frontporchwomanism

[frontporchwomanism]

Territories:

Lowcountry Tribe (born)

Atlantic Shelf Tribe (ruled)

Battles (largely unconfirmed via colonial records):

Statler Hilton Hotel Raid, 1971, wounded but escaped

Queens Raid, 1971, victorious

Battle of Queens, 1971, victorious (police wounded and property destroyed)

Brownsville Raid, 1971, victorious

NYPD War, 1972, victorious

Freeman Raid, 1972, victorious

Battle of Nelson, 1973, victorious

Battle of O'Reilly & Polliana, 1973, draw

Battle of East Brunswick, 1973, wounded + captured with deaths on both sides

Battle of Union Township, 1979, victorious + freed

Early Life

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the people who were oppressing them.”

- Assata Shakur

Queen Assata was born into Afam captivity in Wilmington, NC on July 16th, 1947. She is an Eldest Daughter and her birth was somehow protected from enemy records and documentation.1

Assata was born into a noble family that raised her according to Afam tradition. Her great-grandfather established their place in the local community by securing the use of a house - which colonizers forced her family to re-purchase when he passed away. Both of Assata’s grandparents actively trained her in queenly deportment from a young age - instructing her never to bow her head before colonizers or address them with respect. They rigorously trained her to not allow men to mistreat her, and to defend herself from attacks.1

One of Assata’s prominent queenmothers was her Auntie Evelyn Williams. Evelyn was involved in the Civil Rights Movement and introduced her to Afam society. She took Assata to museums and taught her history and the arts, knowledge she would later use when identifying enemy propaganda. Auntie Evelyn supported Assata throughout her reign, eventually even serving as her royal translator (known in the west as a lawyer) in the foreigners’ court.1

Queen Assata’s Reign

Caption: A map of the Atlantic Shelf tribal grounds, Queen Assata’s ruling territory.

In young adulthood, Assata moved to the Atlantic Shelf area and began gaining military experience by participating in sit-ins and protests. She also began to publicly serve the people in food programs as a member of the Harlem branch of the renowned Black Panther Party, graduating to Dame and increasing her understanding of politics. It was during this time that she chose her sacred name Assata Olugbala Shakur - meaning “she who struggles”, “savior” and “the thankful”.2

She married a man, and then divorced him within a few years due to conflict over gender roles.1

Caption: Black Panther Party Harlem headquarters.

With governing experience under her belt Assata eventually left the Black Panther Party in 1971, joining an elite Afam unit known as the Black Liberation Army. She received and survived her first gunshot wound during this year, which sealed her confidence as a budding warrior.3 Assata established herself as Queen largely in New York and New Jersey, but occasionally conducted missions in other cities as well. Her weapons of choice included guns and hand grenades. She and her unit performed many successful raids, and were able to keep many of the details away from USian intelligence. Assata’s leadership inspired an entire Afam region along the east coast of the United States.

Colonizers began to throw much effort into finding and capturing her, on the federal level. In 1973 two armed colonizers stopped Queen Assata and her armed two-man entourage in East Brunswick, NJ. The battle ended with the deaths of one man on each side. Queen Assata was severely injured and captured by colonizers; they tortured her and attempted to get information from her, but both she and her warriors gave up nothing throughout their very lengthy captivity.

Escape & Exile

Queen Assata was held in an all-male facility and solitary confinement for extended periods of time, and gave birth while in prison. Bomb threats against the colonizers intimidated them into lying about her transfer date, to avoid her loyal people breaking her out of captivity. Colonial forces held her for years in terrible conditions, angry that she had achieved so many victories against them. Even other colonizers noted that they way they treated her was inhumane.3

Loyalists from her military unit formed a new unit called The Family, and together they devised a plan to free Queen Assata from colonial clutches in 1979. They conducted another raid and conquered over $100k, then sent three warriors armed with hidden pistols and dynamite to get her out. The plan succeeded and they kept her hidden on her home territory in the northeast.

Caption: Atlantic Shelf loyalists Talib Kweli and Mos Def showing support for Queen Assata in 2005

For the next few years Assata’s loyal Atlantic Shelf people kept her safe and provided for, even though colonizers retaliated with spies and raids against their communities. Thousands of Africans publicly hung or carried posters saying “Assata is welcome here”, showing their support and willingness to protect her from the invaders. When she made a statement against prisons and calling for the Afam nation to have its own independent rule, they spread her words throughout the land.3

Caption: Queen Assata in Cuba, 2017.

Queen Assata escaped to Cuba by 1984 and remains there to this day, in exile from the Afam nation. Her enemies are still angry at her victories and continue to pressure the Cuban government to betray her, but they remain loyal.

Teachings from Queen Assata’s Reign

Queen Assata’s experiences and words shows much about what it means to operate as a Queen in the Afam nation. Aspiring Queens, take note:

Military action is necessary in order to free our people from colonizers. That is a queen’s job. If you are trying to avoid this, you are likely more suited to another role.

Sometimes you have to experience the thing you fear in order to get stronger.

Rigorous childhood training and family support in early childhood are good for royalty.

You must learn to be a Dame (direct community service, like Assata’s time in the Black Panthers) before you can grow to be a Queen.

Keep your entourage limited to loyal people only - they will save your life later.

