Dear lovely people,

Due to Heidi taking some time to figure out certain Tumblr details, the FCQ! (For Colored Queer) Blog is changing address!

Please now find us at:

http://fcq.tumblr.com/

We have a new post up!! Hope to find you there!! and thank you so much for your support and love!

FCQ! folks

2012 was a difficult year for a lot of us. I’ve watched my QTPOC familia go through so much: isolation; displacement; loss; feelings of debilitating invisibility and rage and doubt; criminalization; violence at the hands of the police; violence at the hands of partners or other family; serious physical and mental health complications; broken hearts; unemployment and financial struggle; rape; suicides and other deaths; and the psychological, social, and political effects of living in a racist, classist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist world.

I have also witnessed beautiful things happen in our communities, and believe we should celebrate every flower, every song, every bit of falling in love, every friendship built, everything we have to be proud of, for these are the small moments of revolution, living in a world that is systematically configured to target us and shut us down.

The tradition of New Year’s Resolution has roots as far back as Ancient Babylon. Modern versions of this practice often include individualized, personal goals, like eating healthier or bettering one’s career. The importance of individual goals not withheld, what if our resolutions also included politicized, collectivized commitments for the next year? What if part of our work in the world were holding each other accountable to these commitments, understanding that many resolutions are also challenges which we will struggle to follow through with, but understanding too, that successes will not come without great effort…? Keeping this in mind, I humbly offer a few New Year’s Resolutions I hope we can share in, and encourage each other towards.

1.    We will hold our heads up high

We will not be shamed for our skin color, our gender, our culture, our body size, our poverty, our health status, or who and how we love, or who and how we fuck. We will refuse to be shamed for any of our difference, and rather, will take pride in it. We will remember to believe in ourselves, and each other. We will be entitled, to show up, participate, and be respected. We will work to develop our literacy in the language of our diverse beauty, strength, ferocity, intelligence, humor, and power. We will not be demolished.

2.    We will take risks

We will accept challenges to grow and transform. We will dare to be vulnerable, to create, to think, to move, to put our voices out into the world. We will have the courage to be utterly strange. We will be louder; our voices and passions will swell. We will step out onto limbs and risk the bough breaking, to take chances at loving, at fighting, and diving into our labors for social change. We will fall, and scrape our knees and get back up again. And again. And again.

3.    We will refuse to be fucked with; nobody will make us small.

Period.

4.    We will care for ourselves and one another.

We will practice self-care as a political act that allows us to continue our work, that is continuing our work itself. We will practice care for each other as a political act that allows our communities to survive and thrive. We will be kind and generous with ourselves and each other. We will push and challenge ourselves and each other as care. We will give what we can, and receive what is offered, to each, from each, according to needs and capacities. We will actively listen to each other. We will denounce the violations we have bore, and cradle the traumas effected. We will learn to discern between solidarity and friendship; between liking each other and being committed to justice in each others’ lives. We will not judge, but we will hold accountable. We will share meals, art, poetry, philosophy, and affection. We will seek joy, and make space for sadness. We will learn to draw boundaries when we need them, and learn to let walls fall down. We will face the wind and tide together.

5.    We will continue to invest in our communities and work for social justice and healing.

We will continue to build community, to do healing work, to struggle together for change. We will invest time, money, and energy, into the well-being, and intellectual, political, and spiritual growth of our families (born and made) and communities. We will educate ourselves. We will write our counter-histories and fight to decolonize the processes through which we are made and grown as subjects, as people. We will refuse normativity’s hold on our bodies, our speech, our imagination. We will understand that different kinds of bodies, minds, hearts, people, produce and contribute to society and community-building in infinitely different ways, and will be grateful for that diversity. We will create together, and sing together; laugh together, and mourn together. We will strive against assimilation and recognize that survival is complex. We will value historical memory and refuse forgetting. We will work hard not to perpetuate oppressive language and action within our communities, and will work to repair and heal when we do. We will not alienate each other. We will care for the children and elderly who are also a part of our worlds. We will intervene on capitalist practices of competition with each other, and support each other and rise up together. We will protect ourselves. We will reach out. We will hold each other, and hold each other up. We will ask more of ourselves, each other, and of the world…

***

May the New Year bring a more just world…

In solidarity,

Heidi Andrea

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Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a  U.S.-born and raised, Queer, Colombian, scholar, activist, and writer-artist living in San Francisco, California. Her work includes photography, advocacy research in Colombia and the U.S., prose and poetry, and performance. She is the singer in a group called “Casi Pájaros”, is a co-founder of FCQ! and a passionate advocate for social justice.

