“Take a Moment to Ask Yourself, If This Is How We Fall Apart?” Practices for Mutually Reinforced Resilience in the Time of Reckoning More Lessons from The Manual for Liberating Survival

ABSTRACT

Centering the carework of dismantling technologies of oppression which aim to silence, exploit, and execute us – oftentimes to a point where repair is impossible – Syedullah and Leiner present lessons and activities from their co-created popular education curriculum, “The Manual for Liberating Survival,” a movement leadership training for revolutionary organizing designed to connect abolitionist activists and academics. This article draws lessons from the Manual that focus on healing justice and abolitionist protocols for decarcerating care within movements for social justice. The paper traces not only the transgenerational effects of anti-Black violence, community separation, and racial trauma but also the protocols of repair and resistance Black gender-non-conforming, queer, and trans women are seeding within movement space.

KEYWORDS:

• Fusion
• Black Lives Matter
• LGBTQ
• grassroots organizing
• embodiment
• liberation

Acknowledgments

This is the second installation of a larger project. The Manual for Liberating Survival is a popular education curriculum Rae and I are co-creating, a culmination of our personal and collective journeys in political organizing. From student activism and prison abolition through burning out and breaking down, through artist collectives and food justice campaigns, to turning inward and deepening into embodied practices of meditation, yoga, earth medicine, sound healing, ceremony, and martial arts. It combines the popular education of activist knowledge with historical and political theory amassed from years of Black feminist study within and beyond contexts of formal education and credentials. It emerges from both our own direct experiences as organizers and our studied understandings that it is not enough to survive movements for liberation—we must simultaneously liberate our methods of survival from habits of colonialism, domination, and genocide. It draws inspiration from the popular education realm of zines, curricular pamphlets, and downloadable toolkits for deconstructing the ways our communities have been working for the liberated survival of queer and trans of-color communities through the work of abolitionist activism for generations. This manual’s aim is to reflect the limits of our overreliance on disposability and respectability in our movements, to recognize that not all we have inherited by way of strategies of survival, care, adaption, adoption, shape-shifting, and transformation that came from those who have come before us are things we want to keep with us as we move toward the change we want to see in our communities, chosen families, and movements. In our first installation, we focused on how our movements for abolition can reproduce the very carceral logics of policing, punishment, and detention we seek to abolish in our relationships and in our organizations. In this article, we turn more specifically to how we come together to care for ourselves and each other through crisis, through calamity. How have the lineages, practices, and protocols of care-taking past and present imprinted themselves on–in what Kesho Y. Scott called in her 1991 book–our habits of surviving in ways that keep our “strategies for life” on point in some moments while still keeping us from thriving in the next? (See also Kesho Yvonne Scott, The Habit of Surviving: Black Women’s Strategies for Life, 1991)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See Octavia Butler’s prophetic post-apocalyptic fugitive narratives Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).

2. See https://tcf.org/content/commentary/welcome-to-newburgh-murder-capital-of-new-york/?agreed=1

3. See http://www.operationghettostorm.org/uploads/1/9/1/1/19110795/new_all_14_11_04.pdf

4. Likewise, the following piece does not follow scholarly conventions, but jumps scholarships to stay fugitive, because the kinds of freedom we’ve been emancipated into always seem to fall far short of expectation. That said, our primary sources are animated, our lived experiences are recent and ongoing, our theory is both ancestral and emergent. This piece is a collaboration between intimate life partners, between activist and academic affiliations, and we center the fugitive, the fusion, the prophetic work of testimony, storytelling, and teach-ins – a mode of analysis that breaks rules when needed and reaches for whatever elements and ideas are actually keeping us grounded, keeping us moving toward alternative orientations to home than those we had to leave behind, otherwise premises for and protocols of risk, accountability, and safety.

5. Char Adams, “A movement, a slogan, a rallying cry: How Black Lives Matter changed America’s view on race, ” CBS News, December 29, 2020 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/movement-slogan-rallying-cry-how-black-lives-matter-changed-america-n1252434.

6. Cara Page, “Healing Collective Trauma,” http://www.healingcollectivetrauma.com/cara-page.html.

7. Activity inspired by workshop with Relationship Uprising, Watershed Center, Millerton, NY: December 2019, see https://relationaluprising.org/.

8. See Love With Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse, edited by Aishah Shahidah Simmons. AK Press, 2019.

9. See Ori Burton’s “Abolition 101 training” https://abolitionjournal.org/studyguide/.

10. Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, Dee Garcia, and the Poor Magazine Family. Poverty Scholarship – Poor People Led Theory, Art, Words, and Tears Across Mama Earth (Poor Press Network, 2019).https://www.poorpress.net/

11. See https://powdersvillepost.com/cars-have-hit-demonstrators-104-times-since-the-black-lives-matter-movement-began/