Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, Mai’a Williams

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, co-edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams, was published in 2016. It continues to be an important anthology that centers how oppressed caregivers throughout the world create and sustain relationships with each other through collective practices that help them thrive in the face of policies and actions that threaten to erase their histories and eliminate their existences.

As we near the upcoming 10th anniversary of the book’s publication, issue editors Maria Hamilton Abegunde and Mita Mahato invited Alexis, China, and Mai’a to share their thoughts on collaborating on the project and its impact on their lives and relationships then and now. We have deep gratitude for the care and time everyone has given to this interview.

Maria Hamilton Abegunde (MHA) and Mita Mahato (MM): We were both guided and moved by this paragraph: “We are making a claim that should be obvious but is often overlooked. In order to collectively figure out how to sustain and support our evolving species, in order to participate in and demand a society where people help to create each other instead of too often destroying each other, we need to look at the practice of creating nurturing, affirming, and supporting life that we call mothering” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs, page 9).

Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines guides us to think about careful collaboration as a sustained/sustaining social practice—actions and relationships that are ongoing even as creative emergences take shape and suggest punctuation along the way. Could you share what comes to mind when you think about the flows and movements of your work together on this book, or its themes over the decade since the publication of the first edition?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (APG): I think about it like a confluence. All of us were thinking about revolutionary and transformative mothering, and had been for some time. Mai’a was engaged in transnational solidarity journalism with communities in uprising and resistance, and was building community with mothers in Zapatista communities, South African communities, and in Palestine and Egypt during the Arab spring while also moving through pregnancy and later traveling with her young daughter and facilitating Revolutionary Motherhood workshops. China had written the first zine by a single mom about single motherhood and was actively nurturing the City Kids childcare collective in Baltimore. I was in the archives obsessively reading activist theories of mothering in rare movement print sources created by lesbian and queer women of color feminists in the 1970s and 80s. I began to realize that my research obsession kept leading me back to my own mother.

I think I first felt cared for by the work that Mai’a and China were each doing in their worlds. And by their writing especially in the Revolutionary Motherhood zine that Mai’a created and later by China’s The Future Generation book based on her many years of zines. As Mai’a and I had more and more conversations I started to feel like there was care and community happening across time between the current revolutionary mamas Mai’a was building with and interviewing, and the women of color feminists who had created the artifacts I was immersed in. And then we met China at the Allied Media Conference and saw in her someone whose care for the subjectivity and labor of mothering, especially mothering by oppressed people resonated so much with what we were doing.

I guess what I’m saying is that resonance is a form of care. Holding ideas together, or holding the edges of ideas open so we can unfold them together is the first form of care that I experienced and noticed in this process. But the care didn’t stop there. Over the seven years of getting the anthology together and published we moved through so much in life and I felt held and supported in all of it.

Mai’a Williams (MW): I got pregnant with my daughter in Bethlehem, West Bank, Palestine and I assumed that sooner or later we would live in Gaza. When Alexis and I first started talking about and envisioning this book, my daughter had just turned two years old and we had just moved to Cairo, Egypt. Obama had just been inaugurated as president and Operation Cast Lead—a.k.a. the First Gaza War—had finally ended. My daughter will turn 18 in a couple of weeks. We’ve spent the past year and a half trying to give whatever support we could to Palestinians as Israel has destroyed Gaza in such a way I don’t know if Gazans will ever recover. Gaza was a difficult place to live before the latest war. The children I knew from there were all deeply traumatized. And as much as nearly every Gazan I know loves their homeland—if they can leave, they do.

So today when I think about mothering, about revolutionary mothering, I think of what it means to be in solidarity with the mothers and caretakers of Gaza. Of the Palestinian families and mothers who have become my adopted family. Of the Gazans I was a midwife for 15 years ago.

China, Alexis, and I spent seven years working together slowly but surely to put this book together. There were months and years when I could barely focus on the book. I am grateful to them for being so patient with me as my life fell apart and came together, fell apart again, and came together. We not only mothered a book project through thousands of emails, we also mothered each other. In the years that we spent collaborating on this anthology, my daughter and I ended up living on four different continents. We survived revolutions and coups and different housing projects. We learned new languages, and we made new friends and some enemies.

Twenty-two years ago when I first went to Palestine, I was deeply optimistic about what the future would look like. I remember having a conversation with another human rights worker and he said that I/we were idealists and I disagreed with him: “I’m not an idealist, I am a realist. I truly believe that Palestine will be liberated.” This was during the Second Intifada when Israel was quickly building the Separation Wall and we were there to stop them building it by putting our very bodies in the way when necessary. When I look back on that younger person who was so certain about a Palestinian future, I smile at them. In Arabic, the word sabr means cactus, but it also means patience. Palestinians use the word often to describe the decades-long, intergenerational struggle for liberation. The cactus is not only used in cooking. It is grown along the borders of Palestinian homes to make fences. This is how Palestinian women mothered that younger person who was so certain about the future and so in love with Palestine. It is how they protected and cared for me—through patience. It is sabr that allows for the deep knowledge of mothering that I am constantly relearning with my own daughter.

