*Proem: life/art work
A longer, more academically enriched description of what this project is about. Includes footnotes and references not included in the About page.
*Proem /proh-em/ noun
an introductory discourse; introduction; preface; preamble.
In this multi-genre living archive[1], I engage in critical and creative rumination of what it means (to me) to be a Black woman artist living and dreaming in excess of a 21st century academic world. This archive is rooted in my research of Black women artists who lived and dreamed while laboring as domestic workers during the century post-abolition where the public/private geography is both scene of subjection[2] and surveillance[3]. My life, while in many 21st century ways is distinctly different from theirs, shares an uncanny familiarity. Like them, I labor in excess of a public/private landscape that often exists as a scene of subjection and surveillance.
It's important for you, if you are electing to accompanying me on this journey, to understand the genealogy of my critical and creative labor; I arrived here through an ancestral/living archive of academic and quotidian foremothers.
Intellectual Roots and Routes
My critical inquiry shadows Alice Walker’s “In Search of My Mother’s Garden,” which asks “who were these creative Saints dreaming unknown dreams,[4]” and responds through engagement with Audre Lorde’s production of the erotic[5]. Through engagement with Lorde’s ideas of imagination and erotic self-knowing[6], I produce a counter narrative of epistemological and ontological being I name Black Womanist Poiesis (neé Black Feminist Poiesis[7]) rooted in Walker’s articulation of Womanism, and that seeks to respond to her query in “In My Mother’s Garden.”
My creative labor traces and honors the quotidian toil my foremothers, known and unknown, blood kin and spirit kin, engaged in. I am interested in the non-traditional archives I hold within me—the ephemera of being their daughter that continues to nurture me: folktales, wifetales, superstitions, recipes, lore, gardening insight, and place/self making (quilting, sewing, decorating) knowledge. Through engagement with their wisdom, fugitive[8] practices, and my inherited/instinctual awareness, I hope to expand what we consider knowledge. I believe in otherwise ways of knowing[9] and hope to produce a counter narrative of what is consider valued epistemology and ontology.
At heart, my narrative poetic/artistic work engages with dreams of my foremothers by observing the fugitive practices they utilized to create new geographies of self and freedom by way of sensual self-knowing within the quotidian. By engaging with public and my own families’ archives, my labor seeks to be a reparative, restorative living archive; it is a creative act of naming and giving voice to the women who dreamt me before even my mother knew me. While this engagement might root me in the soil of them, I am intentional and attentive to my living role in the ancestral garden of us: repair, restore, and create. As such, this is my living archive of me doing that labor and resting/softening my spirit.
My Dreams & Intentions for this Space
Free Subscription
My intention at this point is to give away the most important work I produce. This, I believe at this point—it might evolve, is the critical and theoretical work I will create that engages and works to bridge the gap between what we know as academic and quotidian knowledge.
I’m evolving and allowing myself to turn away from the impulse of having it all figured out and believing the fiction of perfection, so I am in the process of defining what this will mean. Part of this reasoning is because I believe in being deeply intentional and deliberate—meaning listening and responding to the needs of my community and myself.
At this time, this is what I believe I will be able to produce for free:
· Essays (ranging from academic to personal)
· Book/Reading annotations
· Experimental Writing, not meant for publishing
· Photo Essays (taken from my life and garden)
· Information sharing (be it written, video, or audio) from my garden
· Recipes and other ephemeral that connects me with my ancestors/kinfolks
· Updates on my artistic (poetry, writing, fiber/fine arts) journey
(Future) Paid Subscription
I’ve been laboring over and with the idea of paid subscriptions and what that might look like, why, and the purpose behind a paywall. It is difficult for me to charge a price for things I believe should be gifted. I do not believe in the premise of owning knowledge, while also holding true that people should earn income in exchange for their labor. For me, it is an exchange of energy. While I would prefer to not participate in the capitalist structure of creativity and knowledge/community building that currently determines a lot of our worlds, I also recognize that exchanging energy is a viable way to share space and life with others.
A compromise I’m ruminating over is to put the things that are most intimate and most sacred to and for me behind the paid subscription, including written work I’m developing for future publication (it is hard to publish work that has appeared publicly already, including on a private blog). The intention behind this is to share the most tender and vulnerable parts of me with those who have the capacity to journey with and alongside me.
For this area, I will share:
· Poetry I am workshopping for publication
· Fiction, micro-fiction pieces I’m workshopping for publication
· Artwork I am creating for future shows, including behind the scenes personal processes
· Intimate thoughts and lessons I’m processing for future public work, by way of video or audio rumination
· (Future Dream) A creative community engaged in workshopping, sharing, and building knowledge
I am committed to providing sneak peaks to this content, as well as sharing things from behind the paywall once they are published. I am also committed to finding ways of providing access to the paywall content for those who might not have the financial resources as I become aware of ways to make this possible.
