Poetry

Sisterfire 2018, interview with Alexis De Veaux

 

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Sisterfire festivals which began in the 1980s.  Alexis regularly attended the festivals and will be present at this year’s anniversary celebration in Washington DC. Below is an excerpt from an interview with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Initiative on the importance of the Sisterfire festivals.

 

Alexis at the 1982 Sisterfire festival, Washington DC,

 behind her is the black gay poet and activist, Essex Hemphill

 

Q: What are your memories of Sisterfire festivals in the 1980s? How did they inspire you?

A: I remember the Sisterfire festivals in the 1980s as not simply an event but an opportunity for community we all looked forward to. We were all hungry for, and needed, a sense of community that was local and global, and the Sisterfire festivals shaped a weaving of multicultural women’s voices that were necessary to surviving the Reagan era. As black, female-identified and lesbian, I felt particularly in need of, and inspired by, the ways in which Sisterfire politicized the erotics of our resistances.

Q: How did Sisterfire festivals elevate women artists of that era?

A: The festivals provided a venue for our collective visibility, by introducing us to each other across geographies, political agendas and economic realities. There were few, if any, such venues; certainly not another that prioritized a multicultural women’s world view in which art and politics merged in powerful couplings.

Q: How does the legacy of Sisterfire benefit young women artists today?

A: To the extent that we can create necessary intergenerational opportunities for cross-fertilization and knowledge exchange, the history and legacy of Sisterfire is poised to present women artists coming up behind us with a sense of —a model of—what is possible. That’s one of the things Sisterfire did. It made possible what had been impossible. And it can point the way to what can be done now.

 

Continue reading here 

 

In 1982, Roadwork produced the first Sisterfire Festival at Takoma Park Jr. High School in Washington, DC. Initiated as a fundraiser during the severe arts-funding cutbacks of the Ronald Reagon years, Sisterfire featured women artists and welcomed all genders to participate in an open-air urban environment. This video was filmed by Victoria Eves and aired on several local cable channels as well as WETA televisio

Roadwork Documentary Project Teaser from Roadwork, Inc. on Vimeo.

 

 

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival joins Roadwork in celebrating its fortieth anniversary as a D.C.-based multiracial coalition that puts women artists on the road globally.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Breath Erotica” – “we have poetry so we will not die of history”

Introduction to Love | Hope | Community
Sexualities & Social Justice in the Caribbean, Online Multimedia Edition

With thanks to Rosamond S. King & Angelique V. Nixon – Co-Directors, Caribbean International Resource Network   for inviting myself and Alexis De Veaux to be part of this event.

 

“Breath Erotica” (Visual Story)

by Alexis DeVeaux and Sokari Ekine

I pray for us
as evening glides over
implore the gods
pray for us pray
for this breathing
planet the milky way
dreams us
into galaxy
no need for heaven
this is how it started:
way out beyond we
below
the sweet of your lips
dipped in promise
anxieties claim us
bark and skin
what we cannot
remember we give birth
to
“we have poetry so
we will not die
of history”

Continue 

 

“Thats What Poets Do”…For June Jordan

June and Alexis, 1996. [Photo credit, Jon Snow]

Freedom Fighter

 

“That’s what poets do….. we worry words..”

June Jordan, April 23, 2000

 

Sometimes it would happen when we were out being “running buddies” (that’s what J called our friendship) at a political event or poetry reading. It could happen during a visit to one of her beautiful, immaculate Brooklyn apartments. Most of the time though it would be a late night phone call that would turn our “running buddies” thing into a thug thing: so-and-so had done her wrong. So-and-so had to pay for that. She’d already ironed and creased her jeans (looking good was important, even in battle). Said she’d wait for me to do the same. Then meet her, and go kick some butt. I idolized J, so a wrong to her was a wrong to me. Half the time I was grateful when “the enemy” wasn’t at home, couldn’t be found, shrunk at the sight of her. Or when we’d laugh ourselves almost comatose until she calmed down, and realized the absurdity of a prominent social activist – her – being arrested on some silly assault and battery charge.

In time, I understood that J had this deeper thing about sovereignty. Being sovereign was not just about the liberation struggle in South Africa, the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua, the state of black America, the anti-nuclear proliferation movement or the Palestinian Liberation Front, all of which were among her priorities when she lived in New York City in the 1980s.   Being sovereign was basic to her humanity, fundamental to a principled way of living. She believed in and advocated for her own self determination; whether the context was working out the kinks of loving and being loved, sweating out the next sentence of whatever she was writing, having beauty in her life or resisting any actual or possible personal harm.   As she embodied it, poets have to ‘worry words” because the sanctity of being human is the bravery of speech.

She published thousands of words in the form of 28 books; persisting as a writer in spite of the fact that she was under-recognized in some literary quarters. There are far too many who do not know her name, do not know the trembling bravery of her poems and essays. There are far too many who do not know what it meant for her to stand sovereign.

June Jordan’s poems, essays, commentaries in The Nation and other publications, children’s books, plays, audio recordings, her only novel (His Own Where, 1971) and even her troubling memoir (A Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood, 2000) are evidence of a deeply brilliant, passionate spirit. And they are blueprints for radical social change. We need only to read them to figure our way out of the mess this country is currently in. J would be the first to say we have a president we did not elect. The first to say we have been duped by the prostitution of patriotism and have acquiesced to living in “Newmerica”, where a shadowy “war on terrorism” encourages citizens to spy on each other. She would be the first to remind us of the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution, the right of the people to resist “taxation without representation.” She was a true freedom fighter.

She would be sovereign. Now more than ever

Alexis De Veaux

 

Originally published in “The Women’s Review of Books” October, 2002.