 Good morning. Welcome. I'm I'm Shauna Sherman, manager of the San Francisco Public Library's African American Center. And I'm very pleased to host this talented and distinguished panel of artists and thinkers for a discussion. What the black body, what woman, what the black woman body knows addressing trauma through art practice, which is part of the SF Bay Area. Mahafa commemoration. To begin, we acknowledge that we are on the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramaytu Sholoni, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land, and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramaytu Sholoni have never seated lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. Yes, did you hit the broadcast button. Oh no. Okay, start over. Okay, I can edit that on YouTube. All right, go. Welcome. I'm Shauna Sherman, manager of the San Francisco Public Library's African American Center. I'm very pleased to host this talented and distinguished panel of artists and thinkers for a discussion. What the black woman body knows addressing trauma through art practice practice, part of the SF Bay Area, Mahafa commemoration. Again, we acknowledge that we are on the unseated ancestral homeland of the Ramaytu Sholoni who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land, and in accordance with their traditions the Ramaytu Sholoni have never seated lost nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place, as well as for the all the people who reside in their traditional territory. As guests, we recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramaytu Sholoni community, and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. So it must be said the San Francisco Public Library stands with the Black Lives Matter movement and supports all efforts to end structural systemic and institutional racism and inequality in our institution and in our communities. On December 17, at the regular library commission meeting, we will be releasing our racial equity plan. Please go to SFPL.org to find out more. Now I'll introduce Ms. Wanda Sabir, who will be our moderator for the program today. Ms. Wanda Sabir is a journalist, poet and author, moonlighting as a college professor in Alameda, California, and the author of wandaspix.com. For 30 years, one of her many literary events has been to host a celebration of African American woman writers and their poetry, the first Saturday in February. She is also a depth psychologist with deep roots in the bayous of Louisiana, where she was born. Her interests and expertise are historic and persistent trauma and trauma healing. The Ma'afa, specifically ancestral memories, dream tending women prisoners, and the use of art and appreciative inquiry to stimulate those forgotten conversations, especially among diaspora descendants. She is co-founder and CEO of Ma'afa San Francisco Bay Area in its 25th season this year and co-founder of the International Coalition for the Commemoration of African Ancestors of the Middle Passage, and the recent recipient of the Distinguished 400 Award, 400 years of African American History Commission, 2019. She is a transformative justice TJ or community accountability facilitator and believes the true revolution starts at home. Please join me in welcoming Ms. Wanda Sabir. Thank you, Shana, and thank you to our distinguished panelists. I'm so excited about our conversation that we're going to have today with you and with our other attendees who are going to be sharing their responses and questions and thoughts in the chat throughout our conversation, you know, if that doesn't distract from their participation. I just want to just clarify and define for everyone who might not be aware of the Ma'afa commemoration and what it means that the Ma'afa is a key squahili term that means great calamity or reoccurring disaster. And it is a term that references what happened to African people during that period known as the Middle Passage or enslavement. And it more accurately depicts the trauma that continues to this date, more so than the term Black Holocaust. However, you probably heard the term Black Holocaust and they are somewhat interchangeable. And here in the San Francisco Bay Area, for the past 25 years, as Shana mentioned, we have actually had healing rituals for our ancestors. It is an event or a commemoration or a ceremony that was exclusively for, it's for Black people, people of African descent throughout the diaspora, where we give our ancestors a funeral, where we recognize them, where we thank them for surviving and for those that didn't survive because obviously some of them survived because we are sitting here right now on this panel. So again, let's say, share with you, you know, sort of how how that sits in our bodies as Black women. And so anyway, thank you, Shana, for bringing into the space. Our indigenous ancestors, I appreciate that. And, and before I introduce our distinguished guests, I know you have a poem that you'd like to share. Shana, I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to share my work in these spaces. The poem I'm going to read today is called Poem Spinning in Indigo Vat. What's that metal ring called under the screw? A Fisher or a washer? Think washerwoman, he said, if you want to remember. Where on my forehead did you see the circle marks? Speaking of things lost, I went to the printer for mass quantities of flyers. The supplier said, to ever apprehends the person who stole my soul, I want to steal it back. I'm turning the word convict into conviction, meaning gumption. I want to rescue the whale swimming through the delta. At the overlook, he gestured, move to the right of the picture frame. He told me, make a round O with your lips. I was in and I was sick of this new arrangement. My childhood had taught me to say no, why didn't I? Still, I woke up. Any compliance, now a feudal endeavor. Instead, I take a hobby, baking. The recipe said, choose peaches by size and color. The big red ones make a better cobbler. I have seen, I have never seen a peach tree. I'm from the islands. I am black, quick, guess which island? I bought 10 masks, five floral and five tied dye. I wear a mask to save our lives. I also bought a blanket and a shovel. I tally the expenses, a dollar for every bias. I have a bachelor's degree in mathematics and keeps sound accounts. I named my daughter die, a name reminiscent of indigo vats. I'm trying to look inwards but can only see as high as my chest. Call me impudent. All I told him, I have a ticket. I spend stories we've thread in a shack with five spindles. Charlotte sewed, sewed, sewed in a Victorian chair. The teacher she was able, yet discouraged from the white dinner table. I say, Charlotte Grimke, tell him you're just passing through. I don't give a shit about you. The instant I said it, my body armor appeared, metal, the color of honey. I bought this power from a merchant who sold it in powder form. He advertises wares in neat rows on shelves in his dining room. I said, yes, I believe, yes, I believe, I believe. He said, you have to believe if you want it to work. This is the old way made new. I'm saying for life to work, you have to believe in you. May all be forewarned, the truth is hard to hear. Mother Earth is an aging widow. The blacksmith kneeled on his right knee, I the baker kneaded the bread. People from far and near had something to say about both of us. It's not my skin that makes me feel this way. That's all on you. I have my own Camelot. It's in that direction. Yes, that direction, the direction of my finger compassing. Thank you. Wow. Oh, thank you so much. That was beautiful. For life to work, you have to believe in you. Wow, how beautiful. And if you could tell our audience, you know, sort of I think those words came from like your project. I wanted you to tell them what this is a part of the