Missing Witches - October 03, 2021


MW Lucille Clifton - We Take What We Want With Invisible Fingers

WF Granddaughter Crow - The Wisdom Of The Natural World WF Zoe Flowers - You SHOULD Be Afraid Of Women Like Us

Episode Stats


Length

39 minutes

Words per minute

132.48

Word count

5,242

Sentence count

163

Harmful content

Misogyny

14

sentences flagged

Toxicity

28

sentences flagged

Hate speech

31

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.100 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00
00:00:03.260 Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! Be a witch! 1.00
00:00:06.820 You must be a witch. 0.91
00:00:10.300 Lucille Clifton was a twelve-fingered woman, her mother and daughter too, 0.67
00:00:14.560 and she stepped into a house in Baltimore and began to hear the voices of her ancestors.
00:00:21.000 We carry our baggage in our cupped hands, she wrote, when we burst through the waters of our mother.
00:00:26.260 she was the first poet to have two books up for the pulitzer prize at the same time
00:00:32.260 her grandmother was a child when she was taken from africa and forcibly walked across america
00:00:37.880 and never saw her mother again she was a warrior poet radical listener she was from dahomey women
00:00:46.760 lucille clifton falls into the wide and deep category of witches i have been missing of poets
00:00:54.180 i wish i'd known earlier but i'm thankful to be meeting now finally hello spirits and storytellers
00:01:00.920 community weavers and magic makers i want to bury my bones all are missing broken bones into the
00:01:07.880 earth of them and learn whole new ways of being and of listening and of crafting
00:01:14.100 she wrote i was born with 12 fingers like my mother and my daughter each of us born wearing
00:01:25.180 strange black gloves extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and dipping into the
00:01:30.480 milk somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells and our wonders were cut off
00:01:38.040 but they didn't understand the powerful memory of ghosts.
00:01:43.540 Now we take what we want with invisible fingers
00:01:46.520 and we connect my dead mother, my live daughter, and me
00:01:50.640 through our terrible, shadowy hands.
00:01:55.800 If you listened to my conversation in episode 87
00:01:58.720 with Dr. Marina Magloire,
00:02:00.640 you heard some about Clifton.
00:02:03.580 Magloire is writing the missing book on Clifton
00:02:05.700 and she shared a piece of the incredible story in this article for the Paris Review.
00:02:11.240 According to Clifton's firstborn daughter, Sydney,
00:02:13.740 over the years, Clifton evolved from the Ouija board to automatic writing
00:02:17.140 to eventually a spiritual state in which she could directly access the spirits
00:02:21.600 without the need for writing.
00:02:24.480 In the 70s and 80s, the Clifton's Baltimore home became a spiritual way station
00:02:28.980 through which a wide assortment of spirits apparently passed.
00:02:32.040 despite her fame as a poet clifton's trajectory as a self-described two-headed woman is a little 0.54
00:02:38.700 known part of her legacy two-headed woman is a traditional african-american term used to
00:02:44.580 describe women gifted with access to the spirit world as well as to the material world
00:02:49.300 two-headed woman is also the name of clifton's first channeled book of poetry
00:02:54.300 written at the same time as her unpublished journals of spirit writing or automatic writing
00:02:59.380 where she received messages which became woven into her worldview in her poems.
00:03:05.600 Dr. Marina Magloire writes,
00:03:07.600 In August and September of 1978, for example,
00:03:10.560 Clifton received a series of dire warnings about the fate of the human world
00:03:14.280 from a mysterious group of spirits she called the Ones.
00:03:19.780 The Ones did not assume the personality of a departed human
00:03:23.160 and they did not weigh in on day-to-day affairs.
00:03:25.740 they spoke of things of cosmic importance
00:03:29.500 the deep past of human civilization
00:03:31.820 and its tenuous future
00:03:34.400 they returned to remind human beings
00:03:38.060 that they are more than flesh
00:03:39.640 and in 1978 they warned Clifton
00:03:43.960 if the world continues on its way
00:03:46.120 without the possibility of God
00:03:47.840 which is the same as saying
00:03:49.300 without light, love, truth
00:03:51.300 then what does this mean?
00:03:53.400 it means that perhaps a thousand years of man's life on this planet
00:03:57.420 will be without light, love, truth
00:03:59.720 it is what we were saying indeed that there will be on earth
00:04:03.300 that place which human beings describe to the world of the spirit's hell