China Martens (CM): I am sitting on the third floor of the fiber studio at Penland Craft School in Western North Carolina in the room with our boxes of scraps and thrift store clothes that we bought in bulk to be sorted and used in quilts. I’m typing at a table with a sewing machine next to me, looking out the window at the bright green baby leaves on a slender tree with ridges of blue mountains in the distance. The door is closed behind me. I closed it. The ten-year anniversary of Revolutionary Mothering! Wow. I suddenly feel naked here, on this mountain, with none of “my” books to show others.

I’ve carved out time to reply. Good thinking time. Morning time. A cup of tea beside me. A gentle roar of wind. A view. A bit of cloud over the top of the mountain. A cold breeze touches me. I hear bits of metal in the dryer, perhaps a zipper pull, as it tosses around, a soothing sound. Voices in the distance. Students are walking up the steps. My little retreat will be short-lived, used to tell you where I am writing from.

The co-doula magical process of co-editing this book fills me with happiness. It feels like a gift from and back to the community it came from, a reflection of something larger, a time and place, that we could sample and save. The editing relationship and relationship of working with the writers within (and also those not within the book’s edges, but part of this no doubt) is very special to me. It continues to fill me with pride and joy that the book exists as a physical object.

I don’t feel great at speaking and representing the book, like Alexis or Mai’a. What a treat it is to hear them speak. And the way they say things, on book tour, together, after 7 years in the making of the anthology, a slow and care-full making, the kind of making that gives space when space is needed, for revolutions and upheavals and other issues, that makes space to talk on the telephone, and space to work, encourage, mother, write, and publish—what an experience it was! These vivid memories of exchanges with the writers in the book and our thinking and meeting together with each other as editors, my first experience on Skype, seeing each other at the Allied Media Conference, meeting with pages at a cafe in DC, spreading out over time; and then together, in New York City, Blue Stockings, in the spring of 2015 with daffodils in hand, our first book reading together. The book is real! Like a gem in my hand. I have a smile on my face when I look at it.

I have so much gratitude for Mai’a and Lex for this experience. For their vision, bravery, and insistence on dignity. The way they move in the world, which makes sense to me, and fills me with hope, to work in this caring, respectful, collaborative, inspired, idealistic way, while “keeping it real” with others! It’s my third published book on the topic of caregiving and society, on building better worlds while living in this one; and it’s the book that feels the most powerful within society, of being widely well received. It left me with a renewal of pride in the complex and challenging position of being a mother, as well as a newer notion to me: mothering yourself, something I do more now at an older age, in this journey of self and as I write new forms, turning to novel writing.

It is scary to not be brave for the care of another, but just to be brave for your own self expression. And important too. This is the concept I think of when reflecting on mothering yourself even in older age. To continue to look and address your own issues. As well as to continue working on accountability. To listen to my daughter. And to keep growing, in our relationship, and in my own relationship to self. It’s not easy. For me, I like to ebb and flow on “activism” with other goals as well. Maybe it’s all the same thing. Just being me.

MHA and MM: This beautiful work is inspired by the “…legacy of radical and queer Black feminists of the 1970s and 1980s.” How do these legacies help you to cultivate generosity and create new mothering spaces that can hold your visions of community at another critical moment in which we are witnessing the elimination and erasure of the very movements and histories of which you wrote about in 2015/2016 (“Roots”)?

APG: It is in fact a victory that the legacy of queer Black feminism is alive and visible at this very moment, more so now than when we published this book a decade ago. I think our work is a part of that visibility. The elders and ancestors, those Black feminists of the 1970s who refused to be silenced and diligently archived and published their work so that this movement would become intergenerational, have succeeded. Just today, as I am typing this, the Black lesbian feminist archivist Lisbet Tellefsen has just finished cataloging and organizing the archival papers of Barbara Smith, co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and of Kitchen Table Press to help ensure that these movements will not be erased or eliminated. As we create new mothering spaces I think about what Akasha Gloria Hull wrote about in Soul Talk, that starting around 1979 the strategy of Black feminists was to engage seriously with ancient spiritual practices that were called “new age” at the time. They did this in the face of the violent and relentless backlash against the success of the Black Freedom movement organizations in the 1960s and 70s and throughout the 1980s and 90s. This is a major part of what we need now. To understand that we are responding to fascism on seen and unseen levels.

The other thing I would say is that Black feminists have also given us examples of how our movements themselves can be motherful and nurturing. I never get over the descriptions of how nourishing, tactile, and pleasurable these retreats were, and where/how they were also doing the hard work of hammering out a Black lesbian feminist socialist ethic under-siege.

MHA and MM: In the poem “My Son Runs in Riots” Christie NaMee Eriksen writes: “I tell him he is worth the peaceful world,/the clear sky,/the songs free people sing (page 80).” This line has stayed with me (the whole poem, really), but this line in particular. It speaks of a mother’s dreams for her child who she is lovingly raising as a warrior. What dream of/for community and careful/care-full collaboration(s)—your own and/or throughout the world—are you daring to dream right now for your “children” no matter who they are?

