The most amazing Nina Simone song I have ever heard.  And its a Beatles remix.  Can black liberation music sound any better?

janetmock:

I’m a believer in the power of the written word. Today, I got to see my name alongside two of the women whose work guide me: Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.

Stephen Ira, who is profiling the honorees at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s 10th anniversary celebration, wrote a piece about me after our sit-down last Thursday at the SRLP offices.

We got to chat about our work as “communicators,” our online lives and the legacy of Sylvia, whose work lives on with SRLP10. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, please do so, and if you can’t make it to this legendary bash, be sure to contribute whatever you can to their fundraising drive. 

“Y’all better quiet down!”

hi everyone!

so neither rebecca nor reina use this blog anymore.  we’re keeping it up because it has some great posts and even though we believe in TROUBLING THE ARCHIVE.

reina now blogs at thespiritwas.tumblr.com feel free to follow her on that blog!

rebecca is alive and well training for summer 2023!

thanks for following us and being part of this project.

reina & rebecca

Belated Easter Greetings, Forty Day Readers!

hi fortyday readers!

happy may!  here in new york city we’re having the first warm day of the month (by our count anyway).  to celebrate we decided to post what will probably be our last entry to this blog.  thank you for reading and offering great feedback & questions. thank you for your emails and for being interviewed! it has been deeply meaningful for both of us.  

this post deals with three issues that were incredibly important to my lenten process and my everyday life: exile, isolation and reconciliation.  last month,  Cole of the brown boi project, Pooja Gehi, Gabriel Foster and i did a workshop at the New Leadership Networking Initiative (NLNI) that preceded the Civil Liberties Public Policy Reproductive Justice Conference.  We presented about a lot of issues, including exile and isolation of trans people, particularly trans women, from reproductive justice movements.  We did this with the aim of reconciliation and renewed partnership.  i say “renewed partnership” rather than new partnership because too often in social justice movements we imagine that trans lives have just started to exist and that there is no legacy of trans people engaging social justice, specifically reproductive justice.  our historical forgetfulness silences these important stories and supports more mainstream movements in consolidating power. exile and isolation have long been tools mainstream movements have used in order make themselves more attractive to institutional power to win minor concessions like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell or hate crimes legislation.  

this is exactly what Sylvia Rivera (who would have turned 60 this July) had to navigate with the burgeoning gay and lesbian movements, a movement she helped create.  to ground that conversation at NLNI and to bring Sylvia Rivera into the room, we played clips from two different films about Sylvia Rivera challenging isolation and exile within a 20 year span.  the first clip is from “Sylvia Rivera: a Tribute” a film by Tara Mateik, a beautiful tribute to Sylvia Rivera that includes footage of Sylvia at the 4th anniversary pride march being beaten up on stage when ”drag queens were no longer needed in the movement.” Activist Bob Kohler describes the effect of Sylvia being pushed out of a movement she helped start.  

the second is from Randy Wicker’s interview with Sylvia back in 1992. Randy Wicker, a trans aged filmmaker was a close friend of Marsha P Johnson and later a friend and employer of Sylvia.  In this film Randy interviews Sylvia when she was homeless and living on the Christopher Street pier. Sylvia invokes Marsha P Johnson and the Hudson River as inspiration to keep living.  

These clips are particularly hard to watch for many reasons, including self harm, poverty, substance use, and the many violences intertwined with isolation, exile, racism, ableism, misogyny and transphobia.  But they are also incredibly powerful as Sylvia points the way towards meaningful reconciliation.

so i’ve been asking myself a lot about what it means to work around isolation & exile with an aim of reconciliation.  part of it means recognizing the depths of anger & grief accompanying violence. and understanding how violence shapes unraveling circles of care & affects not just our material condition but our spirit and our psyches.  reconciliation means having those hard conversations about power and histories of violence.  it means partnership rather than inclusion.  and to me it means being mindful not to resort to uncritical nostalgia to fill the gaps in my lineage are stories have been suppressed & marginalized.  reconciliation starts with a fuller scope of our social history that extends beyond when we were simply only oppressed or acted incredibly exceptional and aims to challenge the hierarchy of intelligible social justice history that keeps our stories as trans and gender non conforming people from ever surfacing in the first place.  it means reading our blog (jk! jk!) and writing this blog (actually, yes!).  importantly, we learned that reconciliation can also be a lot of fun.

thank you dear readers!
forty day 

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.  But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.  -audre lorde 

the end is reconciliation; the end is redepemtion; the end is the creation of beloved community.  It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform oppressors into friends.  It is this type of understanding good will that will transform the deep gloom of old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. -a “real” martin luther king quote 

Part 2 of Kazembe’s Interview!

