Mixed Up!

We hope you’ve enjoyed our online submissions/ zine teasers.  We’re closing with this amazing online submission by Hannah Cristina — you can find more of Hannah’s work in the hard-copy of Mixed Up!

Don’t forget to come to the release of Mixed Up! tomorrow, NYC folks.

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To the “You” Who is White

Hannah Cristina

The words I’ve heard always bounce around my head – especially in times of sadness. During those times, I smoke too many cigarettes because my body is the first thing I want to punish. It always comes back to the body, you know. No matter how far the prisoner’s mind wanders, the bars will always be there to contain the body. Maybe it’s cliché to picture my skin and hair and flesh as a steel cage. Maybe it’s ridiculous to envision the words I’ve heard as a solid block of titanium, a key-less lock, choking the bars together. But I am so stuck.

            Here we have a twenty-one year old, blackish-brown, boyish-girl themed performance style, part time stoned-butch blues singer and songwriter. You can tell by the way I stand. “Look at those lips.” See, some things didn’t come from my momma. My body is thin and dark – a perfect combination of desire and fear - two sides of the same coin. I’m tired of carrying that shit around in my pocket. Tired of flipping it every time I come into this existence. You know, the one made from steel.

            And they do look at these lips. It makes their mouths water.

It makes my stomach sick, sometimes.

I thought I was the only one that could see my mouth in my peripheral. The wrong lips because they were so big. And then, I saw their mouths wet with wanting, sticky like gum trees. They wanted to consume my existence, make me a part of their exotic fantasies. Milky fingers on a chocolate surface – like sugar rain they fell around me, and melted. I can whisper sweet songs of blackness into your ear. Lines rehearsed like hymns. You know, those same psalms they taught my ancestors. And when my tongue has climbed to your highest peak and you have carved bloody lines on my back, I have finally mastered you. Even if only for a split second while your most prized possession lies between my teeth, in that moment, I am free. My lips become your lungs. See, you do need me.

            This “split second” embodies my split sense of being: irrevocably essential as any amount of time is, yet horrifically excluded and eternally alone. I live for those hair-width amounts of time, the last drop of blood that makes an official “rush.” Because as soon as you can breathe without my mouth, the air you pull in and push out is foggy with those words again. Go ahead, ask me what kind of brown I am, and no, it’s not a very original question. Trust me, you’re not the first to inquire. I forgot that you couldn’t see me in that split second when I was free, when I un-noosed those bars and climbed outside. Your eyes were closed, remember? Remember when you needed me?

            I escaped my body through yours. I escaped those words you always say, the way you paint my authenticity with ugly brown faces and asses shaking up and through my self-image. No, I do not live for men but I will live with and beside the ones who also think there is a better way.  Yes, I do listen to hip-hop, and no, I don’t call myself or my people that word. And sometimes, I can escape the facts that make me “less” or “more” black, if just for an instant. Other times, they consume me. You always did love a good feast.  

Wednesday, April 24th @ 7PM - Free
@ Bluestockings Bookstore - 172 Allen St, New York

Zine editors Lil Lefkowitz, Lee Naught & Lior and contributors to “Mixed Up!” invite you to the release of this long awaited zine about mixed race queer & feminist experience! Join us for cookies and soda, music from Tamar Boodaghians and Music Was My First Gay Lover, and readings from NYC-based contributors including Alex Kingsepp, Andrea Tsurumi, Chelsea Small, Mette Loulou von Kohl and Sabina Ibarrola. We’ll be discussing topics ranging from family and history, to body image and (not) passing, to queerness, community and so much more — and we’re delighted to invite you to join the conversation.

Transit info: Bluestockings is located at 172 Allen St on the Lower East Side. Take the F train to 2nd Ave, come above ground at 1st Ave, and walk one block south. The Delancey-Essex JMZ station is also nearby, and the M15 bus has a stop on Allen at Stanton.

Accessibility info: Bluestockings is wheelchair accessible, but its bathroom is not. There is a Starbucks two blocks down the street with an accessible bathroom. Bluestockings is not a scent-free space. In order to make the event more accessible, we encourage attendees to please refrain from wearing perfumes, colognes or other scented products (including essential oils) and smoke far away from the entrance to the space. Bluestockings has a safer space policy.

FB: facebook.com/events/170407233113946 come!

You will find much, much more Nia King in the hard copy of Mixed Up!

FYI: Nia King = super important/relevant/impressive artist & activist.

Do check them out, here.

