Taylor Post: On BCRW Discussion with Cherrié Moraga
During Cherrié Moraga’s discussion, Ntozake Shange’s words continued to surface in me:
“that’s what I means that black folks cd dance/ it don’t mean the slop or the hully gully…./it don’t mean just what we do all the time/
It’s how we remember what cannot be said
That’s why the white folks say it ain’t got no form/ what was the form
of slavery/ what was the form of Jim Crow/ & how in the hell
wd they know… “
In these words, I read that there are forms of knowledge, ways of being and loving and communicating—moving and being moved— that happen beyond this language—which exist beyond the written word. There is a form beyond.
But in a society whose reason still rests upon enlightenment era conceptions of truth, evidence and thought, it is too easy for people to call these forms of knowledge invalid—if the word is not written it is not considered real. But I know that sometimes the body of evidence most relevant to the debate is my own body. I know to value the knowledge, feelings, memories and truths that surface, I know to call them revelatory and vital.
Cherrié Moraga brought to bear the ways in which students are often surfacing and sharing wealths of knowledge all of the time and that their institutions at large often cannot or will not support it. That fostering those sites of knowledge production is vital but underperformed. She brought to bear that there are so many ways and forms of being and living and loving and knowing that are “too much for this world”, “to queer”, to expansive, colorful—and to me, what this all meant was that there are ways of knowing and loving that, as Audre Lorde might say, are too full for this world.
Or perhaps, Lorde would say that they are too erotic.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs may say they are forms which threaten to spill.
Either way, what I took away from the experience was that it is I/we must continue to “write what [we] keep knowing” as Moraga said that night. That even when I am made to feel so wrong and too wild for the classroom, “we keep writing what we keep knowing” and keep finding ways of communicating those things beyond language. For, as Moraga said those spaces where we feel contradiction/friction between what we know to be true about this world and what other institutions (like the academy, for example) tell us is true, produce consciousness and help us cultivate consciousness and feminist analysis. That consciousness helps us “go home”, explore our origin story and (re)produce knowledges which help us “get free”.
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