African people are loyal to who actively protects them; show that you love them by fighting for them, and they will show love in return.

If a man is trying to limit your power, DROP HIM SOON AND EARLY. No one even mentions Queen’ Assata’s ex-husband’s name but we all know who she is and what she did. Clearly her mission was more important that he was.

Citations:

1) Assata: An Autobiography 2) Assata Olugbala Shakur (1947- ) 3) Assata Shakur (Wikipedia)

[frontporchwomanism]

The Front Porch View: Weekly News - Science & Technology

Welcome! It’s Friday, May 31st and it’s time for the view from the Front Porch - bite-sized news made with radical Black MaGes in mind. This week we touch on the importance of the mosquito, droughts in the UK and more. 

How Important Are Mosquitoes as African Allies?

African Biologists in Burkina Faso have developed a fungus that can infect and kill multiple generations of mosquitoes at once, which is aimed at reducing malaria on the Continent. With over one million deaths caused by malaria each year, and 90% of those deaths occurring in Africa, this seems like a huge positive breakthrough. The Front Porch advises caution though - mosquitoes carrying malaria have been one of Africa’s greatest warrior units protecting her from colonizers. Tropical Africa is called the “white man’s grave” to this day because of the fact that white settler colonists had little immunity to malaria, and mosquitoes thrive in the water-rich jungles where they attempted to settle. White people understood the significance of malaria as an enemy standing in the way of their conquest, and that they must destroy it in order to fully colonize Africa.

The Front Porch is fully vested in there being some place on earth that white people are afraid to settle, and that place should be Africa. We’ll be on the lookout for resistance to this new threat, from African people and our other allies in within nature.

Colonial Countries Hit By Environmental Disasters They Caused

Well, well - if it isn’t the consequences of their own actions. Although colonial nation-states attempt to visit most of the environmental damage onto other regions of the world, it’s nice to know that the places most responsible for climate change have to suffer as well.

Malaysia and the Philippines are sending metric tons of Western waste back to the countries that have dumped on their lands. The expected right-wing leader of the Madrid region of Spain has vowed to undo a project designed to cut down on local pollution - because the smog and traffic are a part of “the identity of our city” - despite the fact that 30,000 Spaniards die annually from air pollution poisoning.

England is in a severe drought to the point of emergency, but their weather reporters are pretending otherwise. European media is still putting the word drought in scare quotes or debating the semantics of the word. Meanwhile Scotland faces “apocalyptic” level damage according to their natural heritage chief: “polluted waters; drained and eroding peatlands...a dearth of people in rural areas; and no birdsong," she predicts.

It seems that the people accused of “deliberately harming climate action” are also deliberately harming themselves. The Front Porch is preparing, and laughing.

[frontporchwomanism]

The Front Porch View: Weekly News - Economy & Politics

Welcome! It’s Friday, May 31st and it’s time for the view from the Front Porch - bite-sized news made with radical Black MaGes in mind. This week we touch on Sudan’s continued revolutionary work, Detroit chiefs and their plans to protect women, and more. 

Sudan Continues To Show Us How Revolution Can Work

Sudanese protesters - led largely by women - continue to enact real-life revolution. They have dragged a president from his throne, and now comes the work of dismantling all of the other hidden powers that supported his regime. It’s important to remember that women across Africa have done the same many times, and have lessons for us to learn about the process. For example, Libyan women have protested the reign of Muammar Ghaddafi but the UN and other powers purposely drowned them in a sea of guns and patriarchal military funding...they attacked and murdered prominent women in order to quell rebellion.

Sudanese women have created an environment of general strike - everyone within the nation is being called to stop participating in “business as usual” and instead march in the streets. Now that the president has been removed, they want to also get rid of the junta (the military state that is currently running things in his absence). The people and the junta have been negotiating but cannot agree on who will lead the three-year transition into a new form of government they have drafted. Protesters refuse to leave the strike until this issue is resolved to prevent what happened in Libya - an oppressive and murderous military state - from happening here.

Military leaders are turning to the Ethiopian state for help. It will be interesting to see how Ethiopia, who has just elected a 50% female cabinet, responds.

Detroit Clan Proposes Ideas to Protect Women In Their Territory

Murderers of women have been plaguing the city of Detroit, causing local African tribal leaders to take action for the protection of their citizens. New Era Detroit, a group of leaders in Michigan USA, have proposed a list of 10 guidelines for women in their area to avoid or defend themselves from the kidnappers and murderers that walk the streets.

These guidelines, such as “No woman is to walk the streets alone” and “All woman should have a whistle and or pepper spray on them at all times”, are intended to protect women. We notice that many of these rules require men’s participation - local chief and founder Zeek has called for men to devote 5 hours per week to look out for women and children in the neighborhood - but still focus a lot on regulating women’s behaviors. This is understandable because we are all in a war zone in the West, but war is not only defense. Here is to hoping that Detroit leaders are quietly planning to go on the offense against the murderers making the city unsafe for women.

New Era Detroit has scheduled a free women’s defense class on June 9th at 3 pm local time, which we have added to the Front Porch Calendar.

South Africa’s 50% Female Cabinet

South Africa

joins Ethiopia, Rwanda and Seychelles as African nation-states with

50% female cabinets

. Congratulations to all of the female politicians who have been selected, and we hope to see good things come from this change. 