00:04:07.120 now there is yet time but not very much
00:04:11.220 your generation Lucille is the beginning of the possibility
00:04:14.660 and your girl's generation is the middle, etc
00:04:18.640 and so the generations living their adulthood now upon the earth are perhaps the last of that
00:04:27.840 possibility to be with light love truth in her book generations lucille writes
00:04:36.120 and i could tell you about things we've been through some awful ones some wonderful
00:04:42.700 but I know that the things that make us
00:04:45.760 are more than that
00:04:46.640 our lives are more than the days in them
00:04:49.740 our lives are our line
00:04:52.160 and we go on
00:04:53.400 and she writes
00:04:56.520 this poem is a table
00:04:58.160 at which we sit and meet even now
00:05:00.680 though there are miles and months between us
00:05:03.900 now look
00:05:05.820 the children are repeating
00:05:07.020 we will wear new bones again
00:05:09.040 and other people think they know
00:05:11.600 how long life is how strong life is we know poet elizabeth alexander praised clifton's ability to
00:05:21.560 write physically small poems with enormous and profound inner worlds and this has been the gift
00:05:29.020 of immersing myself in her writing as i have been this end of summer season this season of the
00:05:34.180 middle and last harvest celebrations of fat red moons and the night we sat and watched the strange
00:05:41.180 silent phenomenon spin the slowest ceiling fan of spiral aurora light over our heads for hours
00:05:48.260 ions in long stately green waves like generations of the way lucille hears voices echoing through
00:05:58.900 time through the bones of houses and of missing fingers through the silent singing universe washed
00:06:06.360 in a rain of electrons and lightning bugs, to open small doorways into enormous other worlds.
00:06:14.720 As Robert Mitchell in American Book Review writes, her heroes include nameless slaves
00:06:19.700 buried on old plantations, Hector Pietersen, the first child killed in the Soweto riot,
00:06:26.800 Fannie Lou Hamer, founder of the Mississippi Peace and Freedom Party, Nelson and Winnie
00:06:32.040 Mandela, W.E.B. Dubois, Huey P. Newton, and many other people who gave their lives to free black
00:06:39.160 people from slavery and prejudice. And in later books, her listening extends even beyond the human
00:06:46.040 world. The embrace of her empathy and her language is vast. Reviewing Clifton's 2008 book, Voices for
00:06:53.480 the Baltimore Sun, Diane Sharper commented, each section explores the ways the poet relates to
00:06:59.380 voices from those spoken by inanimate objects to those remembered to those overheard in the
00:07:06.740 titles of pictures serving as a medium the poet speaks not only for those things that have no
00:07:13.120 voice but also for the feelings associated with them she is mighty with her listening
00:07:20.860 she is a poet medium witch with a gift for words that turn your whole insides over and make you
00:07:27.440 gulp of breath. She writes, being property once myself, I have a feeling for it. That's
00:07:35.780 why I can talk about environment. And she writes, weird sister, the black witches know 1.00
00:07:48.080 that the terror is not in the moon, choreographing the dance of were-ladies. And the terror is 0.99
00:07:54.620 not in the broom, swinging around to the hum of cat music, nor the wild clock face grinning
00:08:02.160 from the wall. The terror is in the plain pink at the window, and the hedges moral as
00:08:10.260 fire, and the plain face of the white woman watching us as she beats her ordinary bread. 0.71
00:08:17.420 she offers the embodied wisdom of fear that to be different is to be deviant 0.99
00:08:25.360 and the black witch knows this better than others don't fear the moon or the dance or the wicked 0.90
00:08:32.420 grin anything uncanny or delicious or deviant the real terror is the oppressive ordinary 0.99
00:08:40.220 the murderous gaze of white supremacy calculating how and what it will kill in others in the earth
00:08:46.740 in itself, to preserve power and to protect its fear. Our power, our fear, mine. I am constantly 0.63
00:08:55.960 untangling the nets of my own white privilege, wondering how to look beyond the filters of my
00:09:00.640 own white gaze. It starts with reading for me. Let the invisible fingers in to work their change.
00:09:09.060 in lucille's poem hag riding the witch message is slightly different
00:09:14.980 hag riding or more often to be hag ridden is a term for sleep paralysis the idea is that you 0.88
00:09:22.020 can't move because the witch evil overpowering colonizing rides you but lucille owns the ride 1.00
00:09:32.000 Lucille is the witch, the hag, and the rider 0.97