HOLY WEEK EDITION: Kazembe Balagun talks to fortyday about colonization, left movements and spirituality!

The weekend before last a few of my co-workers and I went to North Hampton, Massachusetts to do a workshop for the participants and presenters in the Civil Liberties & Public Policy (CLPP) Reproductive Justice Conference around gender self determination, reproductive justice and exile/isolation of trans people within and from social justice movements.  It went really well!  I learned from a person in the workshop that Sylvia Rivera’s story is told at different seminaries (more on that soon!).   Later in the weekend my co-worker Pooja presented really powerfully on a panel about colonization and reproductive justice movements.  I came out of it filled with a lot of wonderings and feelings, new and old, about colonization, spirituality and social justice movements.  Lucky for me, Kazembe Balagun offered to share his insights on camera around the role of spirituality as both a place of colonization and liberation and how he navigates this.  Unlucky for me, I was tripodless & my hands were shaking that day so this frame moves around a lot but of course Kazembe still sounds and looks good!

so your last two posts were wonderful but pretty depressing; what’s up with everything in lent being so sad?  will your blog only be sad? are you sad?

i recorded this video  to answer the question about whether the blog is supposed to be sad.  but the wind overpowers my voice throughout the whole recording.  windsongs are beautiful! but i wanted to share what i was saying, it’s transcribed below.  antony hegarty’s performance and talk at chloe dzubilo’s memorial about unraveling circles of care is really at the heart of what i was naming in the post so that’s who you’ll be hearing if you listen to the video, as opposed to watching it on mute and reading the transcription at the same time!

[transcription of me answering!]
 

This is in response to the question about whether the blog is supposed to be sad.  so i wrote something.  and im just going to read it and i hope that will support the readers’…  

 ahh and i also have a cold (readers’ note: its really just seasonal allergies!)

 anyway so i wrote something

so lent to me is about be present which is…

lent to me is about being present about what is happening in your life right now at the time lent is taking place and for me right now what’s happening is there are really unraveling circles of care that are really deeply affecting peoples lives so what that actually looks like is that people who you know would live a life and would otherwise die at some point are dying at a different point.

so yes the blog is naming sadness because when i sit and am getting present i’m dealing with things that im otherwise in denial about, but its otherwise not supposed to be a sad blog.  and i wanted to share some other things that im in touch with.  and one of them is gratitude.

 and i felt like that was really important to name, so i feel like yes i’m living where there’s unraveling circles of care and you talk about the gulf jet streams are being destroyed and the bees are dying and there are tornadoes in brooklyn the weather patterns are changing there’s a health care crisis but there’s also an amazing resilience that’s happening in this moment 

 and people are really meeting, people in my community are practicing demanding resilience and meeting the moment in ways that of course could be better but are opening up to what is going on and are responding.  and i think that is incredible.  and im incredibly grateful for it.

 and also another thing when im present i get in touch with the power of gentleness, and get gentle with myself and my life and that can’t be understated how important it is to take it easy.   so im constantly joking with my friends and saying be easy, have an easy rest of your day. take it easy.  there’s an emphasis right now where we’re all dealing with such violence and such unraveling of the world and wanting to support each other in moving through it to be gentle with  so that’s one thing i wanted to share

 so its not just about being present with sadness and present with gratitude but its also about being present with a real gentleness.  and i think what that means to me is that any time that i’m present -and lent calls for such a present-ness- whether or not im christian, and i’ll answer that in a post soon (i’m not. just to say, right here: i don’t identify as a christian) lent calls for an incredible amount of present-ness and out of which i’ve experienced growth.  and its not something that’s particular to lent but it is something that is happening powerfully during lent.  growth in terms of engaging questions around what role does spirituality have in social justice movements, spirituality being a place of colonization but also intense liberation.  also engaging around questions of moments of shame, moments of isolation, naming how communities have been exiled, naming how i might imagine reconciliation.  and i’m going to get more into those posts this weekend, specifically around exile.  but its an exciting moment.  

 so i just wanted to name that while its not supposed to be a sad blog its supposed to be a blog about us being present, being present with the grief of the world unraveling around us and things have to do with health care and levels of care being present with gratitude and being present with growth and thank you for participating for reading and asking such incredible questions.