  - Eyoun-Mehet

[frontporchwomanism]

The Front Porch View: Weekly News - Lifestyle & Entertainment

Welcome! It’s Friday, May 24th and it’s time for the view from the Front Porch - bite-sized news made with radical Black MaGes in mind.

First grand slam win! 🥳 @rolandgarros #RG19 #Paris pic.twitter.com/PwwPEPPaNt

Congratulations Cori!

Congratulations to Atlanta clan native Cori Coco Gauff for being the youngest player to win the French Open qualifier at age 15! The talented Gauff will play some Russian next Thursday, on the 30th. Here’s to her continued success.

Girls Grass Roots Football (Soccer) Festival

In Saint Lucia (Caribbean), the Flow-Trevor Daniel Football Development Programme will lend its resources toward the girls of the island’s community. From 9am-2pm local time, 120 girls will get to have fun at the park during this “Barbie dolls to boots and footballs”-themed event. The program will provide t-shirts and new footballs, as they learn to play the game well and perhaps become inspired to play competitively as a career in the future. Good luck to those girls, we hope they enjoy themselves today.

Tiffany Haddish Is An Eritrean Citizen

Tiffany Haddish repped her AfAm heritage hard earlier this month. Now she is representing her Eritrean side by obtaining citizenship during Indepence celebration season, stunting in an Eritrean flag. Being Black is truly a world-class ting.

The Queen Bee Holds Court

AfAm rapper and legend Lil Kim held her first annual dinner in memory of Notorious B.I.G. and their mutual friends and family; it was a hip-hop royal event that met every lavish expectation. Everyone looked gorgeous and glowed in the photos.

Wifin’ These Niggas

South African dancer and all-around baddie Zodwa Wabantu, who proposed to her fiancé Ntobeko Linda some time ago, has mentioned that he will be taking her last name. Because who’s gonna check her?

It’s summertime and we’re ready to travel. Since many of us are dealing with coin issues, let Abby from Packs Light shows you how to travel on a tight budget.

[frontporchwomanism]

The Front Porch View: Weekly News - Science & Technology

Welcome! It’s Friday, May 24th and it’s time for the view from the Front Porch - bite-sized news made with radical Black MaGes in mind. 

Black Women Climb Mountains

Saray N'kusi Khumalo climbed Mount Everest last week. She literally climbed the highest mountain in the world. And she has decided, naturally, that she can climbed the rest of the world’s mountains. The South African Ms. Khumalo has committed to climb the highest peak in each continent and visit both the North and South poles. Since she has already visited the highest mountains in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America...she’s nearly done already.

Blessings to her and may she continue living her passion in strength and dedication.

West Africa Is Studying Her Energy

Two different environmental research groups in West Africa found that approaching the topics of of land, water and food as separate entities would never capture everything there is to know. There are many investors putting money into using Africa’s vast natural resources, especially energy (solar, wind, etc)...but who those investors are and whether they are actually helping Africa benefit from this energy needs a better team to find out. Together they formed the ProGREEN project. People from Burkina Faso and Senegal will gather information and determine whether laws and businesses are helping Africans protect the environment, and what impact this has on food production.

Climate Change Strike

It appears that children and some adults have begun to go on strike for the environment, in every part of the world except Africa judging by both mainstream media and a scroll through the twitter hashtag. They are calling for a new mass strike on September 20th of this year, and the photos of participants look mighty pale overall.

It’s a well-known fact that the main environmental killers are in Western countries, and are mostly white (those of us Africans who are displaced and living in the West are directly harmed by their environmental racism as well). It’s a strange thing to be Black and know that you are deeply connected to nature, and want to protect it...but to also know and distrust the people organizing the event, who have been known to stop short at full revolution.

We think the most important takeaway from this is:

With people on strike, various western systems across the world will be weakened on that day. Do with that information what you and your families will.

Whatsapp Ads

Attention aunties all over the world: whatsapp’s safety and enjoyability is being further compromised. White-owned Facebook, which co-operates with the colonial state and purchased whatsapp in 2014, plans to introduce ads to the platform sometime next year. Facebook owners already makes their billions from selling user data to corporations; they are also known to run their business according to anti-Black bias when they enforce community standards. The bloated multi-billion dollar company now has its sights on the app that many of us use around the globe to share news and communicate with our families.

Signal may be a safer alternative - but keep in mind that the app’s encryption may be safe, but the smartphone itself can still be compromised before Signal has a chance to encrypt your messages. Make a practice of deleting old messages and make sure that you trust the person you’re sending them to.

Urban Surveillance Drones The U.S. government has unmanned surveillance - we mean, “traffic management” - drones specially designed for use in cities. As usual, Black women are futuristic af. Janelle Monáe warned us...

The devices can automatically adjust themselves for wind pressure, and avoid colliding with one another. Amazon (among other bloated corporations) has expressed interest in investing in the project in order to deliver packages - interesting given the fact that they already work their underpaid employees like robots, and are heavily pushing their ever-listening Alexa technology.

The developers seem to be satisfied with their progress so far but will continue testing Reno and Corpus Christi, TX. We suggest using our renowned Black genius to develop community protections against these things. In the meantime, it would be a shame if something happened to this tech while in the final stages of development. A real shame.