poem. Thanks, Wanda. Yeah, I've been looking as a librarian for the African American Center. We had these five books in our collection that were a compilation of all the runaway slave advertisements from a bunch of colonial states. So I looked through all the South Carolina ads and picked out all the ads for the women in those in that book and there are about 600 of them. And I took words from that and then sort of wrote poems from those words. So I've got a several poems based on that project. Yeah. Yeah, you're wonderful. So I'm going to read the bios of our panelists and then Sister Fanya is going to do a libation and then we're going to do a check in and then we're going to start our questions. So again, as as you know, to participate with us, you can use the track chat as a river, and you can put the names of your ancestors on the ancestors in the river you can put questions in the river. You can put feelings that come up for you because they probably will in the river, and the river will wash things through, you know how water does it. The river keeps thing moving, you know that's why water is so good to have around, you know it just makes things move as opposed to staying stagnant you don't want stagnant water you want to move. So use that river. The chat is no longer chat is the river, it's moving. And you can think of it as the Mississippi River. You can think of it as a now Valley River. You know both have significance for us as African people. Sister sister Lorraine Bonner turned to art late in life as a way of dealing with personal trauma. She still recognized the parallels between the betrayal and violence. She had suffered in childhood and the betrayal and violent plunder that formed the foundation of our current way of life. Her work has moved from depictions of personal political portrayal and the perpetrator series to a vision of humanity beyond the limitations of socially defined color in the multi huge humanity series. She is now working on a series she calls the mended series, in which our scars and broken places take on a new beauty. Lorraine Bonner lives and works in Oakland, California, close to her children and grandchildren again welcome sister Lorraine. Sister Fanya Davis is a leading national voice on restorative justice, a quickly emerging field, which invites a fundamental shift in the way we think about and do justice. She is a long time social justice activist civil rights trial attorney, restorative justice practitioner, writer and scholar with the PhD and indigenous knowledge. Davis is the founder and currently director of restorative justice of Oakland youth. Actually, she retired. She served as counsel to the International Council of 13 indigenous grandmothers, numerous honors include the boom to award for service to humanity. The Dennis Baloney Award for excellence and youth restorative justice and the world trusts healing justice award. Davis's research interests include race and restorative justice, social justice and restorative justice and exploring the indigenous roots, particularly the African indigenous roots of restorative justice. And I find that really fascinating. Davis is author of the little book of race and restorative justice right here. Get your copy. I think it's really wonderful and it's really thin. So you're looking for quons of gifts. That one will work. And anyway, back to the title. The title was the little book of race and restorative justice black lives healing and the US social transformation. And also I want to mention that Fanya is. Well, the way I met her was, I'm trying to I don't know how I met her but one of the ways that I met her was through the acquire. Oh my goodness. Bukan in my way to and and at that time Mandela was still in prison, and and she started that choir, because she knew James my Lopey Phillips, who was like the Paul Roberson, but he was he was also a union organizer in South Africa and he was in exile. And and he had he was teaching people to sing. And so they had this big concert at UC Berkeley Zellebac. And after that concert, people were like, well darn this was so wonderful. Let's keep on doing this. And so that's how Bukan in my way to was founded and I think Bukan in my way to was still singing now. I sang with the choir for 10 years up until Mandela walked out holding hands with winning Mandela out of Robin Island. And after that, I had to get back to being a mother to my teenager. So I couldn't do that anymore. But I want to thank find you so much for for making that connection for us. And then also I see find your lots of times at the Malaga Center dancing. She's a very good dancer. And then sometimes I see a walking on the beach in Alameda. So, again, thank you for joining us. This is our Amara Tabora Smith. Oh my goodness. Ah, Houseful. Oh my goodness. This is like such a gift those episodes. Amara describes her experiment experimental dance theater work as Afro, Sierra Liz, conjure art. Her dance making practice utilizes Europe a spiritual ritual to address issues of social and environmental justice, community identity and belonging. A San Francisco native and Oakland resident. Well, not anymore but she was. She's in New Mexico now. She is the artistic director of deep waters dance theater, and was the co artistic director of head of headmistress and ongoing performing collaboration with movement artists share with chin. And it's so cool. I don't know if you remember my remember we were in in in Dakar, and I saw you and share with at the International was at the fast man. And I'm like, oh my goodness Oakland is so in the house in Dakar like really we're like in the theater back same like. It was like so you know it's really cool when you run into your people in Africa right I mean it's like wow wow it's so awesome. So anyway, I digress. So anyway, where was I Oh, her work has been performed in Brazil, the Republic of the Congo, Judson Church movement research New York City and many venues throughout the San Francisco barrier and United States. And so now, thank you so much, Amara Lorraine and finally for joining us today. And finally, I'd like now to ask you if you could, you know, open the space for us with a live Asian to our ancestors. And you need to unmute yourself. I go again thank you. Can you hear us. Fine yeah thank you froze to come back to it already. So, after the, the libation, we were going to do a check in. So, we could shift to the check in and then we can do the libation as a part of the chicken. Yeah, you know spirit does what it does right. It's all good it's all good it's all good. So, I just thought I posed the question. How is your black woman body this morning, you know it's late morning so you know you've been in your body if you've been awake for a minute, particularly for the day. But yeah, but how is your black woman body this morning. And so I was going to. There we go. Oh, okay, we'll go back to find you. Okay. Sorry about that. And what was the last thing. Well, should I start over or yes, you can start because we heard nothing. Okay, we pour to honor all the mothers, the forefought the foremothers of Africa, the mothers of the past present future. We are grateful for the blessings of life. We pour to honor all the African goddesses the orisha below us, the rubs all expressions of the divine African feminine. We pour to honor Oshun, mother of the sweet waters, Yemo job, mother of the sea, no maza, queen of the sea, no Kubelwani, great three breasted undying mother of the earth, no mazulu queen of the sky. I see goddess and wisdom hot or mother of the moon. The fierce lioness protectors ma goddess of justice, newt mother of the sky, kumballama mommy water, mothers of the water. We pour to honor all those African women whose bodies were lost to the Maafa to slavery to lynching to police terror to circumcision and to the coronavirus. We pour to honor and ask for protection of all the young women and girls and children and babies, and for the ones to come. Great mothers we pour to ask you to bless and empower this gathering. We ask you to ask you to bless and empower the justice and the healing work of all of the sisters gathered here today on the panel and in the audience. O great mothers of the waters, we pour to ask that in these perilous times, your healing waters may flow into our bodies, into our lives, the lives of our children, into our homes, into our communities onto our earth, bringing wholeness, healing and holiness, leaving nothing untouched. Ashe. