Hello loved ones.
This is sister doctor Alexis Pauline Gumbs,
founder of the School of Our Lorde,
and this is week 3 of our 21 week
Resurrection Sunday series
in honour of the persistent, unstoppable, survival of the spirit of black lesbian poet warrior mother
Audre Lorde.
So this week, the poem that we're going to look at
is called The Brown Menace, or, Poem To The Survival of Roaches,
which was published in Audre Lorde's collections, New York City Headshop and Museum in 1974.
And this poem is amazing to me in many ways.
For me, it's one of the places where we see Audre Lorde talking about
survival on terms that go beyond the human species.
And...oh I have so much to say about this poem...
but... why don't you check it out for yourself?
"The Brown Menace,
or Poem To The Survival of Roaches.
Call me
your deepest urge
toward survival
call me
and my brothers and sisters
in the sharp smell of your refusal
call me
roach and presumptuous
nightmare on your white pillow
your itch to destroy
the indestructible
part of yourself.
Call me your own determination
in the most detestable shape you can become
friend of your image within me
I am you
in your most deeply cherished nightmare
scuttling through the painted cracks
you create to admit me
into your kitchens
into your fearful midnights
into your values at noon
into your most secret places
with hate
you learn to honor me
by imitation
as I alter -
through your greedy preoccupations
through your kitchen wars
and your poisonous refusal -
to survive.
To survive.
Survive."
So this poem is incredible, confrontational,
really takes on white supremacy's project
to exterminate people of colour, very specifically, "The Brown Menace".
So right now in our contemporary society,
what immigration policy looks like,
what the war on drugs, i.e. the war on the poor, looks like,
is the same project of extermination,
and we can see it in, um, 1978,
Michel Foucault would talk about it in terms of what's now called "biopolitics",
I wanna remind you all this poem came out in 1974, before he coined that term.
And, this is an incredibly confrontational way
to say that when you seek to marginalize a portion of your own species,
you seek to destroy the indestructible part of yourself;
you seek to not survive.
And at the same time,
this poem is amazing because it does this deeply interpersonal work
of how that which we want to destroy when we see it in other people
is really something we're working through in ourselves.
By using the figure of the roach in this case,
Audre Lorde brings out that visceral feeling.
The roach being the "most detestable shape",
that most hated yet most resilient creature that we think of or know about on this planet.
That species that will outlive us, no matter what we do to ourselves on this planet.
And this poem itself has survived.
I see legacies of it in the performances of La Chica Boom,
who does Juan Cucaracha shows,
talking about what does it mean to take on that status of the most hated creature.
Cherrie Moraga shouted out this poem at this event in Oakland several years back,
and she talked about what it means to say "call me roach",
really to take on in identification and solidarity,
that figure that is the most feared by society.
So I love this poem for all of that.
And the assignment, the challenge for you, should you choose to accept it,
is to think about that person who gives you that feeling.
A person who you are disgusted with.
It may be a person that you know in your community or your life;
it may be a political figure.
...For a long time it was Clarence Thomas.
And think about what is the lesson for your evolution,
that is tied to that feeling you have for that other person;
that other, other other, person,
who you would want to say is nothing like you,
but actually may - in your ability to see them - hold the key to an indestructible part of yourself
an evolution that you can demand from yourself
at this moment because you can see them.
That's your assignment.
And, I want to read one of the poems...
I worked with this poem 26 different times for all the letters of the alphabet today,
and I wanted to dedicate to us, this Poem For The Letter S.
"S" is for Sunday and survival, and here it is:
The Poem For The Letter S is
survival
sisters sharp smell shape scuttling secret
survive
survive.
So that is this week's Resurrection Sunday ritual for us.
If you want to get in touch with me and find one of your alphabetized poems
to aid you, like a vitamin, as you seek to look at that indestructible part of yourself,
that you don't want to look at,
but that you're seeing in other people [ LAUGHS ] who disgust you,
please hit me up,
you can check out the School of Our Lorde webpage
to find our how you can get involved.
And have such an amazing week!