00:09:36.660 Why, is what I ask myself 0.99
00:09:40.820 Maybe it is the African in me, still trying to get home after all these years
00:09:45.080 But when I wake to the heat of morning, galloping down the highway of my life
00:09:49.660 Something hopeful rises in me, rises and runs me out into the road
00:09:54.720 And I lob my fierce thigh high over the rump of the day
00:09:58.460 And honey, I ride, I ride
00:10:01.040 she is hope rising
00:10:04.740 she is a body with a home 0.96
00:10:06.700 an origin and fierce thighs 1.00
00:10:08.760 she is a witch in the full light of day 1.00
00:10:11.200 and she is pure magic
00:10:13.700 she wrote
00:10:16.440 they asked me to remember
00:10:17.980 but they want me to remember their memories
00:10:20.320 and I keep on remembering mine
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00:11:52.900 Oh, yeah.
00:11:54.180 You can get a paper copy if you're like me 0.99
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00:12:01.780 It's a lot of- 0.99
00:12:02.600 Same, hard same.
00:12:04.660 I like to dog ear.
00:12:06.380 I have like a sigil system that I use to annotate my books.
00:12:10.680 But also like a lot of times, it just has to be an ebook
00:12:14.580 because I know I'm going to want to search things.
00:12:17.500 You know, sometimes I like an e-book.
00:12:19.020 Also, it's available as an audio book,
00:12:21.380 which Risa and I narrated ourselves.
00:12:24.580 There are musical versions of the carols.
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00:12:47.720 lucille remembers her own worlds which includes generations before she was born
00:13:00.960 in her memoir generations which is read by her daughter sydney clifton for the audiobook and is
00:13:07.360 utterly wonderful. We hear her remember the voices and stories stretching back, her father
00:13:13.620 remembering what his mother and grandmother would tell him of the times before, and how they would
00:13:18.800 tell it, and the things they would leave out, sitting in silence with the world dramas too big
00:13:24.400 for words. But somehow, in the telling of this layered telling, Lucille finds the words.
00:13:32.500 the inclusion of her unpublished spirit writing into the story of her poetry
00:13:38.300 suggests maybe her work should be included in this weird emerging and also ancient genre of
00:13:45.920 channeled writing and if you're inclined to shrug at the idea of channeled writing let's maybe pause
00:13:51.600 and consider that as arthur hastings summarizes about half the world's religious population
00:13:57.060 belong to religions in which channeled revelation and prophecy
00:14:01.060 has been or is a primary aspect of the religion.
00:14:05.980 Much of Western religion would not exist without this form of revelation.
00:14:11.720 Lucille wrote,
00:14:12.960 Writing is a way of continuing to hope,
00:14:15.620 and that perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am not alone.
00:14:21.980 And in her poem, Far Memory, she wrote,
00:14:24.840 the woman walks into my dreams dragging her old habit i turn from her shivering to begin another
00:14:32.440 afternoon of rescue rescue lucille was braver than me actively inviting in voices that i have
00:14:41.360 politely but firmly asked to stay away child as i am of psychologists and protective of my mental
00:14:48.320 health and my appearance of mental health but even she turns shivering from the apparitions
00:14:54.140 of her farm memory back to the work of afternoons of rescuing the people around her in pain with
00:15:01.800 her labor and her joy and her magical language and her house and her sheer bravery as the litany
00:15:09.060 and incantation of generations tells us over and over again with different implications
00:15:13.820 she was from Dahomey women she was of a line of women heroes rescuing the kids tumbling endlessly
00:15:23.120 rescuing the house from the brink of chaos
00:15:26.260 rescuing the stories of generations
00:15:29.220 clamoring at the walls of her gift
00:15:31.020 to be heard and polished
00:15:32.580 and added to the great layers of her work
00:15:35.760 Dr. Marina Maglar writes
00:15:39.080 In 1977, Clifton put out an open call
00:15:42.520 to the spirit world
00:15:43.500 for celebrity spirits who would like to take part
00:15:46.800 in an anthology of sorts
00:15:48.520 which she titled Lives, Visits, Illuminations
00:15:51.720 by asking the spirits questions like
00:15:54.980 what was the experience of death like for you
00:15:57.280 and would you like to clarify anything about your life for our world
00:16:01.660 Clifton hoped to bring them peace and closure
00:16:04.980 through a discussion of the lessons they had learned since their deaths