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, that was beautiful. What's the symbol on your, on your cloth. You know, it's like, is it yummy. Yummy. Okay. Yeah, surrender to God. Yeah, use the Ashanti symbol. Yeah. Thank you. So we're going to do our check in. And so the question is what, how is your black woman body this morning. And so I'm going to start and then I'm going to pass it on to one of my other sisters. My black woman body is feeling great. I went to bed before two o'clock in the morning and I got up went for very, very, very short bike ride, but I did it. And I'm like, yeah, I've been trying to get out and go for a bike ride so you could do this mother. It was like only 10 minutes and I rolled to the beach and back that fast. So my black woman body is like saying yeah, and it felt so good on my face and in my nose it was like so wonderful. And I'm really happy that we are doing this because I've been kind of nervous. It's been like, we planted for a while and now it's actually happening. And I'm really, really, really happy about that. And, and I'm, I'm really, really happy to be sitting here with you as well as with the black women that we can't see you know that are joining us from other realms. You called in some of them fire and, and others you know I want to call in our my, my grandmother Rosetta, and, and my, and my grandmother Josephine and my great grandmother's Francis, and Amelia and either and great great on Adele and Beatrice and great great great great great great great great grandmother Nancy going back to 1776. And, and I'm really happy that that they go and have you know dropped by to listen to these phenomenal black women panelists address how and why we live in these wonderful containers with intention. I live with intention and try to be to really be in this flesh and love every moment of it. After being without adequate shelter as a child, and as an adult, my black woman body is home is a home. No one can take from me. So I'm never homeless because I got my body, you know, it's like everything that I need right now. So I want to pass this on to. Go ahead. Okay. Um, thank you for that beautiful check in. I'm feeling good I'm just excited about this panel and you and Lorraine and the Mara and Shawna. Mara and Lorraine of course I've heard of your work I've known of you I've passed you by. But this is the first time we've had a chance to sit down and be together share space together so I'm really looking forward to that. And my body feels pretty good I did some meditation this morning some breathing and yesterday, I did some salsa. And the dances to Ogun and dances to shungo kind of put in there a little bit so I'm still feeling the joy of that from yesterday. And I'll pass it to Mara. First of all, I just want to give thanks I feel so honored to be with you all today thank you Wanda for the invitation. Thank you Lorraine for I got to witness briefly your beautiful art and just that filled me up. Fania your prayer was so it shifted a vibration. Fania your words. So my body is feeling that shift of vibration. And I want to say my very fun a leg while issue who froze the screen on your altar, because we needed to just be in that silence with the beauty of what you created and what you poured libation from so giving thanks to a leg but who is the great disruptor, and how that's so necessary so I'm feeling how it is important to embrace the chaos, because chaos precedes creation and being with that and and feeling the complexity of what it is to be in this black woman body and grateful for that, grateful for the ancestors who are responsible for me being here in this moment alive and breathing, giving thanks to my family line and the collective ancestors that both known and unknown so I'm, I'm feeling so much gratitude, just to be here with you all and also just want to shout out Shawna your opening poem was the embodiment of all of it. Thank you. Thank you. I'm just feeling tremendous gratitude in this moment, and I'm going to pass it to the beautiful Lorraine. Thank you Amara for passing it to me and thank you to everyone who has gone before. Thank you Wanda for organizing this, Shawna for supporting us, Hanisa, our tech support extraordinaire and Fanya, that beautiful libation. My body is feeling ready, ready to be filled with all of the wisdom that's going to be coming through this day. I've been watching Amara's videos all morning and just really looking forward to hearing and seeing your work hearing about it. I went to bed pretty late last night and got up pretty early. There's a lot, a lot of excitement and expectation. I took a shower I was grateful for the water. I meditated and was grateful for the ability to sit and breathe. I have clothing to wear. I'm a little chilly in the house. I might put a blanket over myself a little later on. But I'm very, very grateful to be here. And thank you all. I do have a poem I'd like to read a little bit later on when Wanda is ready to put it into the program. You can share it now if you like. I would say, first of all, when Wanda first invited me to participate in this program about what the black woman knows, black woman body knows, and I thought, oh my God, what can I possibly say? I'm one person, you know, and there's like millions of us. Who am I, you know, to speak for us. And that led me to think about the diversity. And that opened the door to this poem that came through about kind of the diversity of black women. It's called Black Women. Some black women are dark skinned. Some black women are lighter. The names of the colors of black women are always something sweet. Chocolate, blackberry, ginger, cinnamon, butterscotch, nutmeg. Some black women have hair. Some black women don't have hair. Some black women have hair that in the battle days was called good hair. Today, the power of the black woman's hair has been set free. Some black girls grew up in wealth and privilege. Some grew up in poverty and neglect. Some black girls had two parents. Some black girls had one parent. Some black girls had to raise themselves. Some black girls are loved and protected. Some are beaten and used for sex. Some black girls go to school for safety. Some go from school to prison. Some black girls fight back. Some give up, drop out. Some black women have a roof and food. Some black women have a roof or food. Some black women have neither. Some are sick. Most are tired. Sick and tired of being sick and tired. Some black women are able-bodied, at least temporarily. Some black women are disabled, at least if not accommodated. Some black women practice gratitude every day. Some black women were born women and everyone agrees that they are. Some black women were born women, but in the wrong body, and face violent disagreement every day. Some black women love men. Some black women love women. Some black women love the ones they're with. Some black women don't do love. Some black women go to church. Evangelical, holy, roller, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Church of God and Christ, African, Methodist, Episcopal, Zion, Baptist, Quaker, Catholic, Unitarian. Some black women like candles for Shabbat. Some black women take refuge in the Sangha. Some black