Frequency/Volume
I want to honor my body and your support of me, and that means I have to be mindful of my work/family demands, and the physical constraints I sometimes find myself experiencing due to my chronic illness.
I aim to publish content weekly, and no less than three posts a month. At this time, my schedule will be to publish Mondays, allowing me time to reflect on the concluding week, as well as give me time and space to create and capture that during the weekends.
I would be most grateful and absolutely full of (de)light if you joined me. I am eager to build and extend community, to grow as a creative, and to share all that has been gifted and poured into me from others.
I believe one of the most beautiful and wildly inspiring gifts about our shared humanity is our capacity to create, nourish, and be in communities rooted in love.
In celebration between starshine & clay,
-ki
“It hurts so much that we have to celebrate. That we have to celebrate is what hurts so much.”
-Fred Moten
“here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate”
-Lucille Clifton
*Please forage beyond the break for footnotes that root the preceding text.
[1]I define archive in the following ways: For my own archival labor I utilized the Federal Writers Project’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) Slave Narrative Collection, Ancestry.com for genealogical research that draws from U.S. Census and Vital Records archives, and my own memories as well as oral histories told to me by my belated grandmother and those recollected from my mother, aunt, and great-aunt. My WPA research is often limited to narratives of Tennessee (where my maternal ancestors descended from) and those that mention weaving, spinning, knitting, and dyeing work. Finally, my idea of a “living archive” is rooted in the articulation Stuart Hall provides in “Constituting an Archive.” Here, Hall aids an understanding of an archive as a living entity that is “largely about ‘the past’ but it is always ‘re-read’ in light of the present and the future,” so that “[a]rchives are not inert historical collection” (92). As Hall explicates, archives exist in dialogue with present contexts, which demands that archives become “varied and in a sense ‘eclectic’ enough to bear the weight of different contested interpretations” (92). My labor seeks to enter as a counternarrative that contests traditional archival constructions, interpretations, and narratives.
[2]Sadiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press).
[3]Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
[4] Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (Orlando: Harcourt, 1983) 232.
[5] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007).
[6] Lordes’ erotic, while originally gendered in binary ways, embraces a “transcendence of gender” as expressed by Qui Dorian Alexander, in “Brother Insider: Towards a Trans* Onto-Epistemology.” I believe Lorde’s production of the erotic is one that privileges affective reality over binary norms, allowing for the differences of the way we speak and understand gender now as opposed to when Lorde wrote “Uses of the Erotic.” Because Lorde argues that the erotic is a self-liberation that honors our deepest capacity to know based on our affective feelings in order to produce ourselves and a world we know, I believe that the erotic embraces “a trans*-centered ethic of approaching knowledge creation and [a] work in which that knowledge is used to transform society toward liberatory ends” as Alexander cites Nicolazzo in “Brother Insider” (13). Thus, while Lorde originally genders the erotic within a cis-gendered woman’s body, I summon the erotic as an expansive affect that operates from a trans*-centered transcendence of gender.
[7] The naming of this state of being has evolved as I’ve ruminated on the best, most easily accessible name. My original name was homo erotic, which is rooted in Sylvia Wynter’s homo narans. I am still quite fond of this name but do understand that it does not strike most casual readers/visitors of what it is about; essentially, it is might not be descriptive enough. So, I decided to use homo erotic interchangeably with Black Feminist Poiesis, which is much more descriptive and obvious of what I’m up to, except for one word: feminist. I am intentionally choosing to use womanist as its roots and ideology aligns more acutely with my views and engagement with the world.
[8] For more about fugitivity, See: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Autonomedia, 2013
[9] This concept of an alternative way of knowing and being in the world was arrived at while reading and thinking alongside a number of influential scholars: First, in Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashon T. Crawley provided me with the initial tool of thinking of inhabitation as an otherwise possibility, where “[o]therwise, as word—otherwise possibilities, as phrase—announces the fact of infinite alternative to what is. And what is is about being, about existence, about ontology. But if infinite alternatives exist, if otherwise possibility is a resource that is never exhausted, what is, what exists, is but one of many. Otherwise possibilities exist alongside that which we can detect with our finite sensual capacities” (2). Second, reading Unsustainable Empire, Alternative Histories of Hawai’i Statehood by Dean Itsuji Saranillio helped me to think about nontraditional ways of knowing, Saranillio states, “[b]y taking into account Native epistemes, histories, and knowledges we can transform ways of knowing with implications for ways of observing and dismantling the material force of settler colonialism, particularly injustices that are often obfuscated or ideologically invisible to non-Natives” (205). A conversation with Saranillio lead to my language “alternative ways of knowing and being in the world” as an alternative way to think about how we might live in ways that are in relationship to the world. Finally, this idea was sharpened in alignment with Moten and Harney’s The Undercommons, where Moten argues for being in the world and in another world in the world.