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Interview with Dr. Adela C. Licona

By Nia King

Dr. Adela C. Licona is the genius behind Zines in Third Space: Borderlands Rhetoric
and Radical Cooperation, which I believe is the first and only book about zines by people
of color. She identifies as a queer Chicana scholar whose life has deeply been impacted
by zines by people of color. Her recent book attempts to uplift the knowledge created
in the “sweaty basements” of punk rock by the people of color who fight to exist in that
space, in an attempt to shed light on why left/progressive movements are often not as
inclusive as they like to believe.

Your book is called, Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands
Rhetoric. That’s quite a mouthful. Let’s break it down starting with “borderlands
rhetoric.” What does that mean to you?

I grew up on the Juarez/El Paso border, and I found that the place the produced me is
deep in me. It informs how I see and understand the world. As I wrote and as I became
educated, I realized there were so many way of understanding the world through a
borderlands framework. I read Gloria Anzaldúa, and she gave me permission to leave
the geographic location of my homeland and take that framework and understand the
world through it. And I realized lots of us had been doing it, you have related frameworks
for understanding a both/and consciousness such as “double consciousness,” and you
have “multiply situated subjects.” That means we can understand our class location,
our gender, our sex, our race as it relates to our geographic locations, and bring all of
that to bear on how we understand the world, and how we write the world. Borderlands
rhetorics are rhetorics that reflect a both/and consciousness that can include ambiguities
and even contradictions to reflect the lived experiences of those of us for whom an either/
or approach to the world doesn’t quite make sense. It’s about understanding radical
impurities and radical openness as spaces, practices, and experiences as productive,
creative, and generative and also even as desirable.

And radical cooperation?

[In my research], I was inspired by how people identified limitations of social justice
movements. I saw coalitions with people really acknowledging the privilege of whiteness
and committing to anti-racist practices, acknowledging the privilege of heterosexuality
and being committed to interrupting homophobia. I saw in this potential for radical
cooperation and coalition, kind of coalition that can affect change in a neighborhood, in
a family, in a community, in a state, and even transnationally. I think that is what zines
have to offer us, those who are involved in the racial justice movement, the reproductive
justice movement, the economic justice movement. Witnessing coalition in its full
potential and also in its vulnerability, and the ways in which it falls apart and comes back
together, can help us practice cooperation. I think we witness that in zines around punk,
but around other movements as well. I think that’s really the hope and the potential in
bringing zines to a broader audience.

Is that what inspired you to write your book/dissertation about zines?

The beauty of zines for me is that they’re engaged in real-world thinking and the stuff of
everyday urgency. People talking about health care, prisons, child care, education, justice
in the workplace, immigration justice, reproductive justice, racial justice, economic
justice, and looking how to make community around the pursuit of justice. Everyday
voices speaking out and documenting stories from every day lives. That’s the power
of zines for me, the documentation is powerful and the urgency of self-preservation I
think is a beautiful thing, because we have a right to tell our stories and for our stories to
circulate in ways that can make change, and make our lives visible, audible, better.

Why did you choose to write about zines by people of color specifically?

I identify as a queer Chicana. My daughters had written a zine and I wanted to learn
more about them. I spent some time at the Duke archives and I stumbled upon zines by
zinesters of color and they resonated with me so powerfully. I was in my mid-thirties
and I was reading zines by really young people and people my age and older, but it
was the power in them that struck me and I thought, “Why have I not known or heard
these voices before?” I felt I was learning so much and being moved to my own kind
of action by these voices. I just felt an affinity with them. I felt like I had found a kind
of community that inspired and pushed me on in my reading and in my writing. Before
I knew it I was reading through and engaging with stacks of zines by queer folks and
folks of color and realizing they were doing so much of what I valued which is speaking
up and out, telling our stories, knowing that we have a right to be heard, a right and a
responsibility in a way. I think that’s what builds coalition, that’s what builds community.

Zines are often associated with punk rock, and it’s a long way from your average
punk show to the archives at Duke University. Why do you feel like it’s important to
bring knowledge from these sweaty basements to the academy?

Because the knowledge from those sweaty basements is the stuff that you can’t create in
the academy. I think to talk about labor or to talk about justice and not hear the voices
from the basement is flat, it’s one-dimensional. I truly believe what I experienced in
reading the zines was an engagement with them as deep theoretical productions, and
by that I mean they were making sense of the world, building knowledge, circulating
knowledge coming from the basement and not from the ivory tower.