MW: Part of the reason it has been so difficult for me to write this response is because for the past few weeks, I have spent most of my time caring for someone who wasn’t sure if he wanted to live. We sat for hours, days, weeks discussing what it means to be on this planet at this juncture in time. We talked a lot about war and love, power and community, music and books—what is worth living for and what is worth dying for. I am not a therapist, I am a storyteller. So we swapped stories back and forth. Once, when he was feeling particularly low, I sat down on the chair and told him about how one of the reasons I became interested in going to Palestine was because of the reports that I had been reading about the growing number of female Palestinian suicide bombers and the Palestinian women being forced to give birth at Israeli checkpoints. It wasn’t a romanticization of the roles that Palestinian women play in society, it was a sense of empathy and shared recognition, an understanding of the twisted, difficult, and challenging ways that mothering our communities in times of war can be.

Once every couple of weeks when I lived in Hebron, West Bank in 2004, I would go to a girls’ school and talk to the English class. During one session they told me about a male teacher who had taught at the school the year before, but had then become a suicide bomber and killed himself while destroying a part of the Separation Wall. When I talked with the principal of the school, she described him as quiet, a bit shy, and that she had noticed that he had seemed more and more depressed. Then they didn’t hear from him for a few months. Then he blew himself apart. I asked her, why do you think he did it? She said, suicide bombing has a lot more to do with suicide than it does with bombing.

I live in a small rural Minnesota community on the Mississippi River. Increasingly, there are stories of overdoses that end in death and suicides and in housing and food insecurity. People are suffering under late stage capitalism, under how tenuous survival feels, how painful it is to survive without the strong bonds of community. Human beings are social creatures and yet so much of human social life is being rendered apart, stripped of its ability to sustain life, and sold back to us in parts and pieces by capitalists and billionaires who don’t see us as human beings but as agents that must produce and produce in order to be alive. I find myself often sitting with those who are the most energetically sensitive and thus feel the pain of it all most acutely as they tenuously hang on to a reason to keep being alive and in pain with no sign of real relief. This too is a collaboration, a decision we make together, to sustain each other’s life.

MHA and MM: Maybe what we mean by “careful collaboration” is what you mean by “mothering.” And, even so, you wonder about whether what you mean by “mothering” means what June Jordan, in her life and writing, meant by “the creative spirit of love.” And maybe we need multiple words, multiple ways, so we can always stretch and flex and widen or deepen the holding. What have you come across since the first edition where you’re like “that’s also it!”?

What radical acts and practices of mothering, nuanced and not so nuanced, are calling to you to deepen how you love at this moment in time?

CM: My daughter is IT to me. She watches over my house while I am gone on this grand adventure being a quilting studio assistant for two months. She knows the ways of my old house and how to care for it, that rain means checking the basement. She buys WD-40 for the creaky doors and weeds my garden just a little, knowing the wisdom of gardening. She falls in love with my cats. She sits on my sofa in ADHD paralysis. She wonders what is next and yet is too tired from work. She cooks, cleans, and organizes in Capitalism’s small-business kitchen, and the food she cooks, the happiness she brings to others, are my grandchildren. She does this as her body, her knees, her nerves, her insides, her head, hurt her; and she cares for herself, tenderly, with therapy, meds, massage pads, changing her way of thinking; seizing joy, keeping on. I love that we are always changing ages but remain family. The memories of my grandmother and my great-grandmother are always with me too, to know love and people like that, and the concerns of my parents in their 80s as they confound me.

Legacy work is always important to hold on to, and to learn and ground yourself by. I also believe that you can build together, again and again, like those before you, in your own time and way too. The best thing of my life has been working with others from their heart and ideals and caring. Victoria Law, Ariel Gore, Harriet Moon, Sine Jensen, Mai’a Williams, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs have been some of the best collaborators ever and gave me a chance to try to be my best back for them. To work together feels good. Some days your great collaborator may only last for a short time. All of our work makes it up to each other, continues through each other, and is made possible by each other. This spark of life does not seem to be, in the big picture of it all, extinguishable. Although I am someone who has also lived without hope, while we live, there is the opportunity for hope to return to us.

As I sit down to sew I think of the book. It was such a dream sample of an ongoing movement. And I love it! I think people STILL need to read and listen to it. I think of my mom, the story she tells me, of how she felt on the way to give birth to me. She said how it didn’t feel right that it was an ordinary day for everyone else. She was about to give birth for the first time! To me. It was NOT an ordinary day. I kinda feel like that about being a co-editor on the verge of the 10th year anniversary of Revolutionary Mothering. The personal everyday extraordinary lives within us, daily, in the ordinary. Much love to all revolutionary mothering and everyone across the planet.

I’m proud to be a co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering and feel very lucky to have worked with all the writers in the book and not in the book because all of us are IT.