"Revolution is not a one time event. "

today my blog is dedicated to Audre Lorde..."I am a black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet"
In an African naming ceremony before her death, she took the name Gamba Adisa, which means "Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

When I began watching the Egyptian protests, my ordinary life

"Dr. King’s last act on Earth, marching in Memphis, Tenn., was about workers’ rights to collective bargaining and rights to dues checkoff. You cannot remove the roof for the wealthy and remove the floor for the poor." [jesse jackson marching w/teachers and students in Wisconsin, 2011]

and
"Egypt supports Wisconsin: ONE WORLD, ONE PAIN" [see photo of source]:
http://dudelol.com/egypt-supports-wisconsin-workers-one-world-one-pain/

and MOST IMPORTANTLY!
""The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" [audre lorde, 1984 ]


She wants her difference acknowledged but not judged; she does not want to be subsumed into the one general category of 'woman.

from poem "power" The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.
I want this book to be filled with shards of light thrown off from the shifting tensions between the dissimilar, for that is the real stuff of creation and growth."
Lorde focused her discussion of difference not only on differences between groups of women but between conflicting differences within the individual. "I am defined as other in every group I'm part of", she declared. "The outsider, both strength and weakness. Yet without community there is certainly no liberation, no future, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between me and my oppression".^[14] She described herself both as a part of a "continuum of women"^[15] and a "concert of voices" within herself
Lorde stunned white feminists with her claim that racism, sexism and homophobia were linked, all coming from the failure to recognise or inability to respect difference. To allow these differences to continue to function as dividers, she believed, would be to replicate the oppression of women: as long as society continues to function in binaries, with a mandatory greater and lesser, Normative and Other, women will never be free.
In response, Lorde wrote "what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority."^[13]

"A Litany for Survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive."
— Audre Lorde (The Black Unicorn: Poems)

The Fon creation myth is the traditional creation story of the Fon peoples of West Africa. Various versions of the creation story are told. In most the creator is either Mawu, the moon being and mother of all the gods and humanity, or Mawu-Lisa, the sun/moon being who is both male and female. In others, Nana Buluku is the ultimate creator, an androgynous deity who gave birth to the female Mawu and the male Lisa and passed the power over creation to them.

Many of the creation accounts tell of Mawu creating everything as she was carried from place to place on the back or in the mouth of Aido Hwedo, the rainbow serpent. The earth was created first, its curves, slopes and rises shaped by the winding, snaking motions of Aido Hwedo. Mountains formed from Aido Hwedo's excrement wherever they stopped to rest, leaving precious minerals inside. When Mawu finished, all of the mountains, trees, elephants and other creations left world too heavy, so she asked Aido Hwedo to coil, to encircle the earth and rest underneath to support its weight.

Aido Hwedo holds his own tail in his mouth to hold fast to the earth, and rests in the cool of the seas which Mawu made for him to protect him from the heat. Mawu's son, Agbe, now commands them. Whenever Aido Hwedo shifts or readjusts his position, he causes an earthquake or tidal wave.

[Fon is a major West African ethnic and linguistic group in the country of Benin, and southwest Nigeria, made up of more than 3,500,000 people. The Fon language is the main language spoken in Southern Benin, and is a member of the Gbe language group. The Fon are said to originate from Tado, a village in south east Togo, near the border with Benin.]