I went back and forth a few times on the themes that stood out to me with this year’s pride approaching. It felt a bit overwhelming and borderline impossible to narrow down. Given our country’s current state of affairs, the threatened preservation of our rights and survival of our trans brothers, sisters, and siblings, I want to recenter resilience and resistance, but where do we start? And what can I possibly say to remind us where hope begins? I’m a new teacher and I’m not always confident in what I have to share, but I was reminded of our beloved Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet, Audre Lorde. I had shared her writing with my students earlier this year in an introductory English course on protest literature. Our first class of the semester, we began with Lorde’s 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” I still remember the way they first stumbled around the language. Some said the abstractness made the message unclear. When I asked the room to consider this as purposeful, when I asked why this could be, a singular hand pointed to a quote: “Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” When I asked them what freedom looks like, I received a roar of crickets. I probably sounded a bit out of sorts when I blurted a sharp, “Exactly!” But it really is this nameless, this endless capacity, and its magnitude that dwarfs everything that we know as traditional knowledge. It is the new, the forgotten, the rewritten ways of being on this Earth. It is in poetry and the lyricscape that we find means to sustain the possibility of our genders and sexualities and think up space to breathe: “The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the Black mothers in each of us — the poet whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.” (Lorde) In this world that constantly endeavors to name you, the open and creative mind is how you name yourself or better yet, stay nameless. This is how we have survived and this is how we will continue in this time that insists on politicizing and monetizing queer personhood. It is a song that Audre Lorde has been singing for decades and whose impact will continue to echo through the noise of the named. Mother sang, “Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?” From anger to poetry to the erotic, a constant requirement for our survival has always been an open mouth to receive and manifest a freedom that can only be found in the richness of our inner worlds. Now more than ever, we are in need of new knowledge, new landscapes, new ways of being. Maybe this intersectional kinship of new epistemologies, ecologies, and ontologies begins with clumsy, crayon-etched stories, poems, and plays mapping this queer new world we journey to.
Introduction
Guest Editor Soph Green