00:16:08.180 and sought to serve spirits and humankind
00:16:11.300 by allowing them to share their experiences in their own words
00:16:14.560 the resulting replies were a strange
00:16:17.800 rollicking and deeply moving compilation of voices
00:16:20.960 often speaking against racism
00:16:23.620 and the human tendency to hierarchize physical differences
00:16:26.900 in her writing Clifton adopts an ethereal stance
00:16:30.700 in which the soul survives bodily death
00:16:33.040 has survived numerous bodily deaths
00:16:35.940 will survive more
00:16:37.200 there is someone in each of us greater than the personality
00:16:41.700 we manifest in any life
00:16:43.500 the soul does not merely select her own society
00:16:47.520 the soul is her own society
00:16:49.800 and love is eternal is god is
00:16:55.560 in her view it is no accident that her body and its specificities became a channel for the spirits
00:17:03.920 in her writing being a black woman is a way of listening
00:17:07.660 a radical form of receptiveness to the lessons that history teaches
00:17:12.260 and as her daughter sydney puts it i think her actual gift was her openness and ability to hear
00:17:18.680 clifton's theory of spirit does not succumb to fatalism a radical way of listening and
00:17:26.460 receptiveness creates a theory of spirit that does not succumb not to fatalism not to despair
00:17:32.920 not to the sickening crush of systemic inequality she throws her fierce thigh over the rump of day
00:17:39.880 and rides and i hear her cast it like a spell for you to find new radical ways of listening
00:17:46.000 and so of feeling the impulse of joy and a heart for rescue. 0.59
00:17:53.560 Lucille's mediumship began with playing with a Ouija board
00:17:56.100 in that house in Baltimore
00:17:57.320 and having a spirit spell out her mother's name
00:17:59.940 and make itself clear with an accumulation of selfness
00:18:02.840 that it was her, Thelma, who had died at 44
00:18:06.480 and left her daughter alone in a way that you can be
00:18:09.760 in a house with your father and your sisters
00:18:12.180 all born from other mothers.
00:18:14.800 Marina writes,
00:18:15.540 when one considers the trials Clifton's mother, Thelma, faced.
00:18:19.560 Poverty, epilepsy, a philandering husband, death at 44 years old.
00:18:24.880 There is some comfort in this expansive view of the soul.
00:18:28.900 Thelma's spectral return represents a black woman's soul
00:18:31.820 unbound by the structural misfortunes of her life.
00:18:36.160 She bears witness to these trials but is not erased by them.
00:18:40.540 Lucille Clifton's spirit writing makes the pangs of my own embodiment 0.99
00:18:43.900 as a black woman easier to bear amid constant reminders of the perils of black embodiment. 1.00
00:18:50.600 There is solace in the idea that this brown skin and these wide hips were made for listening 1.00
00:18:55.620 to the voices that could not be erased by time, history, or death. 0.92
00:19:02.220 Oh my body, make of me always a woman who listens.
00:19:07.620 Okay, I quote Marina a lot here. I think she's an utterly magical writer and I can't wait for
00:19:13.880 her book on Clifton and whatever books come after that. Marina and Lucille sanctify their own
00:19:21.720 bodies when they reveal or revel in the idea that this body in particular, in the way it has been
00:19:28.560 pressure treated by the world and in its own electrical currents and specific shapes and
00:19:33.500 resonances, is made for listening to missing voices. What an uplifting, world-opening gift
00:19:41.100 of an idea. The body is a site of magic, not just in orgasm or blood rites or the ways white male 0.59
00:19:48.980 storytellers or state-sanctioned alchemists have explored, drinking silver to reach for an eternity
00:19:54.820 of their own same privilege, but in a way that generational trauma and ranks of murdered and
00:20:01.040 missing ancestors grow loud in their ears, tuning beloved bodies of the next generation into new
00:20:08.420 ways of hearing that light, love, truth, is. What haunts me and challenges me and confronts me in
00:20:16.240 this beautiful idea Marina finds in Lucille. The idea that this brown skin and these wide hips were 0.93
00:20:22.860 made for listening to the voices that could not be erased by time, history, or death. 0.94
00:20:28.480 Is the flip side, of course, that something in my own white skin, settler skin, brown with an
00:20:34.900 Iroquois lineage lost generations ago, whited out, that something in me knows of a cellular
00:20:42.080 architecture of not listening, of willfully welding blinders onto the stacks of inequality
00:20:47.960 that my ancestors' bodies crawled over, clawing out a life, the ways that we have learned