I think it’s important to recognize that knowledge is produced in so many different
locations, and if we are committed to social justice I think we have to be looking outside
of ourselves, outside of our privilege, outside of established formal locations for the kinds
of lived knowledge that can inform us to teach, to live, to make choices for social change,
to be committed consistently to making a difference. I feel like that’s the way that I use
the privilege of formal education is to use the classroom space to value those voices that
have been delegitimized, those that are excluded or considered as not knowing.

Could you say a little bit more about what you mean by the production of
knowledge?

You asked me a question about the basement. I think knowledge is getting produced in
the basement. When you read about zinesters who had to really think about, “Why isn’t
the punk movement feeling liberating to me?” The knowledge that got produced around
that not only documented a history, but made visible what was invisible in a movement
that seemed liberatory. We learned about the limitations of that movement from zinesters
who looked around and said, “I don’t see people like me, and I don’t see people like me
being supported here. I’m invisible here,” and making the knowledge that helped those
of us reading about it to understand, those of us not primarily involved with punk rock
for example, or reading about it from the academy. We got to witness the production
of knowledge that said, “We count, we’re here, we think the movement is limited in
these ways.” That’s producing knowledge, that’s producing history that would otherwise
be forever invisible. I think efforts to make something visible are a kind of knowledge
production.

Before the internet, zines were a really important way to build community. Does you
think zines still have something unique to offer in the age of the internet?

With schools being so differently resourced, we’ve got schools without technology,
but paper is a little easier to come by. The more I come to deeply understand the crisis
in education, the more I come to be inspired by what I see in paper zines. I see such
documentation of the creative, the critical, and the effort to trade and be in conversations
that document, exchange, and produce knowledge. I think that in a way what goes on
technologically can’t compare to the potential from paper zines to circulate and fall into
the hands of people for whom they may not be exclusively written. I think zines circulate
purposely and in kind of serendipitous ways. I also think that the raw cut-and-paste and
copy style of paper zines can’t be produced technologically. I am sure online zines are
related to but they are not, for me, the same as paper zines.

From mexican-korean-disabled-queer artist Caro. Check out some of their new work here.

You can find the rest of this piece in the hard copy of Mixed Up!

*Gasp* that’s right, we’re only giving you PART of this totally awesome piece, talk about a teaser.

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What A _______ Can Take

Caro Reyes

23 years of life prepared me

for a world that was not prepared for me,

for someone that is no easy read,

blurring categories many are not well versed in.

 

And that takes time, the couple of minutes you do not have, 

the extra effort to understand in a time priming us all 

to move quickly, to get going, to understand our world

via set categories and Google,

its one-second-download-click for all we want to know…

…if we have the time. 

 

I was prepped for this: 

to navigate appearing one way, but being another, 

an existence of in-betweens.

 

To sometimes look like an immigrant: “Where are you from? No, really, where are you from?”

To sometimes look like a game: “Don’t tell me… Chinese? Japanese? I’ll get it! Please don’t tell me.”

To sometimes look like a tomboy: “Wait, you’re gay gay? You’re not a femme or butch!”

To sometimes look mixed: “Oh, so you’re half white.”

 

But

to not look disabled and being judged by all those above

to not look disabled and carrying a load invisible to all

to look young and healthy when my body has aged to 64

is something I was not prepared for.

This “looking healthy” to pain ratio disconnect has me floored.

 

Do I tell you 

how each morning, when I wake up,

how my foot stays deep in Sandman dreams

pulling me in, bringing my morning into a painful nightmare,

my foot and leg covered in bear traps gnawing 

at me at various gauges?

 

How do I share 

how my sacrum freezes into a bloodless numbness 

making my legs uneven wooden beams,

as I teeter forward and back, I hear the piano play 

to entertain the gods staring in disbelief from above

at my attempt to stand and start my day?

 

When do I explain 

how every time I take a step,

my calf fills like an hourglass of needles

each burning needle falling slowly into my foot,

my mind clawing its way out to escape my body’s

auto setting: Numb Here-Numb There-Now?

 

Why am I sharing

my pain-pocked reality as you work on traumas of your own?

I have nothing to gain from eyes filled with pity.

And I’m ashamed to say I’m filled with envy 

for how you can numb yourself away into far-away dreams, 

a reality for the healthy and young, something I lost

when I was bound and gagged into a time machine 

that spit me out into an aged body I was not prepared for.

 

Oh, what a soul can take.

This online submission is an awesome personal narrative/ really great community organizing resource.

 

Find out more about Rema’s rad mixed-race community building endeavors here and here!