[frontporchwomanism]

The Front Porch View: Weekly News - Business & Politics

Welcome! It’s Friday, May 24th and it’s time for the view from the Front Porch - bite-sized news made with radical Black MaGes in mind.   We have not covered the recent attacks on abortion in this edition; we will be paying special attention to this and more about the protecting Black trans women in a special issue. We’ll be discussing direct actions we can take to protect Black MaGe bodily autonomy and safety.

Mother Harriet & The $20 Bill

The United States has delayed printing our great queen-mother Harriet’s face on their paper dollars from the planned 2020, to 2028. In a land still controlled by the same colonial forces in power when Mother Harriet was alive and fighting - and whose money has not even been backed by gold since 1971 - we’d like the House Financial Services Committee to know that we’re not holding our breaths.

Madam CJ Walker

Tomorrow, May 25th, is the anniversary of Madam CJ Walker’s death. Many people are taking the time to commemorate her life as an affluent Black woman, and her standing in the community. Madam Walker used her wealth to hire other Black women, create a home for poor and elderly women, and create sumptuous events that other marginalized Black people could attend and enjoy. We bless her memory and appreciate her life’s work.

African Food in Canada

The western world is on the verge of environmental and economic collapse. It is important that Black people strengthen our trade connections across the water so that when the bottom falls out, we are not dependent upon colonial forces in order to get what we need. Luckily Bamako native Oumar Barou Togola is making African produce available in Canada and - most importantly - is paying the African farming experts to grow it. Africa is home to lush plant life, and especially suited to a lavish amount of diverse plant species due to its superior amount of ultraviolet sunlight compared to the rest of the world. Women dominate the agriculture business in Africa and Farafena Food Company is directly paying roughly a thousand of them in Mali to produce quality food items, which they then sell to grocery stores throughout Canada.

Trans Women Under Attack

A moment of silence for three Black trans women, all murdered in the past week.

Muhlasysia Booker, Dallas TX

Michelle “Tamika” Washington, Philadelphia PA.

Claire Legato, Cleveland OH.

@NylaTheMusical has created a thread to donate to directly to Black trans women; they have listed lots of intra-community information and names so that we can follow. We will signal boost any information concerning how to donate to the specific families and communities of the women who were killed this week. We are listening, and wish full vengeance upon the murderers, and the supporters of every evil system that allowed these tragedies to occur. (Note: discussions on direct action will be covered in more depth in future articles, and in the FPW private chat).

Rise of the Kandakes

In Sudan women have lead a successful insurrection against the government of Sudan, headed by President Omar al-Bashir. His government has harrassed and imprisoned women for nearly two decades for violating misogynoirist laws concerning things like clothing and associating with men in public. The military has sexually assaulted vulnerable women in rural areas, and the least wealthy women have been targeted the most by this government’s violence. Alaa Salah and many other women in Sudan took to the streets and braved brutal attacks from the military until Bashir was brought down. During this time, many women they called themselves Kandake - the old Nubian name for famed queens of this region, living ancestors and symbols of anti-patriarchal authority. Our deepest respect for the New Kandakes of Sudan/Nubia on their success. In the spirit of the queen of Sheba, who sent gifts of gold to Huuyo Caraweelo to congratulate her for her victory against the men of her native Somalia, we believe some kind of tribute is in order. Anyone with information on how to give directly to these women (organizations are not always trustworthy, and this is tribute not “charity”) would be much appreciated.

[frontporchwomanism]

The Hagarite Vow, Part II: Tent Cities

When I’m outside at night looking at the sky, I feel fear. This is a programmed response instilled in my by a culture that views the sky as symbolic of a level of uncaringness that is almost actively hostile. Because I live in a metropolitan area, light pollution obscures my vision and it’s difficult to see the stars that my colonizers shudder at. Those starts remind them of how much they feel they don’t belong here, of the trauma they felt when they became aware of their own existence.

When I feel this implanted fear, this foreign feeling inside my belly, I think about the way it would feel to sleep in tents.

We in the West often think of this as the worst thing that could possibly befall us, and it’s truly not a good thing to be forced into this with no preparation or choice - no freedom. Black and indigenous people have spent millenia learning how to make shelter into an art form, how to bring vibrancy and beauty into many different forms of living.

We’ve done tents since before drywall was invented. We’ve laid pillows and furs and elaborate rugs on the ground, slept and given birth under vast linen roofs since before white America set even the first log cabin colonies on this land. When I’m realistic, I realize that my family is capable of living in a waterproof tent potentially with comfortable seating, plenty of room and of course portability. When I’m honest, I remember that there are Black people doing this right now - on the Continent, in the Caribbean, within my own indigenous nation.

We have always been capable of creating lives and homes in as many different places as the Earth provides. The biggest problem I’d face if I was forced to live outside of typical Western housing arrangements would be harassment by police. Or it would be the fact that I’ve spent so many years in individualistic isolation due to working long hours trying to pay rent for my former brick residence, that I don’t have anyone besides my own family of 6 to rely on...to protect, to defend, to create with. It would be that I don’t know the safest and most peaceful places to squat, to hide, to run. To attack, to trade, to steal away in the night. It’s not impossible...it’s just that I never learned.

