...Of Sand

Scholar.Friend.Woman.

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“The challenge when describing black women’s lives, black women’s radical practices, is that they’re always subsumed or asterisked to a larger category. I just needed to say no, their practice is the category, you know? And this notion of being a footnote to everything else is what waywardness enabled me to challenge, it seemed an organic term for describing the radical and disobedient imaginary of young black women – so that’s why I liked it. How do we understand black radical imaginaries without understanding how central girls and women are to those projects?”

— Saidiya Hartman

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“I hold this temporary sweetness in my mouth a small wedge lopped off the mother melon still tethered to the grove watermelon is a social fruit with many heads to a single spine watermelon is a social fruit I press its meat into your waterbed mouth in your eyes I see the tool shed on fire we won’t need the spades the anvil heavy as a blue whale’s heart you kiss me and the fruit look like swollen bodies in a chain gang you kiss me so deep I might never leave the fields I’ve been leashed to our bodies chafe a blue flame we’re not here to dismantle anything we’ve come to burn the big house down”

— The Master’s Tools by Xandria Phillips

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“I have a lot of beef with a lot of people. When we discuss black masculinity, I think of white feminism. Structurally and morally, black masculinity has been violently mythologized as a persistent threat to whiteness, particularly as a threat to white men’s white women. This is all, of course, built on the utter commodification and divestiture of black women as agents, inspirations, threats. But both black men and white women are dehumanized in this equation, and they are both subject to different kinds of violence from male white supremacy.”

— Doreen St Felix

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“Black wellness, strength, and thriving are legitimate and necessary goals. But they cannot be achieved in black prisons or on the backs of black women and girls.”

— from Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing The Black Body In Religion&Culture by Tamura Lomax

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“This practice of regard for one another is so important, so critical because Black women are treated with such little regard, such little regard in the world. We — the surplus life, the nobody, the thing who falls out of the scheme of representation, the void, the tool — expect to be rough-handled. What we think and imagine has been dismissed and ignored. What we want has been belittled and mocked. So when our lives aren’t handled brutally or indifferently, but treated with care, you feel the force of that.”

— Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Rizvana Bradley

[soracities]

we measure our Januaries in loss […]

Joey De Jesus, from ‘malignant catarrhal fever’, in Guernica (via 7-weeks)

[journalofanobody]

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

— Rebecca Solnit, from “Open Door”, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (via soracities)

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“I feel most colored when I am thrown against the sidewalk.”

— from I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against A Sharp White Background by Morgan Parker

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“To be white is to provide targets. Pointing out who to kill, who to imprison, who to excommunicate, who to fire, who to expel.”

— from What Kind of Third Eye the Handcuffs Cut Into My Wrists by Tongo Eisen-Martin

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“The exhaustion that caregivers experience, particularly in the case of women, is as old as the white cisheteropatriarchy that demands we do this with gratitude without pay, that black women were happy being slaves who took care of the children of their lazy violent white oppressors.”

— Nikki Wallschlaeger

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“I’m trying to also universalize the black experience, because it’s always separated. It’s always put in this closet that you take out when it’s convenient, and that’s negating our impact and influence in the world, making it seem as if this is a separate experience.”

— Alexandria Smith

[unusualmodesofresistance]

“Blackness is not only that which relates to the constitutive outside of any social bond—whether that outside be excluded or included is secondary—but also that which relates to the undoing or unraveling of every social bond.”

— Jared Sexton

[ephemeralia]

“How, I wonder, can I find you in the dark? Now at last there is a way. I have orders. It is arranged. I will see your mouth and trail my fingers down. You will rest your chin in my hair while I breathe into your shoulder in and out, in and out. I am happy the world is breaking open for us, yet its newness trembles me.”

— Toni Mprrison, A Mercy 

[thunderstruck9]

Papa Ibra Tall (Senegalese, 1935-2015), Vin Noir [Black Wine], 1964. Oil on canvas board, 98.5 x 98.5 cm.

[atreides]

“All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.”

— Mary Oliver, from “Sister Turtles” in Winter Hours

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[miaohki]

“All the Women in Me.” Happy International Women’s Day! ❤