women dance the Sundance. Some black women dwell in the house of Orisha. Some black women have altars for the goddess. Some black women pray five times a day, fast for Ramadan, undertake the Hajj, give alms, call their God Allah. And if they cover their hair, fools scream, terrorist. Even don't go to church. Don't eat fried chicken. Don't even like watermelon. Like classical music, watch anime, follow hockey. Don't do the neck thing. And sometimes wonder if they are really black women at all. So sister, if in my palm I left you out, my bad, forgive me. Do me the kindness of finishing these lines. This black woman and this black woman, I know, we know, all black women know. Whoever we know ourselves to be inside, we wear a mask someone else has made. Bare a label we never agreed to or in a fight we never signed up for. There are those people in this country who think that this country is supposed to only be for white men. They have no idea how beautiful a country that loved black women would be. How much they would want to live there. So thank you. Wow Lorraine. That was so beautiful. Well, I hope everyone is writing, you know, what was that line again where you told people to write fill in. Oh, right. Some black women, this black woman, this black woman. Yeah, yeah, so hopefully there'll be a whole lot of responses. And I wanted to ask Shana to do a check. Can I just, I thought I was unmuted I just want to say. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, that was awesome. Would you like to check in? Sure. Thanks for including me. I'm just, I'm just like feeling all the energy. I'm so honored to be in this space with, with all, all you guys. And yes, I just, I want to go to my notebook already because I've just got all this energy going. I want to like channel it. So thank you. Thanks, Wanda. Oh, you're welcome. So, I have as a first question. And some of it has been answered in the check in but if you left out anything. Please feel free to add to it. What does it mean in the 21st century America to be wearing occupying living in this black woman body. What is your womb yielding or birthing. And, and we know, sort of this particular period we're in right now in December, and November just happened, you know, Thanksgiving. The, the UN generals, Secretary General's recognition of the International Data Inviolence Against Women campaign which kicked off on November 25. World AIDS Day just happened on the first. So, you know, and this is like the last month of this year and we've been in a pandemic. So there's a whole lot of stuff happening. That has impacted our bodies and, and our thinking and our way we live in our body this particular year. So if you take a moment, sort of present past future. What does it mean in 21st century America to be wearing occupying living in this black woman body. What is your womb yielding or birthing and whoever wants to go first can take it. You have to unmute yourself though. I'll say something. I have to say that I am feeling so much hope and pride and excitement about particularly about the, the fabulous black women who are stepping into the political sphere, which is a space I would never ever ever in my life ever want to occupy. And so seeing Sister Kamala, seeing, seeing Stacy, seeing the squad and thinking back to, to Fannie Lou and Shirley Chisholm and I just think now this is that feels like we're at a point now where that particular that particular area and, and that kind of courage has such a potential to change everything. And I'm, I'm just so grateful to them and I don't know that I have anything to do with birthing them, but I'm certainly sending the money as best as I can. I give thanks to them and I think, I think our world is going to be a lot better place because of them. Yeah, money, money helps. See Amara Avanya, do you have any thoughts on that particular question. I have lots of thoughts. But I, a dear friend of mine, who is a sound healer named Gina breed love speaks about this time being a time of dangerous possibility. And I think that the complexity of that statement is really what I feel is the power of what it is to be in a black woman's body in this time to be occupying this body which is a great privilege, honor and blessing. And I think about this being a time for me. And it's about a rebirthing and birthing is like I was talking about a leg but leg but is represents the idea that chaos proceeds creation, and the birthing process is one of great chaos, and so necessary and so recognizing the duality of that. That it is, to me, this time is offering a an opportunity to really embody to really live into the complexity that we, we are not binary beings. We are socialized in the binary that either things are good or bad but in the tradition that I practice the, the leukemia if I tradition, everything is everything. And so to really live into that again to really disrupt a sort of patriarchal colonial mentality that, you know, is a setup for failure that in actuality the duality of life is so necessary so I feel like I've been hearing, you know, what Lorraine talked about in terms of the hope that this time offers who knew that it would take a pandemic to bring us to a place of great hope, and that that complexity is there where the pandemic has, you know, represented a lot of tragedy and loss it has also offered opportunity for black women to rest to for us to be able to take pause, you know, I feel that as black women we've been preparing for this moment for a long time. So this, you know, what the rest of the world is dealing with, we have been navigating for a very long time and are many of us are doing really well and I know that this is a really complicated thing to talk about but that is, you know, there's been an opportunity for feeling that this time has offered. So, again, you know, there's light and darkness and darkness and light, and that complexity. And I think about how there's a reading that happens in the ephah tradition that comes out every year in June, and the odu of the year really spoke about it's going to be black women who lead. And it's not because it's our job to take care of others, but in the act of taking care of ourselves in a deeper way, everyone benefits. And so that's what I'm swirling with what it means to be in this black woman's body in this time and I'm so grateful. Wow. I'm grateful for you and for all of you and all of the wisdom and words that have been spoken for the heart that is so strongly present. I'm grateful for the ephah wisdom that you bring into our room today. And I'm grateful for the opportunity that we are living into today of experiencing all of creation, the good, the bad, the right, every polarity is becoming one. And this is a time of the coronavirus, the pandemic. This is a time of white nationalism in the White House. This is a time of economic disaster. This is a time of climate disaster. The chaos that you talked about so eloquently that precedes birth and rebirth. This is a time of heartache. This is a time of hope. I mean reparations. That's part of the hope. You know, after four centuries of not being heard on the need for repair, starting with Belinda's petition. We're not starting with but including Belinda's petition in the 17 or 1800s, what that was the first petition for reparation. We went through decades of not being heard of being marginalized whenever we mentioned that word of being branded as kooks and crazy folk for talking about black reparation, no matter that we could talk about reparations for the Holocaust, no matter we could talk about reparations for Japanese but for so long, whenever we uttered that word, we would demonize. And to see this year, the tremendous breakthroughs. It started earlier, but it really came to a head this year in June, especially when all of the presidential candidates were debating