The Brown Menace: Audre Lorde Resurrection Sunday Video #3

Launched on Nov. 17th 2013 on the 21st anniversary of Audre Lorde’s transition from an embodied warrior healer to an ancestral force, this is a weekly series of videos documenting and sharing my process of clarifying survival through a re-immersion in the words of Audre Lorde.

This week's poem is The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches from Lorde's 1974 collection New York Head Shop and Museum. Cherrie Moraga referenced this as one of her favorite poems by Audre Lorde at the Sister Comrade event in Oakland some years back and I see it as one of her most confrontational and brave poems ever! The assignment for this week (in addition to celebrating the survival of those of us who face extermination) is to think about a person who DISGUSTS you. It could be a person that you know in your community or it could be a political figure (mine was Clarence Thomas for a long time) and look for the lesson, "the indestructible part of yourself" that you see in that person or in your reaction to them. How do we become as resilient as roaches? We evolve in the face of what we don't want to see about ourselves.

Every week as part of my practice of resurrecting Audre Lorde in my life and in our communities I will be making an alphabetical oracle from the weekly survival poem which will consist of up to 26 new poems based on the sacred source text. If you would like to receive a custom poem as a blessing for your journey you can with a donation of your choice to Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind’s School of Our Lorde! www.summerofourlorde.wordpress.com

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Captions courtesy of the Radical Access Mapping Project, Un-ceded Coast Salish Territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples.
http://radicalaccessiblecommunities.wordpress.com/subtitled-videos/
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Hello loved ones.

This is sister doctor Alexis Pauline Gumbs,

founder of the School of Our Lorde,

and this is week 3 of our 21 week

Resurrection Sunday series

in honour of the persistent, unstoppable, survival
of the spirit of black lesbian poet warrior mother

Audre Lorde.

So this week, the poem that we're going to look at

is called The Brown Menace, or,
Poem To The Survival of Roaches,

which was published in Audre Lorde's collections,
New York City Headshop and Museum in 1974.

And this poem is amazing to me in many ways.

For me, it's one of the places where
we see Audre Lorde talking about

survival on terms that go beyond
the human species.

And...oh I have so much to say about this poem...

but... why don't you check it out for yourself?

"The Brown Menace,

or Poem To The Survival of Roaches.

Call me

your deepest urge

toward survival

call me

and my brothers and sisters

in the sharp smell of your refusal

call me

roach and presumptuous

nightmare on your white pillow

your itch to destroy

the indestructible

part of yourself.

Call me your own determination

in the most detestable shape
you can become

friend of your image
within me

I am you

in your most deeply cherished nightmare

scuttling through the painted cracks

you create to admit me

into your kitchens

into your fearful midnights

into your values at noon

into your most secret places

with hate

you learn to honor me

by imitation

as I alter -

through your greedy preoccupations

through your kitchen wars

and your poisonous refusal -

to survive.

To survive.

Survive."

So this poem is incredible, confrontational,

really takes on white supremacy's project

to exterminate people of colour, very specifically,
"The Brown Menace".

So right now in our contemporary society,

what immigration policy looks like,

what the war on drugs,
i.e. the war on the poor, looks like,

is the same project of extermination,

and we can see it in, um, 1978,

Michel Foucault would talk about it in terms of
what's now called "biopolitics",

I wanna remind you all this poem came out in 1974,
before he coined that term.

And, this is an incredibly confrontational way

to say that when you seek to
marginalize a portion of your own species,

you seek to destroy the
indestructible part of yourself;

you seek to not survive.

And at the same time,

this poem is amazing because it does
this deeply interpersonal work

of how that which we want to destroy
when we see it in other people

is really something we're working through
in ourselves.

By using the figure of the roach in this case,

Audre Lorde brings out that visceral feeling.

The roach being the "most detestable shape",

that most hated yet most resilient creature
that we think of or know about on this planet.

That species that will outlive us, no matter what
we do to ourselves on this planet.

And this poem itself has survived.

I see legacies of it in the performances
of La Chica Boom,

who does Juan Cucaracha shows,

talking about what does it mean to take on
that status of the most hated creature.

Cherrie Moraga shouted out this poem
at this event in Oakland several years back,

and she talked about what it means to say
"call me roach",

really to take on in identification and solidarity,

that figure that is the most feared
by society.

So I love this poem for all of that.

And the assignment, the challenge for you,
should you choose to accept it,

is to think about that person
who gives you that feeling.

A person who you are disgusted with.

It may be a person that you know
in your community or your life;

it may be a political figure.

...For a long time it was Clarence Thomas.

And think about what is the lesson
for your evolution,

that is tied to that feeling you have
for that other person;

that other, other other, person,

who you would want to say is nothing like you,

but actually may - in your ability to see them -
hold the key to an indestructible part of yourself

an evolution that you can demand from yourself

at this moment because you can see them.

That's your assignment.

And, I want to read one of the poems...

I worked with this poem 26 different times
for all the letters of the alphabet today,

and I wanted to dedicate to us,
this Poem For The Letter S.

"S" is for Sunday and survival,
and here it is:

The Poem For The Letter S is

survival

survival

sisters sharp smell shape scuttling secret

survive

survive

survive.

So that is this week's Resurrection Sunday
ritual for us.

If you want to get in touch with me
and find one of your alphabetized poems

to aid you, like a vitamin, as you seek to look at
that indestructible part of yourself,

that you don't want to look at,

but that you're seeing in other people [ LAUGHS ]
who disgust you,

please hit me up,

you can check out the School of Our Lorde webpage

to find our how you can get involved.

And have such an amazing week!