I once said to somebody near and dear to me, “I am so grateful to have you in my life. I couldn’t ask for a better ally.”

His response was, “Oh, but I think you must.”

______________________

Dear beloved Queer and Transgender POC Community,

We need to talk. We need to talk to each other. All of us.  Oh, the impossible task.

I have been reflecting a lot on solidarity and alliance building within queer community- inter-racial, inter-gendered, inter-faith, inter-classed, inter-everything alliance building- as a huge need within our QTPOC communities. We need to be talking about these things, building skills and resources around it, loving each other through it, learning to hold our own and each others’ rage, lifting each other up in ways that make it possible for us all to learn what we need from each other in order to continue our work in the world.

We need to talk about ‘solidarity’, and ‘accountability’ and ‘community’. We need to think together about what we all mean when we say these words, when we evoke them as tools, as weapons, as ballasts for these tumbling ships we sail on, on the tempestuous seas of the everyday.

I am reminded of the poem below, and its call to accountability for speaking out in solidarity, in the context of a larger war we all fight, however nuanced and heterogeneous each individual battle may be:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

How do we learn to speak up and out with each other, and, as necessary, in times of silencing, for each other? How do we learn to let each other speak up and out for ourselves in ways that bolster our sense of community, rather than break it down? How do we learn to hear each other, amid the whirl and twirl of all our differences, smashing up against one another? Race differences, class differences, gender differences, spiritual and religious differences, national differences, differences in desire and sexuality, differences in ability and wellness, differences which so often separate us all and render us illegible to each other… How, for instance, can we each understand what it means to be an ally to each other across racial differences, in ways that must necessarily be different than what we hope for, ask for, from our white allies? How can we dive deeper into what solidarity can look like from Queer, cis-gendered POC folks, as allies to Transgendered POC folks, beyond the discourse of inclusion/exclusion? How do we make space to consider the infinitely diverse needs of our QTPOC communities, in a way that is sustainable, and not only fixing immediate problems, oversights, etc, but fights for intervention into larger systems that effect those needs? How do we learn to meet each other without obliterating our heterogeneities, and learn to create openings for possibility?

While I think it is important, so very important that more work is done on building and growing possibilities between ourselves and each smaller contingency “QTPOC community” is made up of, I believe that solidarity is never perfect. Cultures of accountability, within a white-influenced (very Bay Area, but definitely not only Bay Area) liberal moral milieu, can easily become cultures of accusation. This often results in us doing further violence to each other: by individualizing oppression, rather than addressing its structural hold on our everyday lives; by centering the work of justice through an ‘oppression olympics’ rather than a genuine desire to listen to each other and learn from each other and share in the work of refusing to let these systemic and systematic forces destroy each other and what potential love and healing and work of justice live between us, in the spaces between our lives, in the spaces where we converge.

And I’m not saying don’t get angry at each other. While I believe that sometimes, as allies, when we are in the position of being allies or wanting to be, we need to just actively listen and take it in, and apologize for the world that is violent and all the ways we can’t fix it, and commit to working as hard as ever, I don’t believe that it is any ally’s job to take all the blame or to allow forms of emotional abuse or projection to be masked as alliance. And being an ally doesn’t mean we don’t ever “fuck up”. Being an ally means we work hard, we own our privilege, we try, we fail, and get back up again to try harder.

But I am not saying don’t have it out. I don’t believe in white liberal notions of some utopic kumbaya-driven world peace. That notion has always felt to me like yet one more condescending, secularized-Christian, manifest destiny, bullshit paradigm of violence disguised as love, and I for one, am not falling for that shit. I’m not even saying we have to all like each other or get along.