reparations. And now there are reparations initiatives all over the country in many, many different cities. That is part of the hope. And the Defund the Police Initiative, which is really a call to abolish systems that have historically and continuously abuse and brutalize and terrorize black people. And to see us talking about, yes, we need to abolish these, and to see that we're also talking about dreaming into existence, new ways of being present new ways of ensuring public safety new ways of doing justice, where finally black lives will matter is a great hope as well. It's a great light as well in these times. I want to say that personally, I have been practicing gratitude just very recently and I'm working on doing it in a more systematic and consistent way. Lorraine talked about that some black women practice gratitude. And I am really. Yeah, all I can say is that it's important to me, especially now this year this time and I don't think I've ever felt the desire and drive to practice gratitude and the way that I do now. So I'm grateful to each of you. To all of you in the audience. Thank you. Thank you everyone. Why is it important for black women to take care of themselves to rest to sleep to dream. And this sort of like both right well into what we've already been speaking up. I think that's a really interesting question. It takes me to a couple of different places. One is something that I'm going to be talking about more when I do my presentation which has to do with the importance of redeeming and lifting up the darkness and the dark phase, which is like the night when we rest. And so I remember from my time as a doctor that that when people have heart failure there's two kinds of heart failure there's a heart failure that has to do with the heart not being strong enough to pump the blood out. And another form where the heart has become stiffened and unable to relax and receive the blood back from the body. And that kind of heart failure. Often is common in African Americans because we're under so much stress all the time. All of our body muscles are always kind of tight. And so that kind of capacity for relaxation and opening and allowing the energy to flow back in before we pour it out again. It's vital. It's essential. It's life. It's life. It's part of life. There's, there's no such thing as a cycle. Unless you've got a phase of relaxation and filling and then a phase of contraction and and in merging. So that would be my thought. Wow. Thank you. You just muted yourself on you. Great. Go again with that. Can we take a moment. To breathe into our hearts. Just sitting back and feeling our feet planted on the earth. Breathe at putting to a rhythm that's natural to you. Breathing into the heart. And out. Feeling the light and spaciousness and openness of the heart and feeling that openness and space flow into every heart of us, every tissue, every sinew, every fiber. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that, Fania. Thank you for bringing us to stillness and quiet. Thank you for that. I don't know where you finished with. So I would like to respond when you're ready. And first and I think was about self care right and why is it important sleeping and and eating well. And being in good relationships. It's important because this is the time of the re birthing. This is the time of recreation. This is the time of renewal. This is the time of healing. And we as black women as the reading for the year has instructed us are embodying these new futures. We call the future of healing of wholeness and holiness to us when we embody them. Right now, the future is now. Sleep is so important. That's when our body yields. What we take into our body is what we become. Whole foods, ideally plant based foods, foods full of life, ingesting energies that are joyful. Energies that are positive and that bring out the best who we are, whether human energies or nature energies, making sure that we are nourished in those ways as well. And in many ways, this is a time of reclaiming our divine birthright. As African goddesses and nothing is too good to too great to nourishing to delicious for us. Thank you. I would lovingly like to reframe that question and say, why is rest and self care important for humans. One reason that I want to rephrase that is that I feel that in our culture, there's a way in which we are asked as black people as black women to state why we need what is that Fania pointed out a, you know, our birthright. Is it that we are somehow separate is part of our socialization that somehow we're not deserving of what is a human right, and that we have to insist upon it or resist a notion that somehow our needs are different. Not different. Everybody needs rest and black women need rest to. Yes, we are the most deprived because of racism and misogyny and patriarchy. And we are needing that just as much as anyone else. And so I, you know, I have questions about the questions that are asked specifically of black women. What is our birthright for humans. What is it that we all need, we all need rest we all need as Fania was sister Fania is pointing out, you know, nourishing nourishing food. We all need love we all need to live peaceful lives. And so, when I first heard the question I thought, I don't know how to answer that without it being in reference to what I am most deprived on based on my gender and and racial identity. And so I want to put forth the possibility that we should be insisting upon these things as a human right, not as a right for black women. Specifically, we are human as well. Thank you all so much for your reflections on this question. And I wanted to, and I wanted to mention that December 10 is the UN Human Rights Day. It's a good day to reflect on the declaration of human rights, but I'm not certain if everyone knows that actually Marcus Garvey drafted the first declaration of human rights, and that body did not take a day he actually filed it a few times. And if you look at, and it was many, many years before this particular document that we know as the declaration of human rights was ratified by the UN. But if you look at the first document and you look at this document the one that we know you so like whoa it's almost verbatim. And, and it's so on point. I mean, it's so on point. You should look at it I learned about this. I guess, I don't know if it was on Marcus Garvey's birthday August 17 or, or on the Africa Day on May 25. But I just thought it was really fascinating to show that you know we, we are, you know, we are so on point around what it means to be a human being and as a people, you know, as a diaspora. So anyway, yeah, I just thought that I just wanted to let you all know that. So, the final question before we shift and let everyone share your presentations. And if it could get better, it's going to really get better. It's going to like, it's already up there so it's going to even climb on. I just wanted us to sort of reflect for a minute on the, the notion of violence. You know, your work is, is anti violence, and violence is a concept we cannot find universal agreement on, especially where the violence is to get is against a black woman or girl. All of a sudden excuses are made for the aggression. How do you define violence is specifically violence against the black woman. And, and everyone can take that find you. I know your work has looked at violence, stayed in interpersonal violence violence injustice, and your justice is that you sort of have been working through and querying this justice centered around community and ownership and restoration where possible. And, and so you can, you know, you can take it wherever it goes for you. You're a southerner, I'm a southerner. I'm from New Orleans, you're from Birmingham. We're both in California, and you, you traveled, you know, the diaspora, and, and, and found