cence. if it feels right, call the name of an ancestor (blood or chosen) who helped make your memory of home joyous or helped you survive it. whis- per their name and thank them. i was born and raised in san fran- cisco. the home i grew up in was complex. throughout my teen years, following my parent’s divorce, i lived with my mother in a flat on castro street. it was a dysfunctional place of love, addiction, black feminist par- enting, depression, support, economic struggle as well as being a gather- ing point for family and family . it was a place of refuge, and also a place where i experienced emotional neglect, where my mother in regular fits of rage and despair would scream that at any point we could end up homeless and that she didn’t know if she wanted to live anymore. it was also a place where i knew my budding identity as an artist, as a queer teenager was accepted lovingly and without hesitation. our home was shared at various times with cousins, relatives, friends of siblings, and where even my mother’s hairdresser and his boy- friend lived with us for a time. our house was always full of music, loud conversations, arguments and pot- luck meals. this experience taught me how to live collectively with others. it shaped my value for fam- ily interdependence. it also taught me about the harm of codependency and codependent relationships but that is a story for another article. though i lived in new york on several different occasions through the years, i would always gravitate back home to the bay. when the assault of hyper gen- trification in the late 90s priced me and most of my family out of san francisco, i moved to oakland where there was a thriving queer BIPOC family and
no shortage of house parties, festivals, and underground spaces. almost every night there were djs spinning in clubs throughout the town where we were welcome. oakland is where i found my spiritual family and came into my spir- itual practice in the Yoruba Lukumí tradition. many of us felt like oakland would always be ours, that what hap- pened to san francisco could not hap- pen here. and then i noticed realtors starting to buy up property in the lower bottoms (west oakland) and advertis- ing it as “east san francisco.” i watched friends, my own sister and many oak- land family members lose their homes, victims of predatory lending in the early and mid 2000s. the writitng was always on the wall, many of us (myself included) were just too naive to see it, were in denial or didn’t believe we had the power to do anything about it.
you are encouraged to moan and/or cry if needed. stay with these feelings if you can.
housed folks born and raised in oak- land. those figures may be even higher due to the covid. this has weighed heavy on our hearts, especially during this never-ending pandemic, and we find ourselves even in this moment continuing to navigate tremendous loss: jobs, housing, and the deaths of family and family members. when house/full member and Boom Shake co-founder monica hast- ings-smith passed from cancer last year, after being diagnosed a year ear- lier, we all went into survival mode. taking pause and struggling to find each other during pandemic isola- tion. trying to move through grief in our own ways. trying to take pause to grieve while the grief continued roll- ing like a river. please stop reading and take a moment to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths before continuing on. this would be a good time to rock and/or hum while you breathe. again, take your sweet sweet time with this before you continue reading. House/full of Blackwomen table gath- erings over zoom trying to see each other through the blur of screen-weary eyes our connection unstable no one to offer you water or sit next to you and hold your hand when you are sobbing there is only the breath of the middle in out in out… how do we recover place and belonging in this bewildered time? in out in
is nothing new. what i know is we must keep doing the collective work of repairing our relationship to each other and this earth called home. we must do this work not because we know we will survive displacement/ climate catastrophe/race and gender violence/covid/the tyrannies of man’s war but because if we don’t, we surely will not survive. i have been rethinking home as not necessarily connected to a particular physical structure or place (though that too is important) but home as a spirit of belonging that holds us wher- ever we are. a state of being and being well. an interdependent web of family connections. connections like under- ground tree root systems, connected systems that we can lean into, love in to, heal with, and transmute this hell of imperialist, white supremacist, cap- italist patriarchy and beckon a black indigenous queer eco feminist NOW. and how do we co-create communal safe spaces so our families have places to land on our nomadic journey? to do so we must engage in the emo- tional and ancestral healing work so that the untended wounds of inter- nalized racial superiority and racial inferiority that we all carry don’t create unnecessary drama and chaos that would undermine our efforts to steward home spaces together in ways that are collectively healing. we need each other. we have always needed each other. and we need each other now more than ever. in activist language, we talk about “struggling together” towards our liberation. but many of us don’t really know how to struggle together as a practice that is not harmful to ourselves or others. it is critical that we learn to do this now, and in ways that do not negate our rest, our joy and our pleasure in the process.
4 know place like home
take a few deep breaths before read- ing on.
TRACK: “Black Folk” Tank and the Bangas
breathe…breathe…breathe
SOUND DESCRIPTION: a jazzy neo-soul mid-tempo song that illustrates the Black experience, joy and pain, through lyrics and spoken word.
Suspend we notions of time We can’t keep track of that here In this place Dis’place There is only the breath of the middle In Out In Out Motion And stillness
INVITATION: ok, now we need to shift this energy. please do not read on without taking a moment to dance to this track. maybe you dance to the whole thing before reading on. no matter if you are black or not, dance to this track as a ritual for black and BIPOC homefullness, for our collec- tive recovery from imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy. afterward drink water and stretch your body a little before reading on. “There’s no place like home” — DOROTHY AFTER WYTCH GLENDA REMINDED SHE/THEM THAT SHE/THEM DIDN’T NEED NO FUCKIN’ WHITE MALE PATRIARCHY TO GET HER/THEM HOME. THE POWER WAS ALWAYS WITHIN HER/ THEM. THAT YOUNG WYTCH JUST HAD TO BE REMINDED TO CLICK THEM HEELS. “Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” — BELL HOOKS
Should we fight? Or should we go?
House/Full of Blackwomen as a project will come to a close with a final episode titled, “this too shall pass” in febru- ary 2023. when we gathered around that table in 2015, all of us either lived in oakland or in the surrounding bay area. since that time, some of us no lon- ger live here. some of us were displaced. some got weary from the never-ending survival hustle that it takes to stay here and moved out of state. ellen, my collaborator and mentor, was the first to go. priced out of the west oakland home she shared with her husband and daughter, and then displaced from the west oakland space where they had a family restau- rant that they created called, FuseBox which was a home joint for so many of our oakland family . since that first gathering, we have watched oakland continue down the same path of violent gentrification that happened in san francisco more than 20 years ago, creating a 47% rise in the unhoused population since 2017, many of whom were formerly
3 | when it hits home
TRACK: “Grow” FaceSoul SOUND DESCRIPTION: an acapella song
composed of multiple layers of a male voice both humming and singing with a deep timber and pas- sionate spirit.
INVITATION: before reading on, put the music track on repeat or have another track of your choosing that moves you to follow while reading this section. go to a place in your mind that felt like home but no longer exists, no longer available to you or no longer feels like home. close your eyes and see it for a moment before reading on. what about it felt like home to you? did you ever grieve this loss? can you locate where you feel this loss in your body?
i will not end this on a note of pessi- mism. i cannot. i know better. nothing is certain, especially not now. and that
if it is possible, rock or shift that part of your body and try to keep reading
out…… stillness
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In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
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