Here’s to Reckoning and Recognition
How I’m supporting the changes our culture needs
I want to add my voice in response to the unprecedented actions throughout our culture since George Floyd was tortured and murdered. To dig deep into my writing voice, I start with some material to spark my pen and find a prompt to ride into it. Like this:
Dreams
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.
Prompt: My dream contains …
(Feel free to try this, too.)
My dream contains layers and layers of explosions of creativity in just as many textures. To feel, to witness and to experience creativity is, always has been for me, the best that this existence called humanity has to offer itself. It’s what I am praying for, rooting for, cheering for, fighting for — the mightiest outcome of the rebellion, the great movement not only forward but up and out of the swamp, the hell hole, the torture chamber and killing field of racism. I’ve had this dream for at least 45 years — it’s what fed and fueled my birth as a feminist. This dream includes you. And you and you and you. All of us reaching for the highest of our spirits out of the deep well of our souls.
It got interrupted for a spell, while my friends Ken and Richard and everybody else was dying of AIDS. It was all I could do to keep my spirits nose above water, treading fast so as not to drown in grief. And truth be told — there’s a voice lodged somewhere behind my right ear whispering — Goddess, please, don’t let COVID take all these brave and bright protesters. But I learned as a child to tamp down my voice of fear — otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to get up every morning and escape our apartment for grade school. I didn’t let the fear voice chain me to my bed. So, I know about shunning and muffling the fear voice.
The dream pulses every time another image, another video, another message comes out promising to stay and fight, stay, and build. Stay until everybody spends their time on, spends their lives on, being creative — making, singing, expressing, and loving being the highest form of human experience. We must honor, foster, clear the way for and tear down the barriers impeding all forms of human creativity.
I want to follow the leadership of the wise, brave, folks in the Black community reckoning with and rebelling against racism. And I also want to articulate where I stand and how ashamed I am that so many of us in our culture are steeped in ignorance and hatred that has been instilled and stoked by the systems of power in our culture, at the hands of white people who constructed and maintain those systems. That’s the stuff my 73-year-old mind recites to me. But travel down a ways, to my heart, and another voice is wailing — at the multitude of sacrifice of lives, dignity, and humanity. What I most treasure in my life is connection with others, love given, shared, and received. Warm eyes taking each other in, open hands and hearts in creative pursuit of human expression. To hear each other’s voices, to experience the carbonated joy of belly laughter together.
Those are the reasons I want racism to be reckoned with and eliminated — so we can all get to the place of being who we each are, truly are, using our gifts and talents we hold within ourselves.
What happens next
Recently I got inspired and fired up watching a two-part forum, Where We Go from Here, moderated by Oprah Winfrey, comprised of a host of wise and dedicated Black leaders. Here’s Part 1 and here’s Part 2.
I’m giving financial support to:
• Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, an advocate, policymaker, activist, and survivor who believes people closest to the pain should be closest to the power and a diversity of voices in the political process is essential to crafting more effective public policy. In Nov. 2020 she’s up for re-election to represent Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District of the U.S. House of Representatives.
• The Performance Project is an arts community of many ages and ancestries that engages young people in intensive artistic training, inter-generational mentoring, leadership development, and community building through the arts. TPP envisions a world in which all people strive for personal and social liberation, where all individuals and cultures are honored, embrace interconnectedness, and we all are free to achieve our full potential. They claim a public voice, engage audiences in dialogue about oppression and liberation, and celebrate our humanity and connection through the arts. Check out this performance trailer from First Generation Ensemble: ROSARY- COP VIOLENCE
• Families for Justice as Healing is led by abolitionists who are incarcerated women, formerly incarcerated women, and women with incarcerated loved ones. Their mission is to end the incarceration of women and girls. They organize in the most incarcerated communities in Massachusetts to transform harm by developing alternatives to police, courts, and incarceration. FJH is unapologetically focused on women and girls and is a member of the National Council of Incarcerated Women and Girls and closely connected with their sister organization, Sisters Unchained. It is also a part of the National Participatory Defense Network.
And I’m reading:
The anthology, Love with Accountability: Digging up roots of Child Sexual Abuse. Edited by Aishah Shahidah Simmons, a Black feminist lesbian activist, cultural worker, international lecturer and award-winning documentary filmmaker of NO! The Rape Documentary
I leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Audre Lorde:
“When I dare to be powerful — to use my strength in the service of my vision — then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
Thanks for reading.
Donna Jenson founded Time To Tell and leads online and in-person writing circles for survivors of sexual violence. She wrote and performs the one-woman play, “What She Knows: One Woman’s Way Through Incest to Joy,” which is based on her own experience of surviving incest and what she did to make her life worth living. Her book, Healing My Life from Incest to Joy, is a narrative of the choices she made and experiences she had that helped her heal from her childhood trauma.
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