a philosophical and spiritual home in South Africa. So around the work that you do, the anti violence and restorative justice work that you do. So, whoever wants to start, please feel free. Well, it seemed that you were directing that question at least the last part of it to me so I'll jump in here. I was born in bombing ham, Alabama. My home was located a top dynamite hill. Dr King at the time said it was the most violent and segregated city in the nation. That's my origin story. Waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of bombs going off all around us. Waking up at night to the sound of my father grabbing his gun and running downstairs and gathering with other armed fathers in the neighborhood to protect their families from racial terrorists. Community dynamite hill was targeted by the clan, because we were pushing the color line we were the first black family to move into this neighborhood that had previously been all white. So houses all around us were bomb we were very fortunate ours was not. The church was fire bomb just because they were interracial discussion groups they are across the street from the church lived an attorney by the name of Arthur D shores and unsung hero civil rights movement who worked with Thurgood Marshall at the time to bring litigation against segregation in schools and employment and housing we helped to bring the walls of segregation down his home was bombed four times. And then there was a bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, September 15 1963. Where four girls were killed one was blinded. Two of those girls were very close friends of mine. Carol Roberts and lived on the other side of town but her family and my family were very close we went on out of town trips together vacations that we were in Jack and Jill together as families. Cynthia Wesley live just two doors down and we played all the time. Their bodies when when Carol Roberts and called my mother to ask if my mother could drive with her to the church to go get Carol. They got to the church, my mother driving Carol was nowhere to be found her body had been blown to bits. So, violence is part of who I am today. Or I should say that the fierce commitment and determination and desire to create a world without it is very much a part of who I am today. And it started there. In Alabama and Birmingham. I'll stop there. And I may want to come back around. Thank you. Do you need anything. Sorry. Do you need anything. That was, that was pretty. Like, in the heart, you know. Yeah, I'm just stopping for a moment I'm pausing and. Thank you. Thank you for asking that. Yeah, that's. Thank you sister Fania for sharing that story, sharing your story your relationship to violence. It's so generous of you. And so vulnerable and so strong and so. It's necessary to remember those. To keep re remembering as a way to not forget. And I want to say that. So powerful is you are describing stories of such deep violence and. And I, and I also believe that. As a culture we need to recognize all the ways that violence occurs. Poverty is violence, misogyny is violence, patriarchy is violence, white supremacy is violence homophobia is violence. These are all violent structures. And, and I think that we live in a violent culture that normalizes that normalizes the violence that occurs oppression is violence oppression is violence in all its forms. And whether that violence is direct in as in the stories that sister Fania shared, or in the ways that rain talked about in terms of the stress on our bodies, the violence of stress that then results in heart attack and injury to the heart. And so there are all these ways that violence is being we live in a violent culture. And so what needs to shift is that we have to that has to shift, because we need to see how, how I think collectively, how these systems are rooted in violence. And, yeah, I'll leave it there. I may come back just for a moment if that's okay. Yeah. I talked about my origin story and as you were talking Amara I thought about the origin story of this nation contained in the seeds of your origins is all that you are and all that you will become. And we are a nation born in the slave trade in the Ma'afa and slavery and genocide and land theft and racial capitalism and structural racism and white supremacy colonialism. All of that in X massive harm to bodies to spirits to minds to women, or to air to waters to monument to harm. It's an engine, a massive engine of harm of violence. And we're finally seeing that we're a nation born, not so much in liberty, not so much in the proposition that all are created. We're a nation born in the blood of of ineffable horrors. And because we have never really confronted that we're beginning to confront it because we have pushed it under the red red because we bury these truths. For so long we've silenced these truths for so long. We keep reenacting those traumas, and we will keep reenacting them until we face those harm so the truth about those harms. We acknowledge them, and take action to repair and rebuild and we are living in a time of telling the truth about those harms acknowledging those harms and T, to repair and rebuild. I was talking earlier about human rights, yes, the right to shelter the right to rest the right to nourishing foods the right to loving relationships, the future that we are birthing now. Finally, and the work that all of you are doing the healing work that each of us is doing on this panel and and in the audience is helping to bird that new world. Well, I feel ill equipped to add anything to those to the to the extremely wise and powerful words of Spaniard Amara, certainly the observations about the foundations of our nation, and which go back even further than that I mean, the Europeans pretty much violated everybody that they came in contact with even before 1776. And I think the fact that so much of the economic foundation of this country is based on theft kind of necessitates violence, because people aren't going to let you take their land or labor without resisting, and the only way to deal with their resisting is to obliterate them in some way. I think, for me when I think about violence, I think about there's a kind of a dyadic process the violence happens and on the other side, the person who's being violence against is feeling something they're feeling fear. I think that the fact that we live in this culture that saturated with violence means that all of us are in a constant state of fear, whether we actually have it at the surface of our consciousness or not, it's there. It's so I think now in the time of the pandemic people are that level of fear is close to the surface for everyone, because everyone is afraid to go out of their house I mean the only reason that anyone the reason that I agree this with Amara had spoken about how you know it's possible to be doing well right now. And part of the reason is I don't go out of my house. And as long as I'm in my house I'm not. I'm only a little afraid. I mean I have an alarm system so you know at night I can say I'm not afraid because the alarm is on, you know, but fear is ever present and that's the legacy of violence. And the fact that it is possible to just stay at home. Not all of us can do that. And so the people that have to go out are feeling even more fear, because there's sickness all around them. There's increasing levels of poverty and desperation. And all of that is a result of this violence that's coming from the top down on all of us. So I think, you know, in addition to the way that we end violence we can end violence in some way by stopping the sources of violence. We also have to deal with the fear that the violence has given birth to bringing it up making it conscious. Otherwise people act out of it without even realizing it. Thank you. Profound question. Now we're going to