Generative Citations:
From Mia Mingus’s opening keynote speech at KQTcon, 2018:
. . . Because after all, what is “community?” What is this thing, “community,” that we talk about so much? This thing that we romanticize to no end and that has let so many of us down, even as we refuse to let it go completely? We talk about community all the time, but many of us struggle to know what that actually means and how to actually build it, especially when so many of us are so isolated …
One of the things I always think of whenever I think about queer and trans Koreans is the way that so many people I know and love stay connected to their families. Though their families often do not understand or are hostile to their queer and trans identities, they refuse to let each other go. Though they might have to hide who they are, for decades, maybe even their entire life, they continue to return to each other. To me, there is something so powerful about that kind of love.
I know it is not perfect and there are many painful complexities about it. I know that the silence that is expected in return for connection is dangerous, harmful and neither just nor right nor fair. I know that it can be hard to tell guilt, shame, denial and abuse from love. And—both/and—there is something so deeply magnificent about the ways that we can still love and care and show-up for each other, even through our pain.
From ‘Everywhere Archives: Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet’ by Mel Y. Chen:
The internet allows … [FTM & Queer Asians] to make their archives usable, not as moribund repositories, but as generative resources for identity … [These archives] are live, constructed, presentist, futurist, real. In their dynamism, their virtuality, their interconnectedness, their evanescence, their craft, and their readiness, these archives might be thought of as viral: not alive, since digital; not dead, since mobile. They are not archived reliably, and so they must be concocted again and again; even if identity itself is forestalled and forestalled and forestalled, the archives make and make.
From Hil Malatino’s Trans Care:
In order to communicate about these lives, you engage in forms of speculation, projection, invention, and translation that inevitably fail to render subjecthood faithfully. The piecemeal, the partial, the imperfect is all you have.
From ‘Cautious Living: Black Trans Women and the Politics of Documentation,’ Miss Major Griffin-Gracy & Cece Mcdonald in conversation with Toshio Meronek:
Cece: … And so, I feel that if there were more trans, queer, and GNC people of color having agency in mainstream spaces, then our narrative definitely could change. Because the stereotypical narrative and the rhetoric that plays out with it soothes society, which then acts out in ways that can be even more violent, or transphobic, or homophobic, or queer-phobic, toward our communities. Or the media helps non-trans people say to themselves, “I didn’t understand, and now I still don’t understand, but I’m a good person because I watched this movie.”
Our narratives aren’t really for those people, you know what I’m saying? They’re not for them to consume in such a way that makes them feel better about themselves. Our narratives should make them get their shit together, not be like, “Oh, trans people exist -- how fascinating!” Like, yeah, dumbass -- Captain Obvious, we’ve been around for all human existence, so why wouldn’t we be here?
From Victor Masayesva, Jr. ‘s Husk of Time:
Life is decay and dissipation of all that we were born with, meaning our bodies and our lifetime accomplishments and material accumulations. From the moment we are born, the brilliant illumination begins to dissipate. This is at least one perspective on living and the control of our biological bodies by time.
But what if we understood what the farmer was contemplating and determined that our memory is constantly, always alive and our brain a temporary holding vessel, a dry cornstalk, and that the physical world is the true and final receptacle of our memory? That the world outside of our personal biological being is shaped by our memories, and as such it is an extension of ourselves—and that is what will remain when our bodies return to the land. We will always be, in the land.
From Aurora Levins Morales’s Medicine Stories:
… All people live somewhere in the terrain of class, race, gender, sexuality, within or outside the bounds of normalized bodies and minds, whether we pay attention or not, whether we are privileged in that spot or not.
I believe that oppression is more like a landscape, with its layered geology, its pollen drift, its leaching of minerals from one level to another. I am the child of an evolutionary mathematical biologist who spent his life looking at complexity, whose teaching of ecology included the distortions of capitalism on science, the relationships between women’s property rights and soil fertility, and the disastrous mistakes made by asking the wrong questions, based on the wrong assumption that just because things are the way they are, it’s the way they have to be.
… So although the endless plundering of resources that is class is the bedrock that most other oppressions exist to serve, I will never say that any one of the oppressions wrecking our world must always come first in terms of action. The shifting historical moments and social contexts through which we move, whom we can build effective alliances with, what issues are the most pressing on us and on the people around us, which struggles are most likely to kindle hope, all determine our points of entry into the multilayered, infinite-issue, shared work of transforming the world. Each kind of oppression has its strategic importance in the reproduction of domination and props up the others, just as each struggle has moments of igniting a broader swatch of resistance and leading that moment.
… There is an immense reserve of untapped power in seeking out our own inheritances of oppressor stories and learning from them, not because we are called out but because we are called. Ultimately what we inherit are relationships and our beliefs about them. We can’t alter the actions of our ancestors, but we can decide what to do with the social relations they left us. We can make different choices about our priorities … Knowing, honestly examining, and taking full responsibility for what our ancestors left us is both a spiritual and a political practice of integrity and authenticity … Deciding we are in fact accountable frees us to act.
From Ariella Azoulay’s Unlearning Imperialism:
It is not a coincidence that ‘we find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did, because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen,’ Lorde writes, since this ‘generation gap’ is an important social tool for any repressive society. In the imperial condition, rejection of the transmitted lesson was made into an ideal of freedom, a pattern of rebellion that impoverished those who struggle against imperialism even more, since they had to turn their back to their ancestors as a sign of their emancipation from the bondage of tradition.