My family has been homeless twice. Both times we stayed in a shelter, and each shelter had a different set of rules set in place since before we arrived.

The first one was Christian-based, and required mandatory chapel attendance every morning and evening. There was a strict curfew. Food was often moldy and unfit to eat. We were corralled into chapel three times a day and then allowed to line up to go to the cafeteria in segments - seniors and people with disabilities first, then families second, and single men third. I still remember the icky feeling of walking past a line of keen-eyed grown men in order to get to our room from the cafeteria, as a developing tweenaged girl.

The second shelter was specifically a women’s shelter for domestic abuse survivors. This environment was better in many ways - the food was not as unsafe, and people were put out before our eyes for any threats or predatory comments. But it was still odd living behind the walls of a place that didn’t belong to us. There was being unable to leave the premises without permission for a while, not being able to tell anyone we knew where we lived...and the occasional sirens warning us to hit the ground and hide, because someone’s abuser had found the location anyway.

Each of these places, with their rules and case managers and floor supervisors, felt as much like a series of violations as sites of salvation. I think a lot about what fate these shelters saved me from...was it homelessness? Our family was still both legally and practically homeless while residing at shelters, so it can’t be that. Were they saving me from sleeping outside? I chuckle at the irony of this when spending the night on my porch sometimes.

African people in the United States are no strangers to displacement and homelessness.

The Trail of Tears was a deadly forced march; colonizer armies pushed slave-owning Native American nations (primarily Cherokee) from their homelands in the Georgia area. Africans they had enslaved walked the same trails, in the same cold and hunger. The First, Second and New Great Migrations are evidence of African people running to Northern industrial cities, to the West, and back to the South again - trying to escape the ever-present white terrorism that follows like monsters at our heels.

Dallas, Texas is my hometown and its Africans have been displaced and redlined so many times; open community wounds scatter our landscape. Freedman’s Towns in the North and the South sides of the city have been incorporated and “developed” - ruined - by colonizer real estate and government players in concert with one another. Our most renowned area was Deep Ellum with its Central Track, a street lined with artists cultivating a Pineywoods Blues style that rivaled the Delta’s Beale Street art in the early-to-mid 20th century. Now it has been occupied by colonizing restaurant and shop owners.

It isn’t that African people don’t know how to move and create homes. We’ve migrated and established civilizations, dissolved them, and started over again with the ease and pleasure of a child building elaborate forts for fun. We know how to live. The issue not nature - neither our own nor the world’s - but that we are being wildly driven to and fro by violent colonial antagonists. The issue is that our choices are coerced by the occupying state.

The issue, as always, is freedom.

One day here soon I’ll fully realize the levels of capability that my ancestors have instilled in me. The night sky won’t scare me. I won’t feel the compulsion to control, obliterate or hide from nature as if I were some colonizer in the throes of deep awareness about how out of place I am. That is not my narrative or consciousness - the story of the people who live with the the world is mine.

There is no wrongness of place, no wrongness of being in my blood.

I belong everywhere.

- Chelsea Neason

[frontporchwomanism]

Los Angeles Clan:

Goddess Glow Up LA, by Hadiiya Barbel  

[frontporchwomanism]

The Hagarite Vow, Part I: Desert

At night I often get severe cases of claustrophobia. The walls feel too tight and the air pressure builds inside the room, inside my lungs. Even the plants I’ve set on top of my altar and shelf ladder/nightstand don’t make it easier to breathe. Headaches grind insistently under my brows.

When these symptoms become unbearable my only source of relief is to sleep outside. There used to be an old sofa that my mother threw out, and I saved the thick cushions to sleep on. No matter how much I tied down the old sheets around the front porch for privacy, they ended up slapping in the breeze sometime during the night - but I didn’t mind. The potted plants and mama’s garden kept me company, and I’d sleep well underneath a spare blanket.

At a certain point my mother got tired of my leaving the porch a mess every morning, in part due to depression making me a very unreliable housekeeper. The old ratty cushions were getting damp with morning humidity and starting to smell no matter how much we washed them; the sheets were mismatched and ripped where I’d nailed or screwed them to the porch ceiling. Eventually I had to throw away all of those trappings. My mother and I briefly argued about it - I was upset because my mother didn’t seem to really understand why I felt such grief about the loss of my front porch haven…but really, I was ashamed of my own symptoms.  

One day when I was feeling particularly rough, I came home from work to a surprise - she’d come up with a way to make the porch more manageable and enjoyable. She bought some cheap green faux grass, soft and waterproof, to cover the hard concrete floor. She’d also bought a roll of bamboo fencing to wrap around the edge of the porch for privacy, replacing those tatted sheets. By the time she finished planting potted herbs and vegetables, the front porch felt like home.

I thanked my mom for putting in that creative effort at a time when I could not, and we ended up talking for quite a while on that same porch. This cheered me up so much that I went and found some outdoor cushions from a thrift store for a dollar each, and some cheap shower curtains with a garden print for extra privacy. None of this was expensive but it made a world of a difference. Outside felt like home.

I still sleep outside quite often, with my oil lamp and a thick blanket. Sometimes I dream of tent cities.

In the book “Sisters In The Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk,” Delores S. Williams delves into womanist interpretations of Biblical spirituality, reading with an African indigenous mind and centering Black women regardless of the efforts of many writers and theologians to exclude us. She makes the story of Hagar a centerpiece, a mirror through which we can step in order to understand the text and ourselves.