I am saying, have it out in an effort at rendering the world and ourselves and communities in it, anew. I am saying we’ve got to show up for each other when the going gets rough. I am saying we’ve got to have each others’ backs in the larger battle, this battle that spans across space and time, which sometimes has us weary, and other times enlivened, but which we have all, in our varied ways, fought to survive within. And I am saying we can’t afford to let our rage shut us down. And we can’t afford to let our rage allow us to shut others down. When we shut each other down, we shut down possibilities for beautiful and powerful work of creativity and healing and justice to happen. When we shut each other down across or because of our differences, we limit the work that can be done, and we deny our communities valuable and rare resources that feed our needs for community, for critical thought, for art and music, for healing work, for racial justice and queer justice and so many other forms of justice. We can’t afford to be divided, because our survival is already a fight against the conquering of our histories, our subjectivities, our memory, our lifeblood, our relationships, our communities, our very sense of being in the world. (A read through histories of state ‘divide and conquer’ tactics between Black and Brown communities offers us poignant examples of the damage this can do, and has done, to our movements.)

We can’t be dumping the entirety of our rage about the whole universe—of racism or sexism or transphobia or homophobia or ableism… and every other phobia and ism—onto each other as individuals in an effort to place blame, to elicit confession and guilt from those we feel have sinned against us. And this is so much easier said than done. I know it is for me at times, especially in the face of pain experienced in response to words or actions, or the lack there of, coming from those we deem allies to our selves and struggles and movements. But I believe that amidst our differences, within our QTPOC communities, as well as stretching outside of them, we must see each other as necessary allies, and to see struggles for alliance and solidarity as never perfect, as deserving of a politicized rage, a tenacious rage, a fierce rage, as well as a fierce generosity that allows us to summon each other from a place of building more possibility, of invitation to think together, to learn together, to grow…

John Paul Sartre once wrote, “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made us.” The work, the intense labor of solidarity and alliance, is, I believe, a vital component of such refusal. We cannot make our refusals in a vacuum, we cannot do it alone. From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, we’ve got to take these bridges called our backs, and cross them, you and I both, and find each other on the other sides.

With love and solidarity,

by Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes

_______________________________________________________

Dear Queers of Color,

It is by no bit of chance that we are here. We are, beyond doubt, fervent and tenacious survivors of a long, bloody and vicious battle- one of many- against the powerful, daunting, and violent forces of Hegemony, of Normalization, of History. History would not have wanted us here, it would have wanted to obliterate us, as it has many of our fallen. (And it is by no bit of chance that our fallen have fallen, for we are being systematically undone.) For centuries, those who came before us made their way through the thick and thin of it, vigorous and weary. I want to tell you that I am glad you are still here. I am glad you are still here. And I am glad I am still here. Because otherwise, among other things, there wouldn’t be moments like this to risk ourselves within. The world is a jagged place, and that we manage to survive it at all is often miraculous to me. I often think of Audre Lorde’s Litany For Survival. I am often awed that through all the centuries that have been architectured for the genocides of our ancestors, I, somehow, am here and You, somehow, are here. I think about those of us, differently raced and racialized, differently queered bodies, who fight tooth and nail and skin and bone and blood to just find a tiny little space in the world to breathe and love and feel freedoms on our skin and in our hearts in ways that so much of the world would not want us to~ and I am stunned that we are here, nonetheless, breathing, and loving, and creating powerful work, smiling to the sky, even if also, crying rivers from which we learn how to swim.

And I am enraged. I am enraged that we have been made to feel small in the world.

Will we ever learn, completely, wholly, through and through, to stop apologizing for who we are? 

Some of us apologize all the time for who we are, in very loving, self-deprecating humour – confessing with the jolly of forthcoming change, or desire for change, of our sad, alienated, lives in the soil of these United States. Our moralistic subjectivities which we fight tenaciously, our poorly educated intellects which evidence an America bent on an amnesiatic storying of the world and itself in it, infuriating us over the necessity of having to expend energies on learning what we should have been taught since our beginnings. We stand like anti-scouts, queer and tall,  some of us pledging our sincerest apologies for being products of the Reagan era, or for our monolingualisms, or for the blindnesses wrought upon us by our privileges, of skin, class, gender, or nation. And we try so hard to be something else, something less alienated, less violent. Something deconstructive and haunted and responsible and we apologise for failing again and again – if apology can also be read in the unflinching commitment to wake up tomorrow and try again. To give of ourselves, again. To tear open our chests and throw ourselves heart first, again and again, into the wide open terrain of struggle: for something else than this, for each other, for a justice that keeps us awake at night, and that we understand as possible, however interminably deferred.