00:20:55.640 to tune out the world, the people, the animals, the howling winds of rage, the bodies broken
00:21:03.900 on the trail of tears and the bodies melted in middle passage which Lucille tells us are married
00:21:09.520 to rock and ocean now. I have to just sit with this I guess and keep thinking and writing through
00:21:17.220 it keep reading the poets like Clifton who channeled the voices of the world and can open
00:21:22.060 and tune me and maybe pass the language on as I turn it over in my hands. Maybe this is a piece
00:21:29.340 of long-listening magic, word magic, and how it moves through our bodies. I know from talking
00:21:36.260 with other white women that that instinct to white tears, tears for the whole fucking 0.99
00:21:40.440 injustice of it all, but self-pity also, when confronted by history or inequality or injustice 0.99
00:21:47.180 is common among us. The concept of white guilt and white tears feels pretty accurate, even among
00:21:54.580 people for whom it's not conscious or intentional escape or manipulation, not willfully trying
00:22:00.420 to get out of being called on or called in, not even particularly conscious of our desire
00:22:06.300 to evade the guilt and shame of this snide privilege, but it's all there still. In some
00:22:12.800 real way, my body doesn't want to hear. It wants to weep. When I spoke with Marina about
00:22:21.380 the idea of a body made for listening. I related it to my sense that chronic pain changed how I
00:22:27.400 heard the world. Later, I wrote to her to apologize. I didn't mean to compare the world
00:22:32.980 of experience of black women and what Marina and Lucille have noticed about the radical form of 0.71
00:22:38.640 listening that might offer to my aching bones and brain. In doing so, to equate black and white
00:22:46.140 experience and to erase the hope and power of a redemptive magic. Marina said she didn't hear it
00:22:52.980 that way, but she appreciated the apology. This is a starting point for me, and I offer it to you,
00:23:00.580 white people staunch in our belief and our good intentions. Try to play our own tapes back. 0.88
00:23:08.860 Where I notice shame, see where I can do this simple thing and be honest and apologize.
00:23:16.140 let shame make care a real action
00:23:20.920 listen to the layers around our own words and assumptions
00:23:25.160 for the ways we too might be distorted by privilege
00:23:28.480 and then make reparations
00:23:31.100 open up some space
00:23:33.880 I circle back to Sydney Clifton's perception
00:23:38.400 that her mother's gift was an openness, an ability to listen
00:23:41.520 and I think about how profound an insight that was
00:23:45.020 about that time. Lucille worked from the dinner table, drawing down her perfect worlds of insight
00:23:51.700 in the midst of the movement and sounds of kids and all the artists and activists and family and
00:23:57.440 community who moved through that home and made an emergent energy electric there, a tightly wound
00:24:03.700 band of feelings and movement and hope and sound, enough to make a kind of magnet for more of what
00:24:10.560 was missing to be listened to, an emergent belief in worth and magic and power, a belief that was
00:24:19.020 in and of itself magic in what it could birth. Magloire identifies that same emergent impulse
00:24:28.060 in the Harlem Renaissance, surfacing again in the internet embrace of hashtag black girl magic and
00:24:33.540 all that swirls around it. She writes in this other piece for the LA Review of Books this time
00:24:39.980 in the blog. Woven into the music, literature, and artwork of the time period was this message,
00:24:46.620 we are not the illness, we are the antidote. And in those brief years between the two world wars,
00:24:53.660 it would seem that America knew it. White America's brief interest in, quote, the Negro, 0.78
00:25:00.400 is nothing more than an affirmation that black people have a secret escape route from the woes 0.95
00:25:05.500 of modernity, and though black Americans are just as prone to alienation and emptiness as any other
00:25:11.560 variety of American, to believe that the cure is in us is an immensely powerful thing for a people
00:25:18.820 who had so long been labeled as a problem. What a perfect summary of how a philosophy of black
00:25:26.540 magic, and I think of a craft deeply rooted in anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist philosophy,
00:25:33.600 differs from traditional religions.
00:25:37.700 The deviant, the occulted, the oppressed come to know
00:25:40.760 we are not the illness, we are the antidote.
00:25:46.460 To believe that the cure is in us
00:25:48.960 is a power.
00:25:52.080 Marina continues, James Baldwin,
00:25:54.960 a Harmelite of the generation following the Renaissance,
