Articles, Book Chapters, Interviews by Angela Hume
, I first met with the poet-philosopher, activist, and cultural theorist Judy Grahn. She was seve... more , I first met with the poet-philosopher, activist, and cultural theorist Judy Grahn. She was seventynine years old at the time. We sat in the bookshelf-lined living room in her and her partner Kris's lower-level apartment in their friend Dianne's house in Palo Alto. It was the first in what would be a series of conversations about her life's work. Early in our interview, Grahn told me, "You're making me think about health, and that, well, all my work, every piece of it, is about health." Smiling with her twinkly crescent eyes, she added, "I know what the operation is that I'm performing because I've had time to think about it: origin stories. You start the story over again." For Grahn, feminist storytelling, the imagining and retelling of cultural myths from the perspectives of women, queer people, and transgender people, is healing work. By telling new origin stories, feminist healers renew the health, or wholeness ("health" and "heal" come from the Germanic "whole"), of self and of community. As Grahn writes, "The meaning of healing is 'wholeness,' an idea comprehended by healers of the distant past, who guided the patient through the forces of chaos to the most sacred aspects of their shared culture" (Blood, Bread, and Roses 1993, 131). In the process of telling stories that heal, feminists instill and transmit a set of revolutionary survival skills, ensuring that they will not be lost. In a series of prose books published over four decades, Grahn has elaborated a philosophy of feminist storytelling. Despite this long project of developing a poetics and an epistemology, she is still
Two years after Hurricane Hugo, which in 1989 devastated the unincorporated US territory St. Croi... more Two years after Hurricane Hugo, which in 1989 devastated the unincorporated US territory St. Croix, and one year prior to her death from cancer, African Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde wrote a poem called "Restoration: A Memorial-9/18/91." The poem grew partly out of a series of journal entries that Lorde made in the wake of Hugo on St. Croix, her home at the time, and bears witness to the storm's catastrophic aftermath, which, in Lorde's view, was "man-made." 1 In her journal Lorde suggests that the Caribbean island had been made sick by the capitalist US government, which exploited it for its resources and then neglected it after the disasterjust as her own body had been made sick by pollution from US industry on the mainland and then sicker by the profitdriven "Cancer Establishment." In this chapter, I will explore Lorde's concept of restoration in both her poem and her journals. The concept empowered her to confront and resist the environmental injustice she saw affecting the environment around her along with her individual body. Throughout her writings, Lorde addresses environmental injustice. She writes about how her childhood home of Harlem, for example, with its sparse city parks and "sooty-pebbled" riverbank, was often dirtied by industry. 2 Lorde also describes how the pollution of her adult home on Staten Islandwater contaminated by refinery runoff and air thick with industrial fumesthreatened people who were already vulnerable: poor women, women of color, and queer women. In what Lorde named a "woman-devaluating culture," 3 where women of color bear the brunt of environmental hazard, the erotic, creative "lifeforce" of women is perpetually under assault. 4 For Lorde, the stark message for her as a Black lesbian with cancer was that she was never meant to survive. 5 When Lorde left the city and went to live on St. Croix, she made connections between her long battle with breast cancer and the disaster that was Hugo, concluding that both were the result of environmental racism. In light of her critique, I hope to show how Lorde's concept of 208 angela hume
In January 2019, on a clear, cold day, I visited the poet Mei-mei Berssenbrug ge at her home in t... more In January 2019, on a clear, cold day, I visited the poet Mei-mei Berssenbrug ge at her home in the northern New Mexico high desert. Mei-mei's house is about 50 miles north of Santa Fe, on the traditional lands of the Pueblo, Apache, and Ute peoples. She has lived in New Mexico for most of her adult life. On the drive, snow
In the mid-1990s, the Asian-American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, at the time experiencing illness... more In the mid-1990s, the Asian-American poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, at the time experiencing illness due to pesticide exposure (Chiu), collaborated with the American artist Kiki Smith to produce Endocrinology-a poem-collage featuring lines and fragments of text alongside monoprints resembling organs from the endocrine (hormone) system (e.g. the adrenal glands, a uterus, testicles). Issued in 1997 as a paperback by Kelsey Street Press, Endocrinology was originally published as a fullcolor, limited-edition art book earlier that same year. According to Berssenbrugge, Smith chose a translucent but tough rice paper with which to build the pages of the art book because of its skin-like quality (Hinton). To create the maquette, Berssenbrugge and Smith cut and pasted lines of Berssenbrugge's poetry onto the pages (Berssenbrugge and Smith, "Story and Notes" 106). Originally a fivestanza poem, "Endocrinology" was transformed, Berssenbrugge explains, into a "field or surface tension of words that float across the whole" (106). Using letterpress, silkscreen, and die-cut printing techniques, Universal Limited Art Editions reproduced the maquette-all of its text and images-almost exactly as Berssenbrugge and Smith had originally created it (Hinton). The result was a tactile, dimensional book object-its interior, in the words of Berssenbrugge, an "abstract turmoil" (Hinton). Through this "abstract turmoil," Endocrinology evokes fluid forms of environmental relation-processes of
Drafts by Angela Hume
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Articles, Book Chapters, Interviews by Angela Hume
Visit www.akpress.org/deep-care.html.
Drafts by Angela Hume
Visit www.akpress.org/deep-care.html.