According to the Bible Hagar was an enslaved African woman, pulled from her Egyptian home and owned by desert patriarchs. Instead of living near the fertile Nile she found herself surrounded by blistering desert wilderness. Instead of the civilized African culture she knew, Hagar was trapped with a migrating family of barbaric monotheocrats who did not share her people’s values. They raped her and forced her to carry a baby for them, then bickered among themselves over how best to keep their foreign culture’s ideas of rank and status intact in the process.  

Eventually Hagar took her son Ishmael and left them. Her first free act recorded was the act of a queen-mother - she chose wife for her son from her home nation. This was the beginning of her reign. I Chronicles 5:18-22 later mentions a wealthy tribe called the Hagarites, said to be descended from Ishmael; Williams quotes Lee A. Starr as follows:

“No one questions the claim that Dan was the ancestor of the Danites; Reuben of the Reubenites; Ephraim of the Ephraimites; Edom of the Edomites; Moab of the Moabites; Ammon of the Ammonites; Midian of the Midianites, etc. Why should we deviate from the common rule when we come to the Hagarites and Hagarenes?”

While the cicadas sing and I sleep in the summer night’s heat, I think about Hagar and her band of desert rovers whipping across the sands like whirlwinds on horseback. I think about the ways she might have set up her tent cities with sky-blotting reams of silks, furs and soft cushions; the ways she took them down again like mandalas, throwing them on the backs of camels and letting the shifting sands erase the evidence of her camp. I think about the trade routes she ran along, making deals and making war. How the desert that used to keep her trapped, that prevented her escape, became her stomping ground. She carried her identity with her, and made a home out of open land.

What does it mean to have a home? Is it ownership? As I write this, I’m facing the hope that my paycheck posts on time so that I can pay the remainder of next month’s rent before the 3rd. The house I live in doesn’t belong to my family, it belongs to our landlord. Is it safety? There has been a rash of break-ins and suspicious behavior in our neighborhood such that my mother is adamant about locking the door each time we leave the house, even for short periods of time. What about social status? The practice of sleeping within four walls is a thin wrapping to put one’s identity in - especially since the reality is that I spend the day playing to assumptions that I sleep there, while in fact shuffling quietly to the porch most nights.

I don’t own this house. I can barely rest inside of it. It’s not necessarily safe. But there is an invisible rope connecting me to this red brick construction, such that the thought of being evicted is beyond inconvenient - it’s terrifying. The nature of this rope is a mystery to me and my spirit strains like a wild horse ready to test its boundaries.

Maybe I’m not ready to break the rope, but if I can just tug it a bit…stretch its boundaries…maybe home might feel less like confinement, and more like freedom.

- C

[frontporchwomanism]

Death in the Red Eye

Across the diaspora, Black victims, young old and in-between, are looking down at the cold bodies of their abusers in a paradox; compressed in a moment that should be cathartic, feigning grief in vindication, or forever silenced, because the response to gaining closure is a resounding “Chile, don’t speak ill of the dead.”

Lionizing the crossed over, in spite of their legacy of terror, is one of many ways in which the agency of a stolen people has been disintegrated. To see the dead as exactly what they were in this realm is viewed as blasphemous, and unless we only fix our mouths to speak of them in light, we are disrespectful at best, and cursing ourselves and those connected to us at worst.

On Monday, June 18, 2018, a young rapper known as XXXtentacion, was shot and killed in his vehicle leaving a motorcycle dealership in South Florida. His death in and of itself, was a senseless act of violence. Unironically, he left behind victims of his own senseless acts of violence: a pregnant ex girlfriend, and a fellow juvenile detainee who happened to be gay. The accounts of both events (the former being his own recollection) painted a picture of misogynistic bloodthirst and misguided rage. Knowing the details of his violent past makes it exasperating for any reasonable person to believe in his fairly recent declarations of rehabilitation, and reconciliation for the “boy” he once was.

As music media platforms, radio, and fans of XXX unapologetically glossed over and minimized his abusive past, some of us refused to allow our communities to forget the victims he left behind. We were gaslit with even more attempts to infantilize him with rhetoric like “He’s someone’s child,” “He was young and deserved a chance to grow”, and weaponizing his death as spiritual leverage over our collective conscience.

We are raising daughters in a community in which their bodies are sacrifices to the sins of spry, misguided and misplaced patriarchal angst. In making all of our dead heroes, we tell our most vulnerable that lore is more important than their protection.

This cycle continues simply because we publicly flog our victims in every resounding applause for the “I’m sorry”, from the first act to the 15th. Those they have violated are left to stitch their wounds in the cold, dark silence as if victimization was their own doing. Part of the solution to curbing this violence is to never forget, and never allow the mourning families of abusers and domestic terrorists to forget. They should grieve in ex-communication of our tribes and territories if they seek reverence. Those who commit senseless acts of male supremacist violence do not deserve support in the communities and sister communities of their victims; not in living or in death.

Our indigenous ways seek balance. Black matriarchs operating as chiefs must be willing to administer swift, violent, and apathetic justice as a response to misogynistic and anti-queer violence -- even if the terrorist is the fruit of our own wombs. If we are not willing to do so, then we must admit our comfort in patriarchal rule that allows us to overlook and ignore the mangled bodies and psyches of our sons’ victims.

