ramblings

i'm really sorry for the lateness of this post. the short story is that mercury is in retrograde and that's the gremlin in everyone's life right now and the long story is a lot's going on in my own.

this weekend i went to the national women's studies association conference here in oakland. i went to a panel called "toward a reparative future: feminisms and visual/literary cultures of women of color" in which one of the panelists presented her research on documentary narratives, activism, and artwork produced in response to widespread femicides in juarez. she talked about mierle laderman ukele's manifesto for maintenance art that she wrote in 1969 and that inspired her to create an installation that brought to light the invisible labor of museums--labor of "maintenance" that goes unnoticed and unappreciated. she invites folks to look at the tools of maintenance as art items and also points to how sites of culture and art do not challenge institutionalization, but continue to reinforce and devalue raced, gendered, sexualized, and classed labor. the panelist expanded on ukele to talk about how women, folks of color, lgbtq folks, low-income folks continue to think about their work and their political activism as acts of necessity and survival and not only don't receive recognition for their personal output, but also aren't moved to think of their work as legitimate. she went on to talk about not only are these things invisibilized, but we're also not really moved to claim them.
i have a lot of feelings about what this suggests about de-legitimized experiences of work and art and who feels compelled to claim identities like poet, artist, and activist and who don't (but who definitely create and fight on a day-to-day basis).
so how i relate this back to lucille clifton is that in talking about her craft and her life, she talks about how she feels a strong responsibility to her "art, sex, family, and race" as well as to "humanness." given the panelist's conversation about how the day-to-day experience of domestic work (unpaid and paid) are invisibilized, i think about how day-to-day experiences of womanness and blackness are also. clifton also talks about how, like, uhh duh i would write about menstruation when that was a part of my life for 35 years. and duhh i'm going to write about and feel responsible to write about black women's bodies and having children and etc etc because a) i am in my body and also because we all have relationships to these experiences that we need to acknowledge and speak to. i was thinking about how all these experiences should be but are not always included in what we think of as humanness and that has a lot to do with why these work, body, life experiences that are very much raced, classed, gendered, sexualized, etc fail to be legitimized in the same way as other work, body, and life experiences.

anyway, there's all that i'm thinking about and didn't really synthesize, and then there's the fact that
mercy is just everything. the poems in there are such deeply felt, beautiful, expressive of suffering, deep love, regeneration, transformation. i felt a deep sense of hope toward the end of the book in the last section of poems that speak to how worlds are capable of great change and that they will change, that they can't hold and can't always keep that power, especially without facing the reality of the damage done.