"I am...being in a with": Black Girl Genius Week Columbia 2019

I’ve come to terms in my thirtieth year of life that I have difficulty with transitions. Perhaps, I have always been this way. My grandmother would tell the story of how restless I was as a fourteen-month old ​Porshé. I seemed to always be in conflict and wrestling with supernatural powers. She would pray over me and that spirit would be settled. I need(ed) to remember those prayers for now.

Ask one of my closest confidants, Jessica, and she will tell you that I am a step beyond dramatic. She’s right. While 2018 was the best year of my life it was a fight. A fight mainly with myself that I realize was partly due to my own resistance to fall into the very things that I believe and still believe. I literally have been on the floor in turmoil over my current state and existence, but somebodies were/are praying for me.

The first week in March 2019 we kicked off this year’s series of Black Girl Genius Week 2019. Black Girl Genius Week is our public campaign of being and creating with Black girls for the sake of freedom and other-world making. During the week SOLHOT host public lectures and conversations, private SOLHOT sessions, studio, fellowships, workshops, and a host of many other things. More than anything Black Girl Genius Week is an intentional and extensive practice of being together. The week is also an endurance practice made possible by the attention and dedication to those on the ground organizing and those managing the details and logistics from a far.

Columbia, South Carolina was the first stop on our BGGW 2019 tour and I am forever changed. I am forever changed not because something new happened, rather much like the intention of SOLHOT I am forever changed because I am reminded of why my work of organizing and celebrating of Black girls is important and necessary. I was pushed to go beyond my need for self-absorption and “whoa is me” attitude. It’s not that I was trained in this way, but some moods are easier to achieve. I also believe that sometimes we have to explore the rabbit holes we jump in just to ensure we didn’t miss anything. Back in January things began to unravel for me. I was restless about my current existence. Mainly because I felt alone and wondered if where I was is where I’m truly supposed to be or if it was a case of settling. I do think settling was involved as I settled into the idea that the surface was true and that that was the end all be all. Y’all I had no idea how I got there, but BGGW19 actually showed me how I got there.

So, BGGW kicked off in Columbia and I was ready. We opened with natal chart readings which was necessary to understand how we would transform this side of being based on the galaxies and stars that rule our time and location of birth. Immediately, the week began to remind me (almost stalk me) that there are questions that I seriously need to answer. There were a host of things that happened that week, but what really spoke to me was the middle and high school girls, whom we organized with, contemplations at the intersection of critical decision making, care, life, and forgiveness. I was stuck by Monifa Lemons co-founder of The Watering Hole statement at the end of our panel “I am a poet. I’m not a poet in addition to something else. I’m a poet (insert the girls’ PeriodT).” I was shook, like damn, what is my “I am” statement? I knew I was slipping on this because the day prior as I went to introduce our opening public event I went into my student spiel and had to start over because I was not any of the things I said I was. Being a student was easy as I didn’t work to find a definitive way to describe or introduce myself. The student identity working on xyz work was easy. So Monifa says “I’m a poet” and I immediately began to think of my own “I am” statement.

Later that week my bandbae Blair gave us the back story of her sound/beat “being in a with.” This sound was produced from Blair’s commitment to organizing with our girlband, We Levitate, but the tradition extends beyond us. In a talk Bernice Johnson Reagon, co-founder of the Black feminist and womanist acapella group Sweet Honey in The Rock, recalls a conversation that Toni Cade Bambara had with a group of young women where Cade ask the young women “what do you want?” The women began to give their prolific and answers they thought Toni Cade Bambara wanted to hear, but Cade persisted with “what do you want” until the women began naming practical everyday desires like apartments with windows so they could write. These desires were not founded on what could or could not happen based on economic limitations, but what they wanted despite these things. Reagon reminds us of this story because she believes we’re raising humans who do not dream to the point that their dreams and imagination scare them. The condition of dreaming Reagon goes on to say is “being in a with.” Being in our dreams with people who can help us is the only way, she argues, that we will be able to make a difference in our world.

In reflecting on the week I realize I had been experiencing so much turmoil the first part of this year because I was living similar to Ntozake Shange’s “Lady in Green,” watching folks or maybe nobody walk off with my stuff. February of last year I sat in a room on my former campus and professed the same sentiment as Reagon, that we were rearing students who were afraid to dream. Yet, a year later I was forgetting that I know how to dream as well and that I’ve only been able to dream and be by being in my with with SOLHOT and We Levitate. Turned inward I really tried to convince myself that my dissatisfaction with my current situation is my own doing, that I am the only one this is happening to, etc. etc. Like girl, chill. What I like most about the concept of dreams and being in a with is that it helps create the new world in which we all wish to live. A world in which we can live.

That’s exactly what we created last week in Columbia and every time we get together in SOLHOT, new worlds and galaxies are built by our being together. This is Black girlhood spirituality because it was only in our being together that we mobilized ideas like time, labor, haunting, and surveillance to create new galaxies where we are able to do the work we need and want to be doing. So why I was so wrapped up in my temporal existence is just a wonder. Why live here and focus on low wages and struggles to pay healthcare premiums when I could focus on the goodness found in being in my with? My with is who I trust and they have been holding me up while I figure it out. I am so very appreciative of the grace that they extend because your girl been needing grace.   

I am a branch of a flower/tree/vine planted in good soil. This actually wasn’t the I am statement I thought I would reach. I did even have an “I am” statement when I started writing this entry. I love what John 15 says about vines and branches. That branches have to be cut off if they do not produce fruit. That branches are pruned so they can produce more fruit, but to produce more fruit you have to remain in Him. Applying that to my current situation means I remain in my with so that I can produce more fruit. The pruning does not kill me rather it makes me produce more fruit.

Every time we meet in SOLHOT we make “I am” statements through our ritual just because. While the “I am” statement is not new, I’m choosing based on the (re)membering (a la Dr. Cynthia Dillard's work) BGGW Columbia invoked in me to not take our/my “I am” statements for granted. I don’t want to take my being in a with for granted either. What I know from my work in SOLHOT is that the “I am” statements are fluid and transient; they change. So while I’m a branch this week, I can be something else next week. But, for this week I’m a branch who is working on growing and pruning the fruit (dreams) sprouting from me.

Just because I rested in the easy mood, doesn’t mean I can't (re)member. My name is ​Porshé and I am a branch.

Feel free to replace my underlined sentiments with those of your own!

xo

You can't see it but that sign says "Garner Lane" :)