shift into presentation so I'm trying to remember. Amara, were you going to go first? I'm trying to remember. I can. Yes. I can go first if that feels right or if anyone else wants to go I'm not attached one way or the other. Well, you had mentioned you've got like a couple of ideas for your presentation one way. I'm thinking for the sake of time. I think what I'll do is share just the video of the work and talk about my work a little bit. For the sake of time because I want to be mindful of that as well. Can we come back and close with your movement thing? Sure. Absolutely. So, you know, you said a lot in my introduction. I make my work is performance based rooted in dance movement and performance. I make what I call conjure art utilizing spiritual ritual in the making and execution of the work. I came to this many years ago. My focus has always been to make work that grappled with questioned and addressed issues of social and environmental justice. But I became increasingly uninterested in making trauma part and more interested in how does the work shift the vibration of the issues. And for me that necessitated that I bring my spiritual practice into my art making. So my work happens rarely in a traditional theater setting and more in public spaces. I read I think of my work as site responsive. The environment where the work is manifest is a collaborator in the work and it's not a blank canvas, but a canvas that has a history and a spirit. And for the past five, four, five years now, I've been engaged in a multi site based performance project called Houseful of Black Women that happens in Oakland. It's about Oakland. It's about the experience of black women and girls in Oakland and focuses on the displacement, the well being and the sex trafficking of black women and girls in Oakland. These are all important issues. And when I speak about it, I say displacement, I put a well being in the center, because at the center of this project is our well being that the issue is displacement and sex trafficking but the at the center is working towards our collective well being and our right to be well. So I think with that, I'll just show a video that is a Shana is going to show a video but I will say quickly about it is that this is represents some of the last five years of how the work has manifested throughout Oakland and is a collage of the work. I asked you, I watched. Well, I went to your, your website. And I looked at your current project, the Chitlin circuit. And I was wondering, and it looked like it had to do with gentrification and displacement. And you, you have a piece about being and growing up in San Francisco and then there's some other stories of other women. But I know you're also running, raising money to be able to do the work. So I was wondering if you maybe had plans on telling us a little bit about that. Sure. So, the way that this project happens as a series of episodes. And so what what that video represented was bits and pieces of several episodes that have happened over the last five and a half years in Oakland. And the, we think of the episodes as, as we're reclaiming that, you know, that term episode can talk about a part of a story, and it can also speak to how, you know, especially women in femme identified folks have been spoken of as having female episodes. So reclaiming that language and each episode is imbued or is the underpinning is a prayer around a certain aspect of our homefulness or our right to live safely in a world in our femme identified bodies. And so the last episode we did was actually very recent. It was in October, and we did. It was called the new chitlin circuitry reparations vaudeville so the original idea was to create a work that was sort of drawing on the essence of vaudeville which was this, this, this, this performance event that would happen. And where you would have all these different acts come together and some of them were body and some of them were opera acts and vaudeville was a, a place where black artists could actually, you know, perform their art in ways that were not available in other, other ways. And so, so we thought about, you know, we were playing with reclaiming this idea of the vaudeville and Oakland would be the stage. We, we paired it back because the idea came to be prior to the COVID pandemic and so we had a series of social, what I call physical distancing and socially intimate events that were how the vaudeville manifested and one of them is in a space that is now called Liberation Park, which is an initiative in East Oakland that took over led by the black cultural zone collective and it is a space that exists behind Eastmont Mall is this open lot that has been has been now turned into a park. And there's now a Sunday farmers market called a coma market that happens once a month, and it's a space that is being a reclaimed. And so we held, we did, we performed the episode in that space. We also performed aspects of it in Betty ono gallery, which is a Nika barbers space and we had a performance of black women magicians. Well, there are now more. And they performed black women's magic inside that space to an audience of 10. And as we, we practice the physical distancing and say that this Houseful of black women is a collective project co directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang, who is my, my art life. And, and with a collaborative of 25 women black women, some of whom are sex trafficking abolitionists like Regina Evans. There are artists who are a part of this project and artists and activists and mothers and architects and somatic healers and you know, all of us coming together to create work and actually do the healing work with each other. So the priority of this project is that we come together to heal our relationship with one another. Because, you know, black women's health and well being will, for us deter, we determine that we must heal ourselves and our relationship to each other, and then from their ripples outward. So that's been the priority of this project is to change shift the vibration of our, our home, our housing insecurity, the violence, you know the sexual violence that most of us have experienced and shift that vibration to healing and well being. Okay, you looking for new members. Oh, open door always you you already a part of Houseful of black women, we already claimed you. I'll be there. I am there. Thank you. Lorraine, would you like to go next star of Lorraine Bonner. Yes, thank you very much. Wow, I just that that video just really blew me away and I actually have been watching some of them on your website and I agree I'd like to join to you know I mean, not much of a dancer but I can jump around a little. It is done. It is already said and done. That would be an honor. Thank you. Thank you would be my honor. I wanted to talk a little bit about about my, my progress and my you know how I got to where I am which is, I don't know where it is. There's a there's a couple of, there may be a few little trigger warnings I'm going to talk about. I'm going to mention child sexual abuse which obviously has already been talked about. I don't think there's anything really graphic or scary, but if there's something I'll say something. So, I went to medical school in the 70s and I really loved it I really loved going to school and learned a lot. For example, I learned about diabetes, I learned about the pancreas and insulin and sugar and how they work with the, with the liver and the muscle cells and the fat cells. It was, it was kind of like, actually, I've come to think of it as kind of like learning about tennis by studying the fuzz on the tennis ball. There's this thing called holistic medicine which nobody knew much about it was a little gleam on the horizon nobody was actually teaching it, but I believed in it and at the time I thought it had