         But these are not the manifestations, the acrobatics and elocutions of apologetics I am bringing into question. This dance, the fight to always be more for the world, I entirely condone with every particle of my being. No, it is something else I want to evoke here.

         In Colombia, where my family is from, homophobia not only lurks around any bend with an assaulting word or glare or fist or gun, but government-sanctioned programs for social cleansing, Limpiezas, have essentially, extrajudicially, mandated the elimination of particular kinds of queer bodies from the streets: the attempt- in this ‘totalitarian democracy’- at some wicked dream of a purified body politic. Moving through queer spaces both here and there, I look around me, and I think about the Limpiezas, the pinche fucking Limpiezas. I think about the world—a world, this world, chock fucking full of fucking Limpiezas, quiet and loud, and I think about all the different ways we meet the world everyday in the aim to survive-to survive the State, (for State brutality can be so undiscerning, and where it does discern, I fear that you and I are not of the type they would choose to spare. But then, that is in part why we are who we are)…to survive our families, our education, our health system, our economy and its poverties, our prisons, every system, every violence, every heartbreaking assault on our worth, …to survive, even, or also, ourselves… it is all one unbelievably, staggeringly, massive systemic and systematic Limpieza.

But where, I have been wondering, is the space to unapologetically love who we love, and be who we are, however heterogeneous to ourselves we may be day to day, hour to hour, breath to breath? How do we learn to walk through this world, rendering ourselves- skin and bone and heart and soul- completely and utterly unapologetic for having survived, for having remained or become that which a world would never have wanted us to be? How do we stop apologizing- for being queer, for not being white enough, for not being woman enough or man enough or Christian enough or productive enough or sufficiently bourgeois? When did it become so difficult, so challenging, so desperately frightening to claim our stake in what it is to be who we are and live what we live? Against the growing tide of normalization, as it rises and swells in great waves aimed at drowning us all; and against the security of an anaesthetized homogenization of the spirit- we must all fight hard, so hard. And I see us fight all the time, I do! Fighting to grow deep into our difference, completely and utterly unapologetically.

We must grow deep into our difference. We must vow, like Shange writes Cypress, to avenge our kin and kindred, living and dead, blood-lined, inherited, and otherwise, to avenge by way of refusal, by way of staking our claims, by way of following our dreams, by swearing to those who come into the world after us that the world shall not make us feel ugly, or useless, or dirty, or ashamed. That nobody, and no thing shall make us small. That we shall not be made to feel as though our skin is too dark; our speech or bodies or desire too crooked and staining; our rage or intellect or poetry too threatening; our dreams too ridiculous; our histories too long.  We must vow to survive, to thrive, in the always and never aloneness that is this curious hustle we call life.

We must grow deep into our difference. That, I believe, is where our magic is rooted. And we must fight! Always! Warriors of the hither and tither, we carry the past on our backs, the ghosts of places and times and histories: of genocides, and colonization, of revolutions as grand event and as small, intimate refusals- both memorialized and forgotten, whispering in our ears. We collectively conspire with the present, the dead and the living, with those here and absent, towards infinite and hopeful futures. With such resolve and contention, do we revolt, fists and words and passions in the air, holding tightly to our insistence against a violent order on which our politics rail, shouting “We shall not be tempered!!”

For this, and so much more, I am in love with you. You, dear Queers, dear fellow Queers of Color, I am in love with you, because you are so strange. You are exquisite. You are breathtaking. You are beautiful. We are powerful in ways we do and don’t yet see, and I am proud to be amongst you, to fight by your side.

Thank you for being you.

In solidarity,

h.

____________________________________________

Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes is a  U.S.-born and raised, Queer, Colombian, scholar, activist, and writer-artist living in San Francisco, California. Her work includes photography, advocacy research in Colombia and the U.S., prose and poetry, and performance. She is the singer in a group called “Casi Pájaros”, is a co-founder of FCQ! and a passionate advocate for social justice.