Take Care of Your Blessings:Toni Cade Bambara & A Spell for Mutual Survival

Alexis Pauline Gumbsis a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, a prayer poet priestess and has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University.  Alexis was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University.  She has also researched in the archival papers of Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Fannie Lou Hamer and many more.Alexis is the author ofM Archive: After the End of the World (Duke Press, 2018),Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity(Duke University Press, 2016) and the co-editor ofRevolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines(PM Press, 2016) andhas also published widely on Caribbean Women’s Literature with a special interest in Dionne Brand. Her scholarly work is published inObsidian, Symbiosis, Macomere, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Literature, SIGNS, Feminist Collections, The Black Imagination, Mothering and Hip Hop Culture, The Business of Black Powerand more.Alexis is the author of an acclaimed collection of poems101 Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Aliveand poetic work published inKweli,Vinyl, Backbone, Everyday Genius, Turning Wheel, UNFold, Makeshiftand more.Alexis is the founder of Brilliance Remastered, a service to help visionary underrepresented graduate students stay connected to purpose, passion, and community, co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, a national experiential archive amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ Brilliance, and the community school Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

On the eve of Toni Cade Bambara's birthday we celebrate and uplift a Black feminist ethic of care.  Toni Cade Bambara would sign letters and books with the phrase "Take Care of Your Blessings" as a sincere but playful spelling of her name TCB.  Toni Cade Bambara. Take Care of Business.  She would encourage people who's book she signed to "Take very good care of your energies." She would also sign letters to her fellow participants in the Black art of transforming the world (June Jordan, Octavia Butler, Cheryl Clarke, Nikky Finney) "Black Blessings." 
In this time of heightened fear what are our practices of care?  On her own birthday, March 25th 1981 Toni Cade Bambara wrote a letter to June Jordan about care.  She affirmed June Jordan's book of essays Civil Wars (she also wrote an affirming review of the book publicly) and said it gave her an insight about why it was important to document her own life, not from a place of ego, but as an acknowledgement that her own life, and the insights that could come from examining it with the values of her own political vision, would be a contribution to the long political movement, our history.  And I am so grateful. 
In that same letter she discusses how the two writers are struggling to quit smoking.  She asks her friend to light a candle and say a prayer for her as she starts again her dance practice, the only thing that has effectively kept her from smoking for any period of time.  What are the intimate forms of care we can practice when we remember that care, this revolutionary stewardship of our blessing, is a shared task.  What will we create in this moment when remember the longer history of Black feminist care, and the path of intergenerational blessings we are accountable to now?
This workshop is for anyone interested in a supportive space of reflective writing centered on a Black feminist ethic of care.  We will continue to learn from Toni Cade Bambara herself, but also from her nurtured relationships as documented in her archival letters, (which I have had the honore of researching at the Spelman College Archives) her legacy of mentorship (which I write about in my essay "The Sweetness of Salt" in Pleasure Activism) and her spiritual practices, best documented by Akasha Hull in Soul Talk. This webinar will be recorded, but is best experienced live.  The audio version of the recording will be available to participants the day after the workshop. 
There are no refunds.  All registration fees go to the ongoing life of Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.

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Take Care of Your Blessings:Toni Cade Bambara & A Spell for Mutual Survival

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Take Care of Your Blessings:Toni Cade Bambara & A Spell for Mutual Survival

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