We are not lost. We know the paths we are on.
My last post on my Substack was in Jan 2024. I cringed a little reading that date and then immediately felt a wave of disappointment settle in my bones. The one thing that has saved me over and over in my life has been writing. I am a writer (a negligent one as I don’t tend to my craft regularly), and the act of taking words out of my brain and arranging them on paper helps me make sense of it all and is how I move into healing.
Writing is how I repair, and yet the repair to be found in this world is gathered in moments between daily witnessing of ongoing genocides and the conscious acts of disconnected humans (who have dehumanised themselves to the point of ignoring their souls). Repair, for me, means; A walk through the park your eyes softening at the young souls and animal friends who play with golden and red-tipped fallen leaves, hands wrapped around a hot mug in a cafe filled with chatter which drowns out the noise in your head so you can just be here, or in an evening with beautiful sibling activists who laugh through their communal pain to find joy and who lovingly tend to wounds by gathering them with endearments of habibi, jannu, hermana, mi vida, babe, sister…
Writing is how I repair and so it makes sense that today is a morning where I am deliberately taking time to return to this space - a screen, my brain, my fingers and the words that pour out to seek out this possibility for repair. Why today and not yesterday or the months before? Well, work has been a lot (sideyeing everyone who knows about what this journey has required), single parenting is always a lot, and the world is…
Today we will learn who the next President of the imperialist nation - the United States will be. We will learn who the next person will be who will sign and authorise the continued rounds of genocide, murder, forced displacement, bio/ecocide, and layered and deliberate dehumanisation of peoples. Today will feel like a lot because it is and yet the work here for all of us is to return to ourselves and each other, over and over again. We are not lost. We know the paths we are on.
Hope has not been lost, it remains in those quiet spaces between each other and our communities.
Power has not been lost, it remains in those quiet spaces between each other and our communities.
Our voices have not been lost, they remain in those quiet spaces between each other and our communities.
Our imaginations have not been lost, they remain in those quiet spaces between each other and our communities.
There is no single way out of the violent systems that keep us bound. There are many diverse, vibrant, winding ways and it is to these paths that we must commit to tending and expanding.
I remember after the 2016 U.S. election the response from Philanthropy was to pour money into new groups focused on political advocacy and movement building and recommit funding to organisations focused on SRHR and Reproductive Rights. The organisation I was an executive director of received such a grant from a foundation - a large one-time grant focused on movement building. Yet after a few years, these same funders turned their focus back to themselves and not these nascent groups who were doing the sacred work of building and breathing life into communal spaces and new movements. Many of these groups shut down or folded into other organisations as a result and funding trickled back into the same traditional industrialised NGO spaces that funders ‘trust’.
I do not doubt that funders will ‘respond’ if Trump is elected President and open some form of emergency funding in response to the impending restrictions we will all face and that communities of people who have been dehumanised consistently will continue to suffer through in the most devastating ways. And yet this response from Philanthropy is not the remedy needed.
Calling on All Silent Minorities
HEY
C’MON
COME OUT
WHEREVER YOU ARE
WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE
AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET
-June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan
The paths to liberation are many and all of them matter. There is no one way to movement build, organise, do abolition work, gather, and make room. In the words of our beloved ancestor, Octavia E. Butler1: “There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead, there are thousands of answers—at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.” The work of Philanthropy in the weeks and years ahead must be in supporting the long-term work that is required to support the vibrancy and diversity of the many paths to liberation.
Our work is to continue to commit to ourselves, our communities and each other in the creation, building, and supporting of these vibrant dreams and ecosystems of liberation2.
Our work is to continue to make room for ourselves and each other to be in community so that we may practice, do the reps3, show up over and over again and have those discussions under that tree so that we may continue to build our collective freedom together.
Keep breathing everyone.
With love for our communities,
-Uma
”A Few Rules for Predicting the Future,” Essence, October 2000. Octavia E. Butler
I continue to be in awe of all the people, communities and partners we build alongside at FRIDA - for it is a commitment to the sustaining of room and space for vibrant and diverse young feminist liberatory ideas, actions and movements.
A communal reminder offered by brother Resmaa Menakem in his somatic abolition work and practice (thank you).