00:25:58.780 affirms the unique spiritual achievement of black Americans
00:26:01.320 is a kind of sensuality, meaning an ability to respect and rejoice in the force of life itself
00:26:07.140 and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.
00:26:14.240 In this way, the Harlem Renaissance is an articulation of a deepening of black sensuality,
00:26:19.680 an orientation towards the world to which we are greatly indebted today.
00:26:25.560 Lucille Clifton sings of this sensuality, rejoicing in the force of life,
00:26:29.700 being oriented towards the world two of her most quoted poems from the collection she titled
00:26:35.860 two-headed woman in honor of her radical forms of listening are called ode to my hips and ode to my
00:26:42.680 hair marina again two-headed woman is her first published work to narrate her spirit communication
00:26:49.880 it begins however not with the story of clifton's spirit visitations but with a series of oft-quoted
00:26:57.180 homages to various aspects of her body homage to my hips and homage to my hair and what the mirror
00:27:03.360 said the latter poem ends with the exhortation listen woman you not a no place anonymous girl 1.00
00:27:11.240 mister with his hands on you he got his hands on some damn body 0.98
00:27:16.700 body is not a no place it is a some place a location in the here and now 0.99
00:27:25.760 moving in loops and circuits through time with its own particular spins and energies 0.99
00:27:31.120 and electricities and loves and hopes and power it's not anonymous you are some damn body and 0.99
00:27:39.540 the damn has both the ring of how real people talk and also the defiance of the damned the oppressed 0.99
00:27:46.700 If the powers that steal and own bodies and violate bodies declare that they are holy, then I throw my law in with the other side every damn time. 0.99
00:27:57.440 With her radical listening, Lucille tells us about the power in her body, power even in the ways it ages and makes vulnerable.
00:28:06.020 She wishes for us to know of each other's bodies and what those bodies have known.
00:28:10.360 In Wishes for Sons, she writes, I wish them cramps. I wish them a strange town in the last tampon. I wish them no 7-Eleven. I wish them one week early and wearing a white skirt. I wish them one week late.
00:28:30.140 her poems are portals into each other's bodies other worlds and at the same time they laugh
00:28:41.500 past the ways we can fetishize the black woman's body as well as her magic
00:28:45.560 and the ways we can use that fetishization to again stop listening to miss out on the
00:28:52.620 individuality in a piece called what if black women were free marina exhorts us to resist the
00:28:59.740 urge to represent black women as a monolithic group. Indeed, within the category of black,
00:29:05.500 they include a complex multitude, from slave-holding Synegambian hostesses to conservative
00:29:11.820 Christian politicians, color-conscious Creole landowners to Germans of Asian and Arab descent, 0.70
00:29:18.140 all within the category of black. When taken together, all these examples form a genealogy 0.96
00:29:24.680 of the fracturing choices and elusive freedoms that black women have forged for themselves
00:29:29.600 since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.
00:29:36.020 Fracturing and forging, some common roots and pressures but utterly unique.
00:29:41.860 People, ripe with all the magic we have in our own roots and bones,
00:29:47.080 shadows and cells, carbon mirror breathing with the plant worlds around us,
00:29:51.740 crawling with life, breathing through each other long after we're gone
00:29:56.180 in the spells we leave of our words and actions.
00:29:59.600 some tuned to a radical way of listening by the way they are shaped and the things they have seen
00:30:05.520 in their generations. As Aracelus Gourmet writes of Lucille in her foreword to Generations,
00:30:13.060 no one writes like Lucille Clifton, and yet, if it were possible to open a voice,
00:30:17.260 like a suitcase, to see what it carries inside it, I believe that inside the voices of many of
00:30:23.060 our most beloved contemporary writers are the poems of Lucille Clifton. There is the ferocity
00:30:30.260 of her clear sight, fiercely freed from shame, and shuttled into truth-telling and experience.
00:30:37.640 There is also the constellatory thinking where everything is kin. Note that she doesn't say that
00:30:45.420 everyone is kin, but that everything is, and I think Lucille's life gives us a genealogy of
00:30:50.780 understanding generations of humans and the things we call things, because I think the Clifton house
00:30:56.600 in Baltimore was Clifton kin. Marina writes, the house on Talbot Road was sacred. In the arms of