… Tradition is a worldly formation that resists imperialism’s offer of emancipation through our withdrawal from this world. Tradition is the most persistent struggle against imperialism, sustained through intergenerational transmission and preservation of some worldly knowledge of being in the world … I am speaking about the self destruction of a culture when its members are made into perpetrators, a culture for whom nothing is left outside of the new template of perpetrator and victim. A complex social and cultural fabric was substituted by a limited set of positions: victims and perpetrators This process of turning descendants against their ancestors or tribes recurring in cultural genocides, was construed as natural in those European societies where children were raised to rebel against their ancestors and risked finding themselves with no allies or solidarity webs whatsoever. In the new fabricated societies that evolve from their interactions with the societies they sought to destroy, their descendants were more likely to become perpetrators.
From Hyejin Shim, 2017:
Why are immigrants (elders & non-English speaking especially) framed as more racist than English-speaking Americanized & American-born children, who are arguably more susceptible to internalizing & continuing American racism? Why is this the case when monolingual immigrants & elders are generally more likely to experience much more frequent and acute forms of racism?
..
Why are we even in this country? What brought us here? Was it war? Upward mobility? Was it US-driven economic policies that made living in our home countries untenable? Or perhaps US-supported military regimes that exploited, disappeared and killed many while importing a certain type of capitalist development? Do we even know the contexts from which we came for “a better life”?
..
Do we know our histories? Do we know each other’s histories? Do we want to? Do our stories of ourselves only begin after landing in the US? Why? And what does that mean for us?
..
What are the legacies we’ve inherited, which ones will we choose to protect, and which will we dismantle?
What will we do with who we are and the power we have?
What do you look for in a scene [for writing / image-making]?
Relationship. Relationship between body and space. Relationship between strangers, passing each other, who will probably never meet again. Relationship between people who irritate each other. Relationship between lovers, between siblings. I want to catch a hand reaching out to another.
From Moten & Harney’s The Undercommons:
Recognizing that text is intertext is one thing. Seeing that text is a social space is another. It’s a deeper way of looking at it. To say that it’s a social space is to say that stuff is going on: people, things, are meeting there and interacting, rubbing off one another, brushing against one another — and you enter into that social space, to try to be part of it … once you enter into that social space, terms are just one part of it, and there’s other stuff too. There are things to do, places to go, and people to see in reading and writing — and it’s about maybe even trying to figure out some kind of ethically responsible way to be in that world with other things … Our first collaborations were in poetry.
From ‘Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud’ by Adrienne Rich:
IV
That light of outrage is the light of history
springing upon us when we’re least prepared,
thinking maybe a little glade of time
leaf-thick and with clear water
is ours, is promised us, for all we’ve hacked
and tracked our way through: to this:
What will it be? Your wish or mine? Your
prayers or my wish then: that those we love
be well, whatever that means, to be well.
Outrage: who dare claim protection for their own
amid such unprotection? What kind of prayer
is that? To what kind of god? What kind of wish?
From Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha:
Lift me up mom to the window the child looking
above too high above her view the glass between
some image a blur now darks and grey mere
shadows lingering above her vision her head tilted
back as far as it can go. Lift me up to the window the
white frame and the glass between, early dusk or
dawn when light is muted, lines yield to shades,
houses cast shadow pools in the passing light. Brief.
…
Lift
me to the window to the picture image unleash the
ropes tied to weights of stones first the ropes then its
scraping on wood to break stillness the bells fall
peal follow the sound of ropes holding weight scrap-
ing on wood to break stillness bells fall a peal to sky
From Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti
… Teach me how
to be terrified today and meditate on this:
… I dream of apples
and courage. I bite an apple in the dark.
Note how wolf and veil both adored me.
To mourn close to mourning with thorn
at the chest. Always blood and snow but
no belly to soft. To burn like paper
and lightning tree. Raise me to spark.
Run those ruined fingers through everything.
From Amy Clampitt’s A Silence Opens:
…
for some purpose, fell open
at random, and there was
the horned rampion, named
and depicted, astonishing
in memory as old love
reopened, still quivering.
Ada Limón’s “Instructions on Not Giving Up”
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
From Zoé Samudzi, in a panel discussion from 2020:
I really love what Dr Spillers just mentioned about the future is the present and that is something that I think about a lot, in kind of playing with time, this idea that we are already ancestors. We are already in the present, growing and expanding the knowledges that the people who come after us will be building upon. I think the beauty of speculating futurities is so rich and right to me because it feels like this meeting of Black feminist care ethics with this abolitionist impulse and effort to destroy, but abolition isn't just about the destruction of oppressive forms in the present … Because there is no blueprint for the future, all of this feels like this scientific methodology where we are constantly speculating and experimenting and continuously refining our approach because abolition is not an end point. It is this continuous into-the-future, into forever, this ongoing praxis of care and destruction that takes time, and necessarily occurs in the plurality of time and spaces and in places, because the praxis has to be so particular and specific to the context. I think that futurity most importantly means a space for multiplicity, and the practice of tending to and growing these multiplicities is really exciting to think about.
From Gail Lewis, in the same panel ^:
… well we attempt to live it, and we hold each other to account to live and practice differently. In order that we can draw on the ancestral inheritance, and further it because we are also ancestors and we owe an obligation to the future.
There is something profound about a different way of thinking about now and what we aim for and what we can't even imagine but we sense can be different. The past that gives us that: the past is the stars through which we navigate our steerage towards the future, it seems to me, and that past is multiple, of course. All the different multiple struggles, the multiple ways in which we have recorded or not recorded those struggles, but also the visions of exactly what it would mean.
Other things to mention atm (not exhaustive, just a teeny additional list)
Tina Campt’s Listening to Images
Emily Jungmin Yoon’s A Cruelty Special to Our Species
Taylor Johnson’s Inheritance
Yaiza Hernández Velázquez’s “Archiving to Oblivion”
KCT’s I Hope We Choose Love
Ka Man Tse’s Narrow Distances
Rahim Fortune’s I can’t stand to see you cry
Akram Zaatari’s This Day