and circumstance assailed impervious indestructible
Look on me and be
renewed. Mari Evans
But this is mythology.
"We been had/we been took/we been misled"
Mythology has its place, but the possibility of seduction into a rigid and atrophying consciousness is imminent. This is not tryin' to make it real.
In 1970 at the first Congress of African Peoples in Atlanta, Amina Baraka led a workshop which dealt with questions of family structure and nationhood.
This workshop was over 70 per cent women, and often the discussion took turnts to the individual, yet shared hassles these people struggled with daily. One particular woman, from New York, again and again attempted to articulate a series of questions that boiled down to: How does one begin to subvert the alienation forced upon one by apartment living in New York City? The answers struggled out with as much difficulty as the question, and only when individuals began to relate their personal experiences of a group supportiveness and closeness, did any pattern emerge. Mothers with children and all living without men, worked and shared the fruits of that work. Those non-pregnant, or for whatever reason unemployed, kept their children and those of the working mothers. And sisters talked of food co-ops.
"In the end/unity will be thrust upon us" Gil Scott-Heron
On a hot Southern summer day, the first glimmers of an idea that only efforts at solidarity--and perhaps, solidarity as black women, could ease the battle for survival.
There is now strong and vocal interest in questions raised by the constant exposure of the injustices in courts and prisons. People identify with prisoners unjustly held and gagged defendants in the courts, for here are the most visible manifestations of the bars around all our lives and the cruel gags that hold back articulation.
"Let us unite out of love/not hate" Gill Scott-Heron
Too much to ask. Many steps must occur before unity, all those painful steps at constant self-definition, and definition of the political realities.
Psyche. Not jivin', but that may be hard to realize till we chase Freud out of the door, and Grier and Cobbs too unless they succeed in their efforts to free their psychological orientation from models of psychopathology, and come full-circle to re-definitions in conjunct with black culture. Nations consist of individuals, and for the time being, most individuals are shaped by the cauldron, or cesspool, or nest of their families, or the absence of family. No more visible chains on the body, the ultimate battleground is for the chains of definitions and fantasy that hang on the mind.
Feminism. Not simply the right to control one's body but one's mind. The right to a new psychology. The right to reassess the possible ways in which individuals connect, into friends, into families. The right to liberation. Auxiliary and intrinsic to any struggle for black liberation; if it is not simply to recreate in color, the Euro-American disaster. We must be our own leaders.
"We been had/we been took/we been misled"