Mother, Loosen My Tongue
or adorn me with a lighter burden
As I’m placing the last edits for this piece, I’m now seeing that the internet and communications channels have been blacked out in Gaza by Israel. The IAF has been carpet bombing the region nonstop with airstrikes and white phosphorous gas to annihilate the Palestinian people, and the Israeli army is conducting ground operations. My God. This is so, so, so enraging and heart-shattering.
With Israel having endorsement from the West and creating an even more explicit environment for killing all Palestinians off-radar, may each of us keep the courage, resilience, bravery, and the practice of solidarity through refusing silence.
So, please consider these words below, a likewise grieving offering and prayer, and a commitment to refusing silence every day in this collective struggle.
The Call - Mother, Loosen My Tongue, by Audre Lorde
Holy ghost woman
stolen out of your name
Rainbow Serpent
whose faces have been forgotten
Mother loosen my tongue or adorn me
with a lighter burden
Aido Hwedo is coming.
On worn kitchen stools and tables
we are piecing our weapons together
scraps of different histories
do not let us shatter
any altar
she who scrubs the capitol toilets, listening is your sister's youngest daughter
gnarled Harriet's anointed
you have not been without honor
even the young guerrilla has chosen
yells as she fires into the thicket
Aido Hwedo is coming.
I have written your names on my cheekbone
dreamed your eyes flesh my epiphany
most ancient goddesses hear me
enter
I have not forgotten your worship
nor my sisters
nor the sons of my daughters
my children watch for your print in their labors
and they say Aido Hwedo is coming.
I am a Black woman turning
mouthing your name as a password
through seductions self-slaughter
and I believe in the holy ghost
mother
in your flames beyond our vision
blown light through the fingers of women
enduring warring
sometimes outside your name
we do not choose all our rituals
Thandi Modise winged girl of Soweto
brought fire back home in the snout of a mortar
and passes the word from her prison cell whispering Aido Hwedo is coming.
Rainbow Serpent who must not go
unspoken
I have offered up the safety of separations sung the spirals of power
and what fills the spaces
before power unfolds or flounders
in desirable nonessentials
I am a Black woman stripped down
and praying
my whole life has been an altar
worth its ending
and I say Aido Hwedo is coming.
I may be a weed in the garden
of women I have loved
who are still
trapped in their season
but even they shriek
as they rip burning gold from their skins Aido Hwedo is coming.
what has never been taught
you are my given fire-tongued
Oya Seboulisa Mawu Afrekete
and now we are mourning our sisters
lost to the false hush of sorrow
to hardness and hatchets and childbirth
and we are shouting
Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer
Assata Shakur and Yaa Asantewa
my mother and Winnie Mandela are singing in my throat
the holy ghosts' linguistone iron silence broken
Aido Hwedo is calling
calling
your daughters are named
and conceiving
Mother loosen my tongue
or adorn me
with a lighter burden
Aido Hwedo is coming.
Aido Hwedo is coming.
Aido Hwedo is coming.1
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the sight & smell of death are everywhere.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel has dropped over 6,000 bombs on Gaza. Now, presently bombing the Gaza area nonstop for hours.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel has murdered at least 8130 Palestinian people and counting and over 20,400 injured.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the global anti-colonial struggle for national liberation still continues.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the Ministry of Health in Gaza declared the complete collapse of the health system in the Gaza Strip.2
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the reproductive health violations against pregnant Palestinians are horrific.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – we are called human animals, children of darkness, that “must be treated as such.”3
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the Western Media is incorrectly calling this a war against Hamas. We know this is an attack against the Palestinian right to exist.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel claims the right to defense while destroying hospitals, Mosques and churches, schools, zones of safety, and more.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel is murdering and targeting Palestinian messengers, journalists, photographers, writers, and all who refuse to remain silent and concede their land.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel, with the support of the US and its tax dollars, is using white phosphorous and nerve gas to kill and exterminate the Palestinian people.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israeli settlers are resorting to minstrelsy and zionist propaganda to legitimate themselves through mocking and dehumanizing Palestinians, at minimum.
Mother, Loosen our Tongue – do we understand the gravity of having no access to health supplies, gas & electricity, food & water, and the ability to travel safely?
Mother, Loosen our Tongue! Because the linkages in the diaspora Black freedom struggle and the Palestinian struggle for freedom are jarring, haunting, an ever-present reminder of our collective reality against the Western empire — it is heart-shattering.
غصة/ghassa - this lump in our throat
I’m finding myself between Audre Lorde’s “Mother, Loosen My Tongue” and the Arabic word غصة/ghassa — “this lump in our throat,” and what it means (in heart, body, mind, Spirit) to be in daily process and practice of being brave, courageous, clear, and committing to the ethics and principles of being against all systems of domination.
As in, what does it mean to become through practice and already be — and recognize both the sacred communal responsibility and Divine equipment we’re afforded to accomplish this?
