LIT LIT: NOV
I don’t know about y’all, but this week I’ve been struggling with finding methods to cope and process – and really just straight up manage – my emotions. There’s a difference between feeling lost and feeling loss. In the wake of #Election2016 results, I have been ebbing and flowing in between waves of both.
Picture this. Feeling lost is describing an experience of uncertainty -- about getting thrown off course on a path and taking even longer to reach your desired destination. Feeling lost leaves us with questions about how to navigate our very environment. How did this happen? How did we even get here? Where do we go from here? What can we do to mobilize, organize, and find our way get our bearings straight and march on again?
On the flip side, the feeling of loss is an experience that something has left us – something that was once there is no longer present. Perhaps we feel that suddenly there’s this void in our hearts and souls that was once filled with the idea of hope and glory and resolve. And maybe President Obama embodied those ideals for us, as our first Black president. And throughout this election season, we’ve been championing for a candidate who could possibly be our first woman president. And that maybe, just maybe, this idea of hope and glory and resolve would carry on to the next generation.
and suddenly that hope felt ripped away.
And I think the reason I, and others, are feeling caught in between lost and loss this week is because we are resiliently refusing to accept that we’ve lost our way in our path collectively fighting for freedom, justice, and equality. We refuse to accept that this is a loss for all that we’ve been fighting for. And this passionate and unapologetic refusal to accept both is what’s keeping us suspended in the emotional in-between.
But you know what? I’m here to tell you that it was just a disruption. This is a brief disruption. We have not lost anything. We have to fight harder and love stronger and more push further than ever.
If at first you don’t succeed, dust yourself off and try again.
We can dust it off and try again, try again.
And when we rise up from the dust, we’ve got to remember that knowledge is essential to our power. As women of color, our knowledge feeds our minds with energy, and our lived experience arms our energy with intellectual ammunition. Combined, this power shields us and builds our resistance on the front lines of this battleground we call oppression.
We’re introducing a series in theGirlMob called LIT LIT where we share with all of you, our fierce-fly-focused digital sisterhood, some literature (aha! now ya'll get it) exploring boss-as-fuck themes of empowerment. In true TGM fashion, LIT LIT is meant to supply you with words + theory + connections to add to your toolbox of badassery.
Our first theme is rage.
Here are five lit AF pieces of literature to get you through January 20, 2017 (aka inauguration day in DC).
Sharpen those tools, sistah!
I, Too, Am America
By Langston Hughes
POEM: click
This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color
By Gloria Anzaldua & Cherie Moraga
“This book is written for all the women in it and all whose lives our lives will touch. We are a family who first only knew each other in our dreams, who have come together on these pages to make faith a reality and to bring all of our selves to bear down hard on that reality. It is about physical and psychic struggle. It is about intimacy, a desire for life between all of us, not settling for less than freedom even in the most private aspects of our lives. A total vision. For the women in this book, I will lay my body down for that vision.”
ANTHOLOGY: click
An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History)
By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
“The systems of colonization were modern and rational, but its ideological basis was madness.”
BOOK: click
We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes of Race and Resegregation
By Jeff Chang
“Culture, like food, is necessary to sustain us. It molds us and shapes our relations to each other. An inequitable culture is one in which people do not have the same power to create, access, or circulate their practices, works, ideas and stories. It is one in which people cannot represent themselves equally. To say that American culture in inequitable is to say that it moves us away from seeing each other in our full humanity. It is to say that the culture does not paint a more just society.”
BOOK: click
All About Love: New Visions
By Bell Hooks
“Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.”
BOOK: click
Stay LIT!
by Flerine Atienza
@flerinecrystal