Thank you for the great questions you’ve asked, readers!  Rebecca and I definitely want this blog to spark lent-related questions and hold space for real conversation.  Other questions that we unearthed using the power of Lenten Intuition were: “What was the experience of going back to church on Ash Wednesday like?  Did you see Winnie?” and “I love your blog!” (not a question, but thank you!).

Rebecca responded in the last post and I’ll try to answer as many as I can because we also believe in Lenten Accountability!  This post will be about Lent and singing.

growing up, lent involved a lot of singing.  will there be singing on your blog?  will you sing together or just separately?

you are getting right to the heart of the matter, reader!  i would love to sing on this blog.  Two Lent appropriate songs I can imagine singing for the blog are also songs i can’t stop signing or playing anyway: Nina Simone’s “My Sweet Lord/Today Is a Killer” from her Emergency Ward album and “Promise Land” from Bruce Springtseen’s Paris ‘85 concert.

For years I searched NYC record stores and the internet looking for a record, cd or tape of Emergency Ward because i wanted to give it to my girlfriend.  I finally found it in a record store, although I imagine its probably now on itunes because that’s how capitalism works.  






Nina Simone performed the song live with the Bethany Baptist Church Junior Choir of South Jamaica, New York at fort dix, specifically for black soldiers stationed there.  It’s a collaged song (with a collaged album cover) combining George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (minus the Krishna) mixed with David Nelson’s poem “Today is a Killer.”  She also sings it for over 18 minutes!  

i love the demanding resiliency in this song. to me, Nina sings about finding momentary joy -startling beauty/startling rhythm- only to have it absolutely shattered by the violence of Today (the present; her present; and really a lot of our presents too).  she’s performing it 1972, “the king of love is dead” & she’s singing for black soldiers leaving for vietnam.  but she sings of leaving Today demanding hopes, dreams and wishes: ”and lately as i listen to the windsong, as it dances a beautiful dance for me…comes the reality of today…crumbling hopes and destroying wishes, can’t even get close to nobody no more, because today is a killer…I Really Want to See You!”

Once I tried to play it for my friend, Nina devote, and fellow celebrity blogger (who shall remain nameless) and he told me it’s one of those Nina songs he just skips right over. yup! but I love it!  you can listen to the first part here and the second part here.

Right after Jimmy Fallon and Bruce Springsteen performed “Whip My Hair” I came across a video of Bruce Springsteen performing Promiseland in a Paris 1985 concert and now am obsessed with listening to it!  It’s one of those “transform grief into something just as powerful” songs.  The amount I play it probably gives my co-workers great pause because I play it on repeat at work. Many many times in a row.




So singing (to me) is great for Lent and will definitely happen! But because of the length of both of these songs I’ll probably just post a picture of me signing them.  I should add, Antony Hegarty’s music was a really obvious choice for Lenten Singing (especially Rapture, which Antony played at Chloe Dzubilo’s memorial) but I’ll be writing more about Antony later in this blog.  Stay Tuned!

Questions from Readers!

Today we decided to use our Lenten Intuition in order to unearth some of our readers’ feelings & wonderings about our blog! Here are a few of the many questions that we intuited.  Stay tuned for our answers!

Rebecca answers questions from readers:

Hi Friends,

I’ve paraphrased some of those great questions and answered them below. Thanks for reading!

growing up, lent involved a lot of singing.  will there be singing on your blog?  will you sing together or just separately?
What a great question! I especially love the singing parts of church— especially when the hymns are really weird. But I must admit that I still occasionally pull the genius reluctant 10-year-old choir member move of mouthing the words while everyone else sings. I have a lot of great qualities, including the ability to find every bad note ever.

