"Relevant is Different Points on a Circle":  Audre Lorde and the Ocean Blue

ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS

Those strong vengeful winds, out-blowing trade from the West Coast of Africa into the Caribbean met Audre Lorde in St. Croix under the meteorological name of Hugo.  Hugo drowned everything.  The US government and the racist media tried to submerge the narrative of the survivors of the hurricane in stories of looting and danger as they abandoned the public.  For months Audre Lorde wrote by lantern after curfew revising one of the few books that survived in her flooded office, Chosen Poems.  Audre created an Undersong passage back into her life, and then she heard that an eclipse was coming.  Audre crossed over two oceans to get to Hawaii for the most direct solar eclipse of her lifetime. On her way she passed over Arawak and Carib territory and Columbus's bloody ghost.  This essay is about revision.  Audre Lorde's revisions of her life's work.  A revision of our understanding of the inevitability of colonialism. A revision of our understanding of our cosmic place. Hurricane, galaxy, lifetime.  Water, air and change. 

Sista Docta Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Feminist Love Evangelist and an aspirational cousin to all life. She is/they are the author of several books, most recently Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals and the co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Trust, an intergenerational experiential living library of Black LBGTQ brilliance.

In conversation with Inez Blanca van der Scheer

Inez Blanca van der Scheer is a junior curator of modern and contemporary art at the Amsterdam Museum and a former curator/researcher at Hama Gallery. She is pursuing her PhD at the University of Amsterdam; her research observes the relationship between human beings and the nonhuman natural world in Caribbean art and philosophy. Her upcoming exhibitions include a presentation of the work of Aruban artist Rita Maasdamme for the Amsterdam Museum and a group show of five contemporary Caribbean artists for the Dark Matter Resignifications festival.