ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS: I understand why looking at that family and imagining them in the White House makes us imagine we might finally be at home. But I have to resist that feeling. If I pretend that home is something that the state can give me in the form of a good-looking “first family” without stopping its economic, invasive, nativist violence, then I deny us all the home in the making that I believe in today and every day.
WE WRAP UP our week of the African American Perspective at UMX feature with depth and soul and power and I thank Alexis for capping things off so. I want to thank all the writers who were generous enough to help me make this feature work and share their thoughts, feelings and experience with the UMX audience. I have found all the various viewpoints extremely helpful even in arranging my own thoughts. I also owe big thanks to Sylvia, my admin. asst. at XOLAGRAFIK for coordinating much of the effort. Tomorrow we return to your normal Nezrantium terrarium. Hasta entonces!
—Nezua
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press. She is also a PhD candidate in English, Africana Studies and Women’s Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
The night before election day this November, Durham’s Youth Noise Network (YNN) presented a poetic audio presentation of June Jordan’s insightful and prophetic essay “On the Night of November 3rd 1992.” Jordan wrote that piece about end of the Bush era, about an exuberant election party celebrating the victory of a candidate who had campaigned on hope and change, about the giddy belief that a diverse groups of people we able to have for a moment in the United States of America. Jordan was writing at the end of the first Bush era, celebrating the election of Bill Clinton, and Jordan’s belief was never in Bill Clinton himself, but in the potential power of a majority that voiced it’s rejection of the status quo and it’s belief in change that day.
The night before election day this November, Durham’s Youth Noise Network, most of whom were born around 1992, most of whom cannot vote, read that essay like it was scripture or news, and said we do not trust or expect politicians to create the world we want and need. We do not believe that one person will make a world worthy for us to live in. We know that we are the people, nonvoters though we may be. And we know that it takes all the people doing more than voting to create a change worth living for.
And at home, having just left YNN I had a semblance of the moment I saw so many have the next night when the election results were announced. The night before, I stood up screaming, I clapped, I danced around the room, I was near tears. I said YES! over and over again. I was hearing a change I could believe in. The youth in my city were claiming their futures and our world. I am tearing up again even as I write this. I live in a city (and if you ask you will find that each of us do) where the young people know what power is and what it isn’t. And they know that you don’t trust a politician, you can only trust your own movement. I stood on a chair and sent frantic celebratory text messages. A great rejoicing.
The month before November (aka October) I was on the Grassroots Media Justice Tour
sponsored by Left Turn Magazine, Free Speech Radio News, Make/Shift Magazine, Spread Magazine and Bitch Magazine that went across the SouthEast in a beautifully bootleg and breakneck manner. Once we were even in the same city (Asheville) as the president-elect on the same day. (And astonishingly people still came to our workshops.) In most of the cities I led a workshop called “Pressed for Knowledge” in which a group of stranger came together to create radical publications in 2 hours. Watching groups in different southern cities agree and disagree on matters of messaging, content, audiences and division of labor, watching people create community by creating art stregnthened my deep belief in direct democratic practice.
And every night as I facilitated a poetic exercise called “Dig” which asked everyone to fill in the blank “If you dig here you will find __________.” I found myself making church in my own mouth, filling myself with mmhmms, and yeses at the startling depth of every statement, at each communities newly articulated recognition of it’s roots and cracks, at the hope in the faces of the people in the next cities as they listened to our growing sound collage. I found myself believing in places, Valdosta, Georgia…Pensacola, Florida that I had never considered important parts of my world. A great rejoicing. Across the land.
So, after a very important month, and a very important night there came that other moment, that I had not been waiting my whole life. Call me impatient. Say I jumped the gun, but like most of the people I know, love and respect, I have not been content to wait my whole life to find traces of home, identification and affirmation in the place that I live. I have been digging for those things all along, in the days spent writing, reading and listening with young people, and elders, in the hundreds of poetic exercises I’ve imposed on unexpecting and brilliant audiences, by putting my hands in the dirt of our community garden, by searching the archives for hidden histories that affirm a radical existence here in this place.
The election of a particular American President cannot, must not be the determining factor of my joy, or of my ability to be inspired in this place that I live.
In her essay, “On the Night of November 3rd 1992,” June Jordan says that upon the of Bill Clinton, at her election party, full of a multicultural group of friends and loved ones, she felt more at home than she had ever felt. And I understand why so many people, especially black people, keep saying that they feel proud of their country for the first time in lifetimes, and why we identify with the ascent of this particular family. I get it. My dad is a well-spoken charismatic light skinned guy who is very convincing when he speaks (even and especially in front of white people), my sister and I used to wear our hair like those beautiful little girls. I understand why looking at that family on stage, and imagining them in the white house makes some of us imagine that we might finally be at home.
But I have to resist that feeling. This is not the Cosby show. I cannot imagine that I am home when my chosen family is still under attack from the INS, when the president-elect can come out of his mouth and support an apartheid Israeli state, when all of the Republican AND Democratic candidates in my state ran on anti-immigrant platforms.
If I accept this election as the foundation of my home, I am sacrificing the home I actually want, the home I am collecting and saving out of the faces of every poetic collaborator, every workshop participant, every morning, afternoon and evening with the youth visionaries of Durham. If I pretend that home is something that the state can give me in the form of a good-looking “first family”, without stopping any of its economic, invasive, nativist violence, then I deny us all the home in the making that I believe in today and every day. And the day before and the month before, and always as long as you live here with me.
love,
alexis
*note: the title comes from June Jordan’s “On the Night of November 3rd 1992″ in her collection of essays Affirmative Acts.
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Thank you alexis for this sobering reminder, that we’ve GOT to keep our feet on the ground.
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