what is it bringing up for you right now?
1 | home(land)
take a moment and move your body to the music in any kind of way that is available to you.
TRACK: “Celestial Dance” Kahil El’Zabar’s Ritual Trio
SOUND DESCRIPTION: The instrumental music is warm and gentle, as if a stringed instrument and a steel drum are being played in a damp, lush rainforest
go ahead now. stop reading for a moment and just move to the music.
get comfortable. if it is available to you, have something warm to drink. go get it now. you have time.
did you move? if so, take a moment to write anything that came up. no more than a page. then set it aside and take a few breaths. if the music is over, keep reading. if not, don’t continue reading until the song is over. just sip your warm drink. “It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.”
“...any land loss is a cultural loss. Our lands hold our memories, our histories, our identities. When we visit our lands, our elders walk us through them, and they share oral stories that have been passed down to them. So when we’re experiencing land loss, we’re also experiencing the loss of stories, connections, and historical accounts...” —DR. JESSICA HERNANDEZ, transnational Indigenous scholar, scientist, and community advocate take a moment to remember/acknowl- edge the ancestors of the land that you call home in this moment, understand- ing that land acknowledgments can be problematic. they must be thought of as a means and not an end in our support of indigenous land rematria- tion. i invite you to treat this moment as your pledge to figure out what your role is in supporting the rematriation of colonized/stolen land back to indig- enous people. perhaps start by donat- ing to one of these indigenous orgs. take a moment to acknowledge the ancestors and living BIPOC relatives whose unseen and unacknowledged love, labor, and stewardship of the land you are on made/makes it possi- ble for you to be where you are right now. if this invitation feels any kind of ways complicated, uncomfortable or annoying, just stay with it for a moment.
— BELL HOOKS
in public and private sites and spaces throughout oakland that have been propelled by the need to address the displacement, well being, and sex-traf- ficking of black women and girls in oakland through collective rituals masking as performance. director ellen sebastian chang and i along with a group of black women artists and abolitionists started this project in 2015 sitting around a table, guided by the question, “How do we as black women, girls, and gender fluid folks find space to breathe, rest and be well in a stable home?”
sitting around that table in the house of one of the women in this proj- ect, we shared stories of how we are continuing to call oakland/bay area home through our exhaustion, anx- iety, laughter, rage, hope, doubt and creativity. processing the ancestral wounds of our historical experi- ence of displacement as black/african americans and continental africans became part of our ritual process. we came to understand that without regular attention to these wounds, we cannot holistically address the present struggles that we navigate to keep calling oakland home. the wounds of our historic experiences with displacement, violence, exodus,
genocide, and forced migration are reopened for us everytime we are displaced out of our homes, every- time a beloved is displaced away from our family , and this has devas- tated our families throughout oak- land and the bay area, destroying the cultural eco-system that has drawn many to live here in the first place. prioritizing our collective well being as fundamental to our creative process in this project over the production of art, has been a radical refusal of what bell hooks termed, “imperialist, white suprema- cist, capitalist patriarchy”. and this is how we chart our way for- ward home.
2 | home body
We laid side by side Staring into the dark night We had bundles We had seeds We had nothing When we left home long ago
TRACK: “Les Fleurs” Minnie Ripperton
SOUND DESCRIPTION: a 1970 r&b song whose lyrics and instruments encompass the openness and “free love” mantra of the time period. One could imagine resting or dancing in a field of flowers while listening. INVITATION: when you finish reading this section, do a free write or poem on memories of growing up. it might bring up difficult feelings or fond mem- ories. stay with it for at least one page. play this track on repeat or choose one that reminds you of your adoles-
i’ve been engaged in a deep inquiry with the notion of “home” and place making since ellen sebastian chang and i embarked on a creative jour- ney almost 7 years ago with a group of black women in what became “House/Full of Blackwomen”. this project has been an episodic jour- ney. a series of performance rituals
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n amp l i f y u n i f y s t r e n g t h e n a p l i f y
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