I do know a really good/obnoxious Easter song that the adults in my first church really came to loathe. I could teach that to Reina and maybe she could perform it. If there is singing, it will likely follow the traditional format of our blog: Reina on video and me via text!

so your last two posts were wonderful but pretty depressing; what’s up with everything in lent being so sad?  will your blog only be sad? are you sad?

Gosh. Yeah I guess they were. Go us! Maybe our blog will be pretty sad. I really loved reading Reina’s post about grief and about what it means to make space to feel it, to preserve it. Parts of the world are so sad, and I know I feel both more and less lonely when I am allowed to revisit those sad parts. Queers are in all kinds of complicated relationships with the world, inundated with uneasy feelings we cannot control. I am really into letting this period be a time when we sit with our sadness.

Of course, sometimes when I sit with my sadness, it changes into something else. It doesn’t always, and I don’t want to privilege those transformed instances. But sometimes sadness is lament— and we go in weeping and emerge in overwhelming song.
 

i don’t get it, are you christians or are hipsters pretending to be christians?  

Reader! Are you insulting the gold scarf I made for Reina!? jk! Is this a humor blog? Well… I think we can alllll agree that at times it is pretty funny. But it’s not a spoof blog or anything like that. I guess this is the moment that I proclaim to the Internet that I am a Christian. I would argue that I’m not a hipster, but I think that’s like the hipster’s motto.

I’ve historically had complicated feelings about identifying as christian— in part because I was also raised Jewish, and identifying as christian feels like a really particular obviation of that. But I think I’ve come around to it. So I would say that I am a christian, and, in particular, an episcopalian— and, in particular, an episcopalian with no dearth of pencil skirts and skinny jeans, who doesn’t know how to ride a fixie. And that I am writing all of this with a heart full of spiritual humility and earnestness.

did either of you give anything up or take anything on for lent?

Yep. I gave up meat and television. The reason I chose meat and television are about my health. Maybe some of you know that I live with chronic pain. I’m not going to talk about it here, yet, but suffice to say, I am in a period of intense re-orientation around that pain.

I also took on a few regimens, including this blog. I guess a lot of people like to feel deprivation for lent. I am using it as a time to think really concretely about the space that I take up in the world, and then I’m trying to modify my behavior. I kind of hope that 40 days is enough to break some patterns and start new ones. It’s good to have a time limit so that I can try things out for a period and then re-evaluate at the end.

In order to do this, one of the most important things I’ve taken on is patience. Mostly I am trying to be patient with myself about learning new things and asking hard questions. I want to be unembarrassed to ask questions, to find out that I’ve been doing things wrong. I think that’s maybe the first step I can take towards taking responsibility for things I’ve unknowingly done to hurt others.

christianity is so hegemonic and oppressive in our culture and has been so violent.  why not start a blog about something without such oppressive beginnings?

You are so right! It’s true that even if christianity didn’t have really oppressive begninnings, it has had a terrible history of oppressive iterations. It also continues to be oppressive. There’s no way to be involved with it, I think, ethically, without really engaging with that reality.

So, why blog about it? For one, I think it’s really important to engage with the nuances of hegemony. I said in another post that sometimes the first response we have to christianity is to just say “no.” I think that even if you do say “no” to it, it can also be really helpful to understand it better. I mean, I think that even former-christian atheists and agnostics can probably benefit from thinking about how christianity actually works. It infiltrates our lives whether we want it to or not, so I, for one, really like untangling that. 

For me, learning to be a christian means actually understanding the hegemonic, oppressive, and violent aspects of the christianity as a religion, concept, and institution. I mean, if that’s an identity I am going to take on, I have to know what that really means— and not just what I mean by it. So, with patience, I hope this blog can be a place to ask hard questions and leave space for the sadness that might persist.

Rebecca and I have gotten a lot of incredible feedback about our blog, thank you kind readers!  There are several reader responses to the lent & grief post that we wanted to share.  Our friend Jeannine Tang wrote the first response, thanks Jeannine!  We hope you find it as moving and though provoking as we do! 

