By Josh Hughes
“All of these four women are time travelers and they came here to time travel with us,” went the introduction to the Western Reads event on February 8 entitled “Rise Up: An Activist Conversation.” Put on by both Western Reads and the Justice Speaks Series, the event featured four writer-artist-activists in conversation both with each other and with the audience.
Their discussion centered on intergenerational movement-building and its relationship to race, literature and art. The four women, Alexis De Veaux, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Erin Sharkey and Junauda Petrus, who all focus on the intersectionality of black feminism and social justice in their work as writers and artists, sat at a table together to open up conversations about their work and career as well as the pervading necessity to rise up against institutional norms and faulty societal systems.
Alexis De Veaux, an award winning writer, speaker and activist whose work dates back to the early 70s, spent much of her speaking time focusing on the continuity of time within her art and the way that her ancestors represent both her past and her future.
“It’s my grandmother’s shoulders that I’m standing on all the time,” she said when prompted about influences on her work.
The idea of a non-linear relationship to time pervaded the entire talk, with each speaker addressing their work as activists in conjunction with people before them as well as those that will follow. Alexis Pauline Gumbs also brought up her grandmother’s influence on her work, talking about her revolutionary impact and the way that it’s shaped her as a women’s activist. Erin Sharkey talked about her mother’s lasting impact on her creativity because of her eagerness to solve problems in the face of adversity.
“We can’t have the conversation stop with ‘I can’t imagine’,” she said during a conversation about how to break through socially placed obstacles.
The four women also talked about the impact that each other’s work has had on their writing over the years, each expressing fond admiration for the others. “Alexis is one of the people whose creativity I survive off of” said Gumbs in reference to De Veaux, before talking about needing to find an access point that “goes beyond time, life, and death” to be able to manifest her full potential as a revolutionary.
It’s important to note that Western Reads and the other promoters of the event did not divulge much about what the talk would completely entail. De Veaux talked about this near the end of the night, saying “we didn’t put terms like ‘race’ in this because we didn’t want to set something up that was voyeuristic that you could look at but not participate in.”
After the opening talk about influences and an overlapping, roundabout understanding of time, the discussion shifted its focus to topics on race and politics, which can often be difficult to navigate effectively in talks like this.
However, the four women gave articulate, open-ended ruminations on what it means to be black, women activists and how to break through societal barriers set in place for the benefit of white people.
“Being a black queer, my consciousness of myself was a disliking of myself — what I was afraid to love,” Petrus said. “By inverting that, loving myself and other black women, that’s what will start to change everything,” Petrus said when addressing the internalized struggles that minority groups face on a daily basis in America.
De Veaux talked about the need to reconstruct parts of our language so that we can reach a level of comfortability saying words like revolution, protest and change. Sharkey talked about confronting the “make believe” ideal that certain systems are in place to protect us, and Petrus talked about the concept of “Make America Great Again” and how it speaks to an America that has never treated minority groups well.
The initiative of the night truly was to rise up, and that’s exactly what the entire audience did at the conclusion of the talk. After telling everyone to stand up from their comfortable Fraser
Hall seats, De Veaux started a call and response of “rise up,” starting with a whisper and ending with a confident shout.
“We should be levitating all the time,” she said before ending the talk, which was unfortunately cut short by an hour because of poor weather conditions. “We rose up together,” De Veaux said, before sending us off into the biggest winter storm that Bellingham has seen since the early 90s. It was quite the fitting atmosphere for what we’d just experienced.