Names are Spells, Incantations

After Audre Lorde and James Baldwin

In Yoruba and Dahomean poetry, the poet, the linguist, is the speaker of a tradition’s deepest truths.  Poetry is an art, like any art, and has a function. The function is to make each one of us more who we are–to empower us. (27, Lorde/Hammon) 

In the 1978 interview with Karla Hammond, Lorde exalts her support group of women—a group which included the great poet-ancestor of mine, Adrienne Rich, whose book, Of Woman Born, I have given to dozens of clients facing the deep descent into Matresence and into what can be the loneliest, most anaerobic place in the world for a thinking woman, the nuclear family of the West. Rich names her women: Adrienne Rich, Francis Clayton, Michelle Cliff, Blanche Cook, Claire Cos, Bernice Goodman, Deanna Fleisher, Barbara Smith, Yvonne Flowers, Yolanda Rias-Butts(33, Lorde/Hammon). 

I believe that self-governing communities of practice and council are what is called for in this world of unequal power, violence and the disappearance of human gifts and human wisdom and human bodies in the carceral and ‘mental health” systems. The ‘mental health crisis’ in this country is less about our individual stories and more about the collective trauma of the delusion of separation that has taken hold on planet earth. Separate from the plants and animals and separate from the ecology of the village, the ancestral voices, indigenous ways of knowing and deep-time music that we are intended to join and to be in our multiplicitous unity. This separation has special depth and meaning for descendants of enslaved people and those forced into migratory patterns of disconnection and disassociation. 

The antidote to the causes and social conditions of suffering (dependent arising) is found in communities of liberation (be that artistic conversations, microbial networks, anti-oppressive seminary classrooms infused with liberation pedagogy, intergenerational healing relationships ala James Baldwin and his nephew, in poetic spaces of empowerment and deepest truths, Black love, Queer love, the love of Women). 

I could name few of mine (though not exclusively cis women):Alexandra Elite Marcanado(therapist), Jamie Berth(writer/dean/filmmaker), Swaranpal Kaur(therapist), Pooja Kaul (filmmaker), Corrine Cappelleti (dancer/ therapist), Joanne Rendell (author/educator). Their names are a spell, an incantation, a Dharmic shield, a tool of protection and divination, a call home, a coven, a sanctuary, a commitment, a care-web, a family tree.  This family tree, this society of the relational/sacred is one altar, the bookshelf is another.  Baldwin and Lorde sit in the assembly, Steff is here too, I feel A’Dorian, Dr. Rima, Alex, each of you who are willing to co-create a collective micro community of practice- our practice is to awaken, to liberate and to do so through the study of the Dharma of these great Black, Queer, luminary elders. 

Lately I have come to understand that my name, which holds the spell of the clan of my father, must be broken.  I asked my son, a poet, to help name me in an act of complexity, which defies time and resonates with themes of ancestry, word-witchery and self authority I want him to understand. We sit together pouring over our ancestors.  We have not found a name, but we have found a person named Deliverance Williams from the seventeen hundreds( I recognize this ability to trace my mother line is a privilege not all can engage), I'm talking to Deliverance in the dreamtime meditation which is my sadhana.  What's my name, who are my people, who do I bring, who claims me, who do I carry? 

The people I am writing for are not even born yet. 

Right now, writing this, I carry my nephew, Frisk, formally Elijah. I carry my sons'- Ezekiel and Cosimo, I carry Umashari, and they carry me. I'll carry you when I read you and now you carry me. May our words be a spell of lightening the load, of carrying the heavy burdens of oppression.