We must surround victims with support, loyalty and resources even when we have no intimate or blood connection with them. They must be believed. They must be respected and the restoration of their agency must be a community effort. The potential for rehabilitation for abusers, rapists and patriarchal terrorists, no matter their age and personal traumas, cannot take priority over trauma recovery for their victims.

Unyielding forgiveness was beat into our ancestors. There is nothing healing in coexisting and empathizing with those who leave welts on our backs. We do not benefit from rigging the door permanently open for more violence done to us under the idea (collective delusion) that “people can change”.

- D

[frontporchwomanism]

D had her baby!

Check out this video where she and Tosha Nichole go over the details of the birth process, sharing photos and experiences. There were several complications and it was a poignant case showing why it's so important for Black people who give birth to have a doula as an advocate.

Check it out! And don’t forget to share this donation link, where you can help fund the next doula trip to ensure safe and healthy deliveries for black babies. 

[frontporchwomanism]

D has been gracious and open about her pregnancy journey up to this point. She has been working with Tosha Nichole at Conjure Goddess Doula Services , and together they created this video Q&A to answer your questions and share real-life experiences and perspectives.

Check it out!

P.S.: If you’d like to volunteer as a doula in your community, check out this link. If you prefer to simply donate to the volunteer doula program and ensure that every pregnant person can have the doula experience they deserve, click this link instead.

- C

[frontporchwomanism]

Petition to Mama Zulu

I recently came into a conscious breakthrough about my own weariness of the day to day struggles of life as a Black non-man head of household. This particular day I sat and cried to my altars, begging the ancestors to make it all make sense. Why am I getting the shit end of every bargain, every deal, every matter where my gender and my body is up for labor or consumption? Spirit responded with:

“Why not you?”

Why not me…my former Christian mind would recall a quote like “The meek shall inherit the earth,” and I would try to reconcile with idea that there’s an endgame to all of my struggles. The “melanated queen” in me would go into superhuman mode and say “I’m the mother of humanity, and them crackas shook”.

The beauty of intersectionality is knowing that these both have lingering truths that are felt even if not articulated. Which brings me to my muse in this prose -- Queen Nandi, or Nandi kaBhebhe, mother of the great Shaka Zulu.

Shaka Zulu was born illegitimate. His mother was not married to his father, King of the Zulu people. The king initially did not claim Shaka, but Nandi had time, and told the whole nation of the king’s ain’t shit ways. She demanded 50 herd of cattle be sent to her in support of her son and her village. The king was not only compliant, he tried to get that old thing back by bringing her and Shaka to his home. He and Nandi did not get along so that arrangement was short-lived, and Nandi went back to her home to raise Shaka on her ancestral land.

The support from the king was cut off, her village went back into famine, and Shaka’s life was constantly threatened by assassination attempts to make certain Shaka would never make it to the throne. In the midst of all this struggle, Nandi herself trained Shaka to be a deadly warrior and huntsman which contributed heavily to his ascension to the throne. Her sacrifices made her the Alpha and Omega in her son’s eyes. The year she died, Shaka ordered every pregnant woman be killed so that his nation was a nation of collective sorrow.

Dear Mama: The Tragedy. Not a happy ending, but an ending that just “is”.

                                                    _____________

Nandi did not deserve her struggles. I’m sure a lifetime of dodging figurative bullets with her son is not the lifestyle she had in mind. I’m also sure that having a child with a birthright to an empire is a hell of a motivation, and it makes me reflect on my own motivations when the social and economic push-backs of the life I lead hit the darker parts of my spirit.

My children, the ones I birthed, and the ones in my community are not descendants of kings. Most of their fathers don’t know their own fathers. They may never get me into that nice big house back on my ancestral soil of Coldwater, Mississippi after I have sacrificed and worked so hard to protect them from the violence of White and Black patriarchy alike. The one thing I am certain of is that I am told to make do in a world that defined matriarchy without my mothers in mind. To make what this means clearer to me and mine, I must claim my borders in the soil, and protect and nurture those within.

I will call on the spirit of Queen Nandi as I sharpen my own spear.

- D

[frontporchwomanism]

The Daughters Of Jane Elkins

I'm a Dallasite, born and bred. Dallas is a self-consciously conservative city with its own international airport and glass-cut skyline. Home of both Erykah Badu and the Texas State Fair. Gentrified and country-fried.

Dallas is wholeheartedly a part of the New South, a project in which former white anti-Union rebels sought to erase their history of brutality by becoming aggressively capitalistic with a side of fake color-blind. My partner once said that Dallas is like a plantation master that hires a Black overseer - just to prove he's not like those rednecks down in Georgia.

Once upon a time, back when this city was still the Old South, a slave master named Wisdom died bloody. Jane Elkins killed him. 

Jane Elkins was a slave. She was loaned out to Wisdom by her owner, another local Dallasite, to watch his two children and keep his house straight. I often wonder if she had children of her own back "home" - but the truth is she was never allowed a "home". She was already a ghost made to wander from location to location at the command of pale monsters. This was just a new stop on a hell train she'd been riding since before she was born.

