M/other Ourselves:
A Black Feminist Genealogy
or
The Queer Thing
Originally published in make/shift no. 8 (fall/winter 2010/2011)
Dedicated to Mai’a Williams
We were never meant to survive.
—Audre Lorde, “A Litany for Survival”
Mothering. Claiming some power over who we choose to be . . .
—Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger”
The queer thing is that we were born at all.
I was born in 1982 in the middle of the first term of a president who won by demonizing “welfare queens,” in the global context of “population control,” a story that says poor women and women of color should not give birth. A story with a happy ending for capitalism: we do not exist. The queer thing is that we were born; our young and/or deviant and/or brown and/or broke and/or single mamas did the wrong thing. Therefore we exist: a population out of control, a story interrupted. We are the guerrilla poems written on walls, purveyors of a billion dangerous meanings of life.
And how unlikely that I would love you.
In 1983, Audre Lorde, Black, lesbian, poet, warrior, mother, interrupted the story of a heterosexist, capitalist fashion and beauty magazine called Essence with a queer proposition. In an essay on the impact of internalized oppression among Black women, she offered: we can learn to mother ourselves. It’s the title of my dissertation and I still don’t know what it means. Except that love is possible even in a world that teaches us to hate ourselves, and the selves we see waiting in each other. Except that in a world that says that we should not be born, and that says no to our very beings every day, I still wake up wanting you with a yes on my heart. Except that I believe in how we grow our bodies into places to live at the very sight of each other. We can learn to mother ourselves. I think it means you and me.
You are something else.
The radical potential of the word “mother” is the space that “other” takes in our mouths when we say it. We are something else. We know it from how fearful institutions wield social norms and try to shut us down. We know it from how we are transforming the planet with our every messy step toward making life possible. Radical childcare collectives, mamas who unlearn domination by refusing to dominate their children, all of us breaking cycles of abuse by deciding what we want to replicate from the past and what we need urgently to transform, are m/othering ourselves.
Audre Lorde’s essay had an older sister. Ten years earlier, in 1973, Toni Morrison wrote a novel about a dangerous, undomesticated woman, an “artist without an art form” who spurned her own mother’s advice to settle down, insisting, “I don’t want to make someone else. I want to make myself.” Sula, the novel that inspired Black feminist literary critics such as Barbara Smith and Mae Gwendolyn Henderson to invent Black feminist literary criticism, is a sacred text about two girls who “having long ago realized they were neither white nor male . . . went about creating something else to be.” Sula herself is not a mother type, except for how she creates herself, except for how she creates a context for other people to grow past the norms they knew, except for how in her name contemporary Black feminist literary theory was born and she is how I know how to write these words.
Your mama is queer as hell.
What if mothering is about the how of it? In 1987 Hortense Spillers wrote “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: A New American Grammar Book,” reminding her peers that motherhood is a status granted by patriarchy to white middle-class women, those women whose legal rights to their children are never questioned, regardless of who does the labor (the how) of keeping them alive. Mothering is another matter, a possible action, the name for that nurturing work, that survival dance, worked by enslaved women who were forced to breastfeed the children of the real mothers while having no control over whether their birth or chosen children were sold away, worked by immigrant nannies like my grandmother who mothered wealthy white kids in order to send money to Jamaica to my mother and her brothers who could not afford the privilege of her presence, worked by chosen and accidental mentors who agree to support some growing unpredictable thing called future, worked by house mothers in ball culture who provide spaces of self-love and expression for/as queer youth of color in the street. What would it mean for us to take the word “mother” less as a gendered identity and more as a possible action, a technology of transformation that those people who do the most mothering labor are teaching us right now?
The queer thing is that we are still here.
We can remember how to mother ourselves if we can remember the proto–queer of color movement that radicalized the meaning of mothering. In 1979 at the National Third World Lesbian and Gay Conference, where Audre Lorde gave the keynote speech, a caucus of lesbians agreed on the statement: “The children of all lesbians are our children,” a socialist context for mothering, where children are not individual property but rather reminders of the context through which community exists. This means that “mothering” is a queer thing. Not just when people who do not identify as heterosexual give birth to or adopt children and parent them, but all day long and everywhere when we acknowledge the creative power of transforming ourselves, and the ways we relate to each other. Because we were never meant to survive and here we are creating a world full of love.
That’s the queer thing.