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The Swan Song:

The Duckling Story of a Black Mixed Womanist in Canada

 

By: Rema Taveras

 

“The ugly duckling did not at first recognize himself, for he looked just like the beautiful strangers, just like those he had admired from afar. And it turned out he was one of them after all. His egg had accidentally rolled into a family of ducks. He was a swan, a glorious swan. And for the first time, his own kind came near him and touched him gently and lovingly with their wing tips. They groomed him with their beaks and swam round and round him in greeting… We all have a longing that we feel for our own kind, our wild kind.”

-Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

 

Like the duckling, I have struggled to find my voice for over 30 years as an outsider. I feel that my greatest obstacle, if I can name one, has been the lack of language to contextualize my experiences. I often write about these experiences through Mixed in Canada (www.mixed-me.ca), a national cultural resource centre I created as a platform for mixed-identified Canadians. I consider this site to be one of my proudest achievements, but the truth is I often lie in bed awake at night wondering why it took this long to learn and understand words like “objectification”, “fetishization”, “exotification” among others? Where were the resources to help me develop as a woman of colour in Canada? How did it take so long to have the concept of privilege introduced to me and more importantly, to understand and deconstruct it? How many relationships, mistakes, and growing pains could have been avoided by having been prepared for what was to come? As a female-black-mixed-identified womanist, I continue to struggle to deconstruct what it means to move through the world in this body. However, by sharing my story, I will attempt to answer some of these questions and conclude with some recommendations & personal actions to help support our extended family who may also feel this way.

 

Growing up in an almost exclusively white village of 1000 or so people in rural Canada was not exactly fertile ground for a strong foundation. I was read as “Jamaican” because of my Jamaican-born father who is in fact black-mixed himself via West African & Sephardi Jewish ancestry. My parents separated when I was 3 years old and I lived there until I was 18 with my mother’s white Irish family. Race was almost never discussed in either of my parent’s houses, other than to say that it didn’t matter. This brings us to problem number one: neither of my parents had any black-consciousness or anti-racism training and assumed that because I was light-skinned, mixed and born in “racism-free” Canada, I would glide through life unscathed. Needless to say, there are many problems with this colour-blind paradigm; however this belief system tends to be normalized in mixed upbringings, if not celebrated for its “progressiveness” by popular Canadian culture. The fact is, Canadians experience racism, albeit in a different way than is stereotyped of the US by Canadians (ie racial-slur-slinging, lynching, KKK racist business). Somehow, by simply not being the US, Canada ended up as de facto “not-racist”. For a crash course in Canadian history, Canada’s racism began with it’s genocidal warfare to steal Indigenous land, and continued with African slavery, Chinese head tax, Japanese internment camps and outrageous immigration policies to name a few. Not surprisingly, these blemishes on Canada’s “nice guy” persona were quickly swept under the rug as hiccups in an otherwise multicultural friendly society. The education system, following government-created curriculum, shares the in fabrication of this myth by reframing them as: “Indigenous-European partnership and bartering systems”; reading Underground to Canada while avoiding our own history of slavery; and preaching about our history of “peace-keeping”. This oppression-denying storyline also follows for other marginalized communities, including women-identified folks, as sexism is also “a thing of the past”. This pattern continues until the average Canadian is prepped and primed to dismiss and vilify anyone who dares to cry fowl, which brings us to problem number two: it’s not ok to talk about racism in Canada, so there are very few resources for people to turn to.

 

While I had read Black Like Me, Freedom’s Children, The Glory Fields and pretty much any black history related material that I could get my hands on as a youth, it wasn’t until quite recently that I was able to find women wonders as the likes of bell hooks, Audre Lorde & Patricia Hill Collins, as well as our Canadian counterparts like Dionne Brand, Makeda Silvera & fellow mixed-identified Carol Camper. These and other courageous women of colour have never been on the curriculum of any University course I have taken, book clubs I have joined (and left), or any other mass media venue that may have reached me in a more rural setting. As I now know, the voices of powerful women of colour are so threatening to white supremacy that they are strategically marginalized. While they aren’t banned, these writers and others like them are not provided any kind of platform outside of the more radical circles, which are quite difficult to locate if you don’t live in a major metropolis. Until the creation and proliferation of the Internet, many of my rural mixed-identified peers and predecessors waited longer than I have to find a supportive community, and that’s if it ever even happened. I made my own journey to Canada’s largest city, Toronto, in 2007 which has drastically changed my life in this vein. However, this is where problem number three came up: I suddenly/finally had to confront my new-found privileges.