One night Wisdom woke up with his head split open by an axe. He bled until morning, when he slipped from unconsciousness into death - still too gently.

She initially told pale authorities that the deed was done by a white person she figured they held in high regard; after it became obvious that they did not believe her, she remained silent and even asleep throughout most of the trial. Of course the white slave state convicted Jane, and of course they killed her. She knew. So do we.

The United States' local government authorities killed Jane Elkins right in downtown Dallas, outside the Old Red courthouse.

                                           ____________________________

I pass by the area where Jane was killed very often. I wonder if she has any descendants walking the earth and if they've elevated her, honored her. Where is her influence?

So far I've grown wise enough not to expect our settlers' and occupiers' governments to commission a statue of a body they priced at $700 in that times' currency. I don't expect Dallas city commissioners or mayors to establish a city-wide day of rememberance, or to invoke her name during the month she was killed - the same month as annual Juneteenth celebrations, which are also not quite "official". Even if they did these things, it wouldn’t mean that much coming from an enemy state. It wouldn’t matter to me, because ultimately this is not my city.

This is not my city. These red bricks and glass buildings are not my city; they are the parasite that grows on its wide, indigenous Black back. I'm concerned with the underground and underfoot Nation. The Nation of Black people who roam the streets and pack themselves into corners, who scrape and sing and stroll in the heat. The ones who hold on tight to the Bottoms near the Levy, Oak Cliff, South Dallas, and the crumbs of Deep Ellum that the Gentrifying Task Forces didn't snatch from us. This thing isn’t ours yet, but it could be.

Meantime, I wonder where Jane Elkins' daughters are. Is she welcome at someone's altar? Is she teaching someone's children how to fight - how to do what needs to be done in the safe Blackness of the dark and to face the harsh light with indifference should it burst in?

Jane Elkins should be honored. She should be invoked with wisdom, talked to in low whispers and consulted as one of our Mother Warriors. I'm thinking of a small table in a dark, quiet place...perhaps in the closet of a little ramshackle building that no one would suspect housed such fierce spirits. But she'd know, and so would we. - C

[frontporchwomanism]

Season Of The Food Stamp Witch

"Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread."

Richard Wright, “Native Son”

During his '76 campaign trail for presidency, Ronald Reagan recalled a California woman who he claimed supported herself with food stamps while practicing witchcraft. It was genius fear mongering. In one statement he wrapped up White America's concern with aiding those under its boot of classism, racism and misogyny. His statements asked a question: what if we were to use the State as a stepping stone towards our own self interests, and not simply to be a more adaptable cog in the machine? To Wright's quote, I also think about the legacy our heads of household leave behind while continuing the fight for sustainment over enrichment.

I'm a self proclaimed juju girl, but for inclusive purposes we will contextualize Reagan’s  "witchcraft" to imply any form of knowledge or set of skills that is useful and beneficial to self and community, that does not reinforce the institution in power. Puritan-era Massachusetts burned women at the stake for knowing a bit too much about plants or politics for the authority's comfort. In order to incite fear towards those deemed inferior, we just gotta add some broomsticks and blood rituals; otherwise the town doctor, the mayor's brother, will begin to lose patients to some farmer's widow.

For a less contemporary feminist point of reference my ancestors were beaten and killed out of their indigenous spiritualities. They were doing what they could to preserve their tie to the healing and sustaining properties of the earth, but we will never credit the root doctors for keeping us alive during that period in history -  its too "anti-science" (read: too "invalidated by White academia that prioritizes medical breakthroughs tried and tested on Black, enslaved, poor bodies").

"It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual."

- Zora Neale Hurston, “Dust Tracks On A Road”

From the plantation to the present, Black women have been molded to labor in ways that keep their own homes just above water as the homes of our oppressors have the best part of the meat at their tables. Our great-grandmothers literally nursed their masters' children with breast milk designed for their own children who, if were not sold (if she was so lucky) were being half watched, half cared for by her fellow enslaved folk prioritizing making weight in cotton and getting supper at the big house on the table. The exhaustion and weariness I can imagine is similar to my fellow mothers running to the bus stop after their second shift with pained feet, to get home to her children and give them what nurturing she has left to muster.

I imagine what they could be - what I could be - if we reconditioned collectively to use that resourcefulness, that endurance, to enrich ourselves and our communities in ways that do not prioritize respectable "hard days work" and service to society. So did Reagan, and the idea of it had him SHOOK. Being in our homes too long, especially with our children, is a threat to the order. The proper place for our young is in school for 8 hours a day learning how to be a laborer, how to mind authority, and out of the arms of the mother to receive whatever lashes those in authority deem fit from "in school suspensions" to state sanctioned violence.

How do we find the time to build educational institutions that prioritize the needs of Black children if we can barely put the time in our homes for Sunday dinner?

This isn’t a call for Black matriarchs to all quit their jobs, gather up their support systems and go off the grid, though I am sure that would be what most would gather by the end of this piece. It’s imperative for us to begin to ask what has the system as it stands done for us, and scrub that list of pros against the ways in which we feel exploited and used at the expense of our households. I believe individual "calls to the wild" being answered will slowly gain traction and lay the foundation for a new narrative to come, or better yet one we had all along that we were told was "savage".

If you scared, go to church.

- D