Musings on Roots and Wings...

It was over a year ago that we started the intersectionality reading group! As my Uncle Mike, and an Elder who I respect has told me, its important to look back before we go forward!  Through the story he shared with me, I am reminded of the importance of looking back, of sitting and reflecting, before moving forward. This reading group is kind of like that for me and I hope for others, a chance to sit on a rock and consider where we have come from, but also what is growing and emerging all around us.  For me the roots of intersectionality are found in poetry, in resistance movements, and the work of artists.  The Combahee River Collective started as a reading group and was informed by the political agendas of the day.  I don't want to lose the focus on social action and political change that resonates in their statement.  I am also struck by the role of language, of speaking the oppressors' language as Gloria Anzaldua said in her work Borderlands..  " I am my language... I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing.  I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white.  I will have my serpent's tongue - my woman's voice, my sexual voice, my poet's voice... (81).  Or the words of Aude Lorde "my fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definitions.."   There is a poetry inside of this theory, of that I am sure.

If poetry and political movements are the roots, I wonder at the wings of intersectionality? I feel at times that it has been disguised,  discussed and dissected, even decorated to the point where it is unrecognizable.  I hope that through this group and our shared wonderings from all of our unique and varied vantage points, we can begin to move in new directions with our own research and social action...