The Other In Ourselves Residency at University of Arizona #blackfeministbreathingtour

This workshop uses Audre Lorde’s “Between Ourselves” to explore “blackness” as a dream, a desire for connection, a community built through difference, challenges and growth (instead of an identity policed by narrow definitions and exclusions).  Activating the Lordeian Oracle, participants will delve deep in to one of the poems that most exemplifies Lorde’s work to trouble and transform the spaces she moved through in a process that allows them to distill specific insights for their own work and to create their own poetry for the path forward.

In the early 1860’s when slavery was still the law of the land and she was still a fugitive slave, Harriet Tubman had a dream that her people were free.  She woke up repeating the revelation “My people are free!” and continued to her work to end slavery.  About a hundred years later civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer said “Nobody’s free til everybody’s free.”  We are still working with the challenge of freedom in the face of multiple oppressions.  This workshop invites participants to define and redefine freedom and clarify their accountability to “my people” with a robust vision of collective liberation.