 

As I mentioned, having grown up in a racially unsafe rural setting, at no point in my childhood, youth, adolescence or even young adulthood did I feel that I was privileged in any way. While this statement actually magnifies some of my privilege in thinking that, it is true that I experienced many forms of racism, sexism, and classism in that environment. I was, as far as I knew, the only person (let alone woman) with African heritage in my entire school with the exception of a young boy who was in “special ed”. However, in typical Canadian style (read microaggressions), no one ever called me the n-word directly, but would for example tell me n-word jokes, make comments about my hair and my overall cleanliness (or perceived lack thereof) and would occasionally remark on how “fat and ugly” I was. While I am no friend of fat-phobia, I wasn’t overweight by any stretch of the imagination. What they did mean was that I had a shape that was not mirrored in my fellow blonde, blue eyed waifs that made up the majority of my peers. I was also asked if I brushed my hair and ridiculed for admitting that I washed it “only” once per week. Ironically, while being shamed for my ugliness, I was also the target of many sexual harassment incidents. For example, at a grade 7 dance, some local boys started throwing money at me because “I had big boobs”. Others would comment that I must stuff my bra and stick out my backside for attention. I was also the last of my peers allowed to shave my legs (at the ripe old age of 13) which did not go unnoticed. The classism, on the other hand, came in the form of living in a single woman household with half-siblings in the blue-collar, old part of town versus the white-collar families that live in the new part of town. This played out in a few ways, including who your friends were & what clothes you wore, among others. Layered on top of each other, these intersecting identities of class, gender and race played a major role in the worldview I developed as a youth, and has forever impacted my self-concept. However, my identities and experiences have evolved as I have matured and migrated to bigger and bigger cities. For instance, after puberty, the combination of my racialized & sexualized identities evolved from ugly to “exotic”. Yet this exotic-ness was compounded with shadeism, particularly because of my white-passing features. Unfortunately, by not understanding my new-found shadeism privilege as well as the wild, over-sexed stereotype of the “mulatto”, I was flattered by the change in attitude towards me. Like the prophetic ducking, I thought I had finally found a space to inhabit as an objectified “mulatto temptress” and I remained in that space for a long time - until I came to Toronto.

 

The radical community in Canada’s largest city completely shook my foundation with their brilliance, strength, and wisdom. I was greeted and “groomed” with love and tenderness – this was my swan family. It is here that I began laying the groundwork for what was to become Mixed in Canada. And it is here that I have been able to meet allies from all walks of life who have helped shape and mould me into the person I am today - one that I am much prouder to be. With this support, I am excited about what the future holds as I continue on this journey of self-identification and knowledge of self, now from a place of belonging. However, looking back from this place, I have regrets. I regret things I have felt, said or done that trivialized the experiences of other folks that I didn’t understand at the time because I was so focused on my own experiences of oppression. I regret not challenging other oppressive systems sooner as opposed to just going with the flow and trying to get by. Although it is unfortunate, regret is often a part of the process of deconstructing identities and especially privilege. Having said that, the important thing is that I’m here now, and we are all on a journey of self-discovery. We make mistakes, we learn from them, and do better next time. We also forgive ourselves, because this system was not created for us, we were never meant to thrive here (or even survive). I now have the privilege to check my “ally card” daily to find ways to support my more marginalized fam, and conversely, to call in my equally or more privileged peers. This, and Mixed in Canada, is how I try to do my part to fight oppression. The things that we can all do though, are work hard to love ourselves and each other, to support and uplift each other, to share and cry with each other, to fight for each other. In this way, we can welcome our swan siblings home, which, in my own experience, is the most radically loving thing we could ever do.

 

 

 

 

Find more of Susan’s amazing work in the hard copy of Mixed Up!

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Marginalia

By Susan Kikuchi

They will tell you
That you are but one
That you are the other
That your story is not a story

They will tell your story without you

It might be, Exotic. Sexy. Even, Great hair
But then if you are unlucky, or if they are a different kind of honest, Fat
Chinky eyed
Undesirable
And you, traitor, agree with them.
Agree with them and go home with them, when they’ll take you.

Whites only, that was the joke.
Whites only, change the fucking sheets and forget

They will tell you that you are not here
That you are not American
That you do not exist.

And you will try, and try, and try again to listen.
You will please. But, slowly, you will begin to hear instead
the breath of your ancestors
in the persistent whalesong hum
of power lines and train tracks
and the first time you visit the ocean.
It will remind you of their embrace.

You will tell them
That you have nothing to prove
That you are sorry for them

You will tell yourself,
You are the enemy
You will tell yourself,
Your story is your only story

and all the while, their persistence
all the while, contradiction
and so

You exist.
You change.
You forgive yourself.