00:31:04.920 its wraparound porch, poet Lucille Clifton lived and loved and danced, along with her husband Fred
00:31:11.120 Clifton and their six children, for more than a decade. It was at the dining room of this house
00:31:17.160 that Lucille wrote some of her most celebrated collections of poetry.
00:31:22.000 It was a place where their people could,
00:31:24.020 in the words of Lucille's poem after Kent State,
00:31:27.440 come into the black and live.
00:31:31.320 In our interview, Marina also told me
00:31:33.480 that Lucille's spirit writing began and ended in that house.
00:31:37.860 A house carries with it something, an assembled energy.
00:31:42.840 Doreen Valiente, in her final public address,
00:31:45.440 urged us to consider what kind of energy it is that witches draw upon when they call down the
00:31:50.420 cone of power. And I think about that all the time. I think about it in relation to the energy
00:31:56.460 in houses, in the patterns of passage, in the way the places I have lived have been part of my body,
00:32:04.520 the apartment crawling with cockroaches where my mom and I lived when I was little,
00:32:08.820 sitting watching the blue and yellow budgies hop and poop around the tiny living room while the
00:32:13.580 free-to-be record wore out its grooves with my replaying. The light from the mini-mall across
00:32:19.300 the street. The apartment in my 20s where the tub burped black kitchen goop. The two times I finally
00:32:27.060 lived alone and made a living. The quiet of the sunny breeze down the long hallways. The way those
00:32:34.460 brief months of solitary reprieve still give me breathing room today. Those places are more than
00:32:41.400 tattooed in me. And I left my mark in them, walking up and down the halls. And when we
00:32:49.620 were together, there was a particular alchemy of what was impossible being born. When it
00:32:56.520 was over, I like to think we both mourned. Marina continues. The Cliftons' loss of their
00:33:05.760 home to foreclosure in 1980 was a traumatic event. According to the children, while the
00:33:11.280 Clifton's were still inside. Neighbors gathered outside to place bids on the house.
00:33:17.360 Many years later, Lucille said, I don't think my family ever got over the loss of our home.
00:33:24.500 This has been the fate of many black families in America who have lost their homes to eviction, 0.83
00:33:29.600 foreclosure, and the structural violence of redlining and gentrification,
00:33:34.580 to experience the loss of their spaces without adequate time to mourn.
00:33:41.280 When Sidney bought back the house in 2019,
00:33:45.020 it brought a sense of wholeness to the surviving Clifton siblings,
00:33:49.860 fulfilling the prophetic lines of their mother's 1969 poem, Admonitions,
00:33:55.140 What you pawn, I will redeem.
00:33:58.200 In that poem, she's telling her sons that this is what she can offer.
00:34:01.940 What they pawn, she will redeem.
00:34:04.500 She will be a net, a layer of gentleness in a world that has not been gentle,
00:34:09.860 but has been cuttingly unjust
00:34:11.920 she will be forgiveness
00:34:13.320 and that's the story
00:34:15.980 of the generations that swell
00:34:17.820 and sing a chorus alongside her poetry
00:34:20.260 and in the house
00:34:21.980 that Sidney Clifton redeemed
00:34:23.580 the one she fills again
00:34:25.620 with artists and energies
00:34:27.320 and activists and love
00:34:29.040 weaving something
00:34:31.080 that will hold
00:34:32.320 when all else is breaking
00:34:34.020 and if they listen
00:34:37.240 one melody tracked through the kitchen
00:34:39.260 up the stairs, all along the porch, will be Lucille's. Singing for her people, her generations,
00:34:47.620 to take what you want with invisible fingers. To redeem what has been lost or pawned. To
00:34:54.840 become the storytellers and the artists and directors, magic in your own right, no permission
00:34:59.940 required. Witches, you are some damn body. Lucille and all her generations of Dahomey 1.00
00:35:09.240 women are here, an army of memories and strength standing with all your ancestors in the in-between.
00:35:17.700 That power, that light that never goes out, calling out with the extreme urgency of this time that our
00:35:24.700 lives are more than the days in them. And it's not quite too late to hear the pressing call of the
00:35:32.100 earth and finally to know it in our bones both living and missing that love is that we are kin
00:35:42.460 to everything 0.77
00:35:43.880 you must be a witch 0.98
00:36:02.100 Thank you. 0.98
00:36:32.100 Thank you.
00:37:02.100 Thank you.
00:37:32.100 Thank you.
00:38:02.100 Thank you.
00:38:32.100 Thank you.
00:39:02.100 Thank you.
00:39:32.100 You