Also, tomorrow we’ll be directly answering readers’ questions using the power of LENTEN INTUITION!  You won’t want to miss it!!

——-

Hello Reina,

Since you shared a fantastic post on your Lent blog, I thought I would email you a response, because it made me think! In your post, I respect how you collectivized the intensely personal experience of grief, and describe mourning as a process of nurturing relationships with the living, and honouring relationships with those who’ve passed. I was inspired by how you suggest mourning as a critical practice for dismantling conditions that diminish relations and chances of survival, and that you implicitly refuse that these conditions will only ever be as they are. I was inspired by your suggestion that mourning is a necessary healing practice that can also build relationships with people, and that you, as an activist, do it performatively, in public (online), and in the context of faith.

I’m re-reading an essay for teaching in the fall — Douglas Crimp’s “Mourning and Militancy,” written in 1989 in the midst of the AIDS crisis. He wrote this for his fellow AIDS activists, at a time when many opposed mourning to activist militancy, because they thought a focus on grief was defeatist and diverted people from action. This essay was also an academic intervention into how Freud’s theory of mourning was read, as scholars focused on a “turning inward” toward the self and away from social activity, which concludes with a return to normal life. For queer theorists, returning to the normal would be impossible and undesirable, especially if queer subjects never had (or wanted!) the normal to begin with. And for Douglas, the solitary act of mourning had to be re-read alongside the communal acts of mourning during the AIDS crisis, where candlelight marches and memorial services were also places where people could gather, support and organize.

Douglas examines the activism that emerges in mourning, as he describes the interruptions to mourning by those who refuse to recognize the value of queer life. Here, mourning becomes militancy: one fights for the right to mourn, and the right to mourn the self-determined identity of the individual (rather than a normative one pushed upon them in death). He also considers the conflicting feelings that emerge during mourning, to think of how violence affects us not only on social and conscious levels, but also in unconscious ways. Mourning becomes a practice of confronting the things we wish not to feel, but nonetheless affect us and the work that we do. Which is why Douglas urges his community to be patient enough to grieve, and make time for mourning’s complexity, as he puts it – ” if we understand that violence is able to reap its horrible rewards through the very psychic mechanisms that make us part of this society, then we may also be able to recognize – along with our rage – our terror, our guilt, and our profound sadness. Militancy, of course, then, but mourning too: mourning and militancy.”

When you speak of pausing at mourning before reaching for hate crimes legislation, I feel like you and Douglas seek something similar – that we try not to enact the internal and physical violence done to oneself, to another. I also feel like you go further than he does, in connecting the vulnerability of mourning to the building of power and community in the long-term, as you ponder “what an abundance of these spaces would do to our collective resiliency? Would our movements and lives be able to hold more people?  Would we feel less isolated and less shame?  How they would affect our individual self-determination and our movements for self-determination. What kind of power comes from a space of pausing with grief rather than making room only enough for urgent response.”

I will continue to think on these amazing questions, and the greater collective space they open onto. And as much as I appreciate Douglas’ essay for what it gives me, I also like reading into what it doesn’t address. For Douglas, ACT UP’s AIDS activism was the case by which mourning could be rethought, because of how it decimated a population and a sexual life. He lists hundreds of people dying, the hostility of the media, welfare and medical agencies, the loss of abstraction concepts (and concrete experiences) like sexual community and sexual freedom. However, for people of color, those who live or identify as trans, and those who experience poverty and dispossession, the losses of abstract and material ideals of community, freedom, life expectancy, contending with violence and aggression from institutions of care – are also conditions predating the AIDS crisis by decades and centuries.

The conditions for mourning — and the movements that work through it – are also woven into the very fabric of a history of colonialism in the U.S., and makes me think on how mourning and militancy can be further queered, by remembering mourning’s longer history and racialization, and more complex crossings of queer lives. Especially if, for many, the time of mourning is closer to the time of the everyday than the time of the epidemic, and when people live the epidemic in the everyday. Your call to “slow down” against the pressure of a rapid response, feels like a call to lengthen that everyday, and not only create larger space, but a longer time that more people can live within :) Reina, thank you for posting!

x jeannine




Mourning & Militancy: Reader Response on Lenten Grief from Jeannine Tang !