Every repetition of “Mother, Loosen My Tongue” in the poem feels like a stirring, an incantation, where our speech gets stronger and sharper with each iteration. Every repetition of “Mother, Loosen My Tongue” feels like a call to our Divine and a conjuring of their presence. To me, it feels like a release of words begging to be expressed, the truth needing to be told of the systems we live within, making clear what’s poised as “complicated conflicts,” and the urgency of reclaiming our narratives.
The true burden is to remain silent.
I can think of so many times before where I’ve self-repressed and chosen silence — to my and other’s detriment — out of fear of fracturing what appears “peaceful.” But I know these aren’t isolated events and speak to something more. “Goodness,” “peace,” and “justice” are words co-opted into settler colonial narratives and cultural embodiments. To be good is the primary pursuit and requires total obedience. Maintaining peace requires silence and agreement. But justice? Justice requires any level of violence towards those who are not in allegiance to the narratives and scripts set by settler colonial society.
This trinity of words reinforces the death-dealing systems that we exist in today by cultivating and manufacturing the very present unjust conditions we experience. That’s how we’ll realize that what we initially deem as peaceful because of silence and conformity are no longer indicators of us being in a peaceful environment but a troubling sign that our silence fuels what silences us.
Assata Shakur said it best, “nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”4
I ask, in the burden of silence and the gift of release, who are the anti-colonial revolutionary ancestors that we call upon to continue in our collective responsibility in the struggle towards liberation? To whom do we owe our work? Who continually benefits from our silence?
When we remember that death is a constant present and not a metaphor, what is in our arsenal to combat it? How does our posture shift, if at all, and what are our modes of resistance? Who are we leaning upon to ensure we don’t stay stuck in empire-created modes of despair and complicity?
Audre Lorde reminds us that it is the memory of our people that boils within us: “Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer/Assata Shakur and Yaa Asantewa/my mother and Winnie Mandela are singing in my throat.” We have a cloud of witnesses whom we bring back to life through reading their words, calling upon their names, keeping priority to remember them, and thus re-member ourselves. This is the power of our archives, our literature, our griots, and our messengers, who have always operated in an alternate time and space reality, to insist themselves in a world that consistently denies our humanity.
The Solidarity with Palestine - A Radical Black Feminist Mandate: A Reading List is an incredible resource created by Black Women Radicals, especially for where we’re at in this sociopolitical reality. If you haven’t already seen it, please check it out.
From this list, Audre Lorde, at the Oberlin College Commencement Speech that happened on May 29, 1989, said,
Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true. And every day that you sit back silent, refusing to use your power, terrible things are being done in our name.
The genesis of genocide starts with silencing. What does each day require of us, and what does each day demand of us to make freedom and liberation a closer possibility? What are the vices, comforts, and distractions that get in the way of our radicality and rightful outrage “before power unfolds or flounders/in desirable nonessentials,” which brings me to
’s latest piece on addictions as a pervasive reality of our world in ongoing genocides.Alexis Pauline Gumbs shared that solidarity also requires reflection as practice.5 I see solidarity with the Palestinian people that requires us to be in a continual process of re/building our muscles of courage, bravery, resistance, anticolonial knowledge, revolutionary love, application, and steadfastness against all aspects of death-making systems. Solidarity with the Palestinians, the Sudanese, the Haitians, Black diasporans, and people in the struggle against imperialism and zionism means holding a commitment to strengthening our political education and communal engagement – as in, becoming a member of a local grassroots political organization, investing and divesting through our money and labor where needed, and keeping the fight and hope alive for a new world.
I’m holding onto these words written by Sarah Ihmoud, an organizer with the Palestinian Feminist Collective, who recently wrote in 'Ghassa,' The Lump in One's Throat Blocking Tears and Speech that to practice “feminism in the midst of bearing witness to genocide is to embrace love as a radical consciousness, as a radical decolonial politic of fighting for life.”
To practice feminism in this moment is to hold each other through the vast darkness of our grief, to walk with each other hand in hand, to bear witness to landscapes of death, and, as Mona urges us, to tell the truth. Indeed, Mona's words invite us to break out of this غصة/ ghassa, this lump in our throat that keeps us from speaking, and to speak loud and courageously into the wind.
Telling the truth as feminists in this moment requires rejecting colonial narratives, and boldly affirming the power and creativity of our life force that we have always possessed and cultivated as Indigenous women, the power we have always wielded in service of dismantling settler colonialism and genocidal war, thrusting its overbearingness into crisis. In the same breath, telling the truth means amplifying our visions for freedom and dignity.”6
May our weeping through words and actions no longer remain “lost to the false hush of sorrow.”7 May we push past silence to fight for the new world. Long live every resistance. Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Haiti, Free Congo, and all living in the imperial core.
Check Out:
Stay updated with the Palestinian Youth Movement
Connect with the Palestinian Feminist Collective
Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions - check this page to take part
RSVP for the Political Solidarity & Feminist Resistance Teach-In
Download the Palestine Digital Action Toolkit
Watch Black Feminist Writers & Palestine, hosted by Black Women Radicals
by Audre Lorde, from Our Dead Behind Us
Assata: An Autobiography
by Audre Lorde, from Our Dead Behind Us
gorgeous writing―♡