"We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": A Dialogically Produced Audience and Black Feminist Publishing 1979 to the "Present". — Page 4:
16 My use of the term "mothering" uses the modifiers queer and black in order to disrupt the normative incorporation of maternity into a narrative of patriarchal family. It is clear from the political discourse on black maternity in the United States that "black maternity" is seen as disruptive to the patriarchal order of family and to the model of "democracy" that the patriarchal family functions to reproduce. By keeping the terms "black" and "mothering" together I hope to retain this threat born in the moment Spillers invokes. Black maternity has always been about production (in this American Grammar Book), or more explicitly the reproduction of abjection, instead of family, but as Spillers elaborates in a later essay the law that the child would follow the condition of the mother "did nothing to establish the maternal prerogative for the African female." By adding the term queer, I am suggesting that a focus on the black queer maternal enables the production of an intersubjective future that does not reproduce ownership of or through bodies but rather reimagines connection, accountability and the production of a livable world.
"To Mother Ourselves"
17 In 1983, Audre Lorde published an article in Essence Magazine entitled "Black Women and Anger," later republished in her 1984 volume of essays Sister Outsider as "Eye to Eye: Black Women Hatred, and Anger." Lorde's 'Eye to Eye' appeared alongside an article entitled 'Sister Love' in which Alexis De Veaux outlined a politics of loving other black women that included but also exceeded romantic love. The explicitly diasporic tone of De Veaux's companion piece brings Lorde's diasporic vision into context. De Veaux opens her piece with a quintessentially diasporic statement: "I am a Daughter of Africa." In order to include her sexuality, class and gender within this primary identification with Africa, De Veaux explains that she must "dress myself in my own words." Similarly Lorde, writing a piece that approaches the issue from another angle, the internalized hatred and anger that makes sisterhood between black women difficult, agrees with De Veaux that the articulation of love and partnership between black women is a radical and poetic act of translation.
18 The main argument of Lorde's article is that as black women "we can learn to mother ourselves." This statement comes after a section in which Lorde explains that black daughters often believe that no other person will be able to provide them with the love and understanding that they have learned to expect from their mothers. Lorde wants to counter the belief that only black women socialized into a mother/daughter relationship with each other can provide the mothering that healing and community building requires. But it is significant that Lorde does not say "we can learn to mother each other." She says instead "we can learn to mother ourselves" which relies on an intersubjective production of a rival maternity, that does not reproduce familial relations, but rather disperses the labor of mothering. Lorde argues that black women "eye to eye" reflect the defense and hatred that we feel for ourselves onto each other such that answering the hatred that we have learned to metabolize after being forced to consume routine ideological, physical and sexual violence is a coproductive process that requires women "who will not turn away" from each other.
19 My argument is that this combination of a queer vision of the future and an anti-capitalist relation in the present is a key concept for reading the literary productivity of black feminists during the late 20th century which is marked by discursive interventions into the potential of mothering. How else do we understand why a figure as publicly resistant to domestic models of normalcy as June Jordan entitled her collection of anti-imperialist love poems, Living Room? Why would a collective of black lesbian feminists founding a publishing company for third world women decide to call it "Kitchen Table Press"? Black feminist literary producers during the late 20th century were actively engaged in appropriating and transforming discourses of home, reimagining nurturing to create space for a radically different future.
20 The structures, practices and ideas expressed by these publishing collectives in the 1980's enacted the co-productive pedagogy of "learn(ing) to mother ourselves" at the levels of labor, content and form. The individual articulations of writers such as Jordan and Lorde were not only sustained by their continued communication with each other during this period (during which they also decided both decided to end their editorial participation at the mostly white publication Chrysalis due to racism),[10]"Correspondence with Chrysalis." Box 85, Folder 1. Radcliffe Library: Harvard University. but was also indicative of a larger scene in which the transformations they imagined were validated. In the late 1970's June Jordan participated in a collective called "The Sisterhood" which also included Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Veve Clark, Renita Weems and others who intended to create something called Kizzy Enterprises, which they envisioned as a periodical, publishing initiative and clearing house to be stationed at Shange's home and funded on a not-for-profit basis to reach a mass of working black and third world people and to keep important black texts in print. This collective was in communication with possible chapters in Atlanta and in the Bay Area, met monthly in the homes of writers scholars and publishers and envisioned a transformed literary impact generated by their relationships to each other. Though it seems that Kizzy Enterprises never officially emerged, in November 1980, the women who had participated over the years in the Black Feminist Retreats hosted by the Combahee River Collective gathered in response to a phone conversation between Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde to create Kitchen Table Press. The gathering, which consisted almost exclusively of women of African American and Afro-Caribbean identification, agreed in that first meeting that the press would be for all third world women and women of color, not just black women and not just lesbians, though the Press did intend to combat the under-representation of lesbians of color on the literary landscape. At that first meeting the group also decided on the name "Kitchen Table Press" which they chose because it referred to alternative modes of invalidated production that women of color had depended on for their self-expression and survival. The press itself ran as a community-supported initiative, which at a significant financial burden kept all of its titles in print for its entire lifetime, regardless of sales.[11]Barbara Smith. "Memorial Address for Audre Lorde." Box 101, Folder 4. June Jordan Archives. Radcliffe Library: Harvard University. Women who had participated in the Combahee River Collective and the Salsa Soul Sisters, a lesbian of color organization based in New York City, also formed the Azalea Collective, which hosted the first 3rd World Lesbian Writers conference and which produced a literary and visual arts publication with a rare editorial process of including all submissions from lesbians of color and rotating editorial responsibilities so that no one's labor became specialized, or taken for granted.[12]"Note" in Azalea, front matter. Vol.1 No. 2. The publishing apparatus developed by these black feminists sought to create rival spaces of nurturing in the anthologies they produced. Most explicitly, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology attempts to serve as a surrogate home for black feminists and lesbians who are rejected from black communities because of their refusal to reproduce a gendered status quo. In the introduction Barbara Smith explains her intentions to respond to the phenomena that "so many Black people who are threatened by feminism have argued that by being a Black feminist (especially if you are also a lesbian) you have left the race, are no longer a part of the black community, in short, no longer have a home." Smith explicitly reveals the mission of Home Girls as the creation of collective nurturing by and for black feminists who have rejected other models of home due to their commitment to a transformed future. Home in Home Girls becomes a process of alternative nurturing, responding to the patriarchal forms of home that text like Amiri Baraka's collection of essays entitled Home enforced. Learning to "mother ourselves," in the sense in which Lorde will express in Essence around the same time, is a call for the production of a rival sustainability, providing a system to produce a livable world.