something to do with recognizing the interplay of the mind and the body that we weren't a mind and a body but rather a body mind. I studied meditation and breathing relaxation guided imagery, gnosis stuff like that to help people regain a sense of the wholeness of their body mind. That was what I thought of as holistic medicine and healing was relaxation through breathing and conversations with your pancreas. I was also interested in diet and exercise but that also hadn't been addressed much in medical school. And I once I suggested to a patient that she take walks around the block to help manage her diabetes. And she looked at me and she said, Dr, I can't walk around the block those those kids out there they would knock me down and take my purse. And I said, how about some fresh fruits and vegetables and she said there's no grocery store in my neighborhood. I kind of got that the sphere of holistic medicine was going to be bigger than body mind it was bigger and really out of my control, and really then it only got larger. Because sometime in the mid 80s, repressed memories of my own childhood trauma began to surface. And then I started learning more about trauma and asking questions to my patients about their experience of trauma and abuse. And man, then it seemed like what was I thinking about practicing holistic medicine. I could not get my arms around this thing at all. So by the end of the 80s, my life was really disrupted. I actually was listening to our talking about a leg but and the time of chaos and confusion. I was clearly not going to be able to be the kind of doctor I wanted to be. The person I thought I was this this eruption of memories into my life had completely blown up my ideas about my childhood my parents, my identity, everything was blowing up. So at that point I decided to refocus my medical practice I left primary care and became a hospitalist which is a kind of doctor that just works in the hospital and takes care of people that are really sick enough to be admitted to the hospital. And then they go back to their primary care doctor when we get them back on their feet is the kind of medicine that Western medicine is kind of designed for. It was some way I could really use my skills help people and really just kind of rest from the whole holistic thing. Because there's really so much you can't do anything about. In the meantime, I was working on my own recovery from these horrible memories and I turned to art. And I will share with you with the progression is I have a slide show which I'm not quite ready to show but if it could be gotten ready to be coming up pretty soon. A friend of mine gave me a bag of clay she had gone to a community art center and taken some ceramics classes and we played together. And all these little figures started coming out of my hands. And they were telling stories that I could not say, I could not say, I know words. I also started going to 12 step meetings for survivors of incest and other forms of childhood abuse and heard the term perpetrator, which was defined in these programs as someone who has betrayed a trust. Now, you know, we all had different people who had betrayed our trust in different ways. So I was reflecting on that quite a bit and I realized that really, in fact, all of social living is based on trust and the expectation of trustworthiness. And all of the catastrophic problems that are afflicting us, all of the supremacisms, all of the plundering of the ecosystem, all of the capital over labor, all of that can be seen as the outcome of a massive form of untrustworthiness. The people who are doing these things to us are extremely untrustworthy and betraying our trust. And it rolls downhill. In my own life, I began to see how the feelings of unworthiness that I had felt all my life and the patterns of self destructive behavior that have begun in my childhood, were not signs of something really deficient and defective in me, but we're happening because some things had been done to me. That was a big paradigm shift. The clay led the way, which and led to an exploration of perpetration and I'm wondering if the slideshow could be put up now we we worked so hard to get it to work. This is a piece called studying the perpetrator. By this time I had started not really knowing. I'm not really seeing the little thing down there that that enabled me to move the slides around. The clicking. Oh, here it is. Okay, good. Great. Thank you. It went away again. Come back. Oh, oh, I have to press. Okay. The clay led the way. By this time I'd learned enough about clay to have found this, this wonderful luscious. Yeah, there we go, black clay that that I claimed for myself. All of us and the perpetrator claimed the white clay for his self. I want to say just as this at the outset that I do not track these clays that are black and white do not track for me with people who are socially defined as black or white. It's pretty clear to me that perpetrators come in every skin color. And I'm going to talk about skin colors a little bit later on. My own perpetrators were my father and other men. I am accustomed to using the male pronoun for that reason, but I'm also aware that not all perpetrators are cis men, cis males. So after I started recovering these memories, my life was very disrupted as I mentioned and it felt like the images and feelings that came with the memories were stuck in my bodies like stones. My mind and my heart were split into a million pieces and in some ways still are denial and self doubt filled my mind. I realized that I had in many ways sacrificed my heart, my capacity to feel in order to survive the betrayal. This next one's a little harder. Oops, we lost it. At one point I began to bleed uncontrollably. I was speakable and unescapable. But then as it had before the clay came to help me. I extracted the perpetrators white male head from my dark female body. And I continue to search myself for remnants of supremacism, which are as pervasive as the air we breathe. The tongue of lies from my mind and began listening to myself, my body, other survivors in the clay. I began to notice when I went to the clay supply store that there were other colors of clay beside the black and white very much like the colors of human beings dark brown to pale beige tinged with reds and yellows. I went to Wikipedia and looked up melanin. This is a model of the basic unit of melanin. The actual molecule is long chains of these units and it is dark brown. Different variants of melanin are more red or yellow, just like us. The social labels of black and white made very little sense to me. We are one species in a rainbow of browns. I began using clays of different colors to represent what I call multi huge humanity and reserved the black and white clays for the archetypes of black and white. The perpetrator has made white and its attributes dominant over black, but the two are supposed to be reciprocal of equal value power sacredness as we free ourselves from perpetration. Black is redeemed black. Yes, black is redeemed we meditate on the balance of black and white. These pieces are made from various different colors of clay. All merged together and the idea is that each person looking at this piece could probably if they looked hard enough find their own skin color represented. Black and white of course, have their own meaning. Black is the night which reveals the stars that guided the ancestors to freedom. Black is the wound and the soil in which life germinates. Then about five years ago, I had the first of several surgeries. This was the leg but coming back in my life again. The surgeries caused me to reflect on wounding and scars. I was grateful and remain grateful to have access to health care and that the surgery fixed the problems. But now I have scars where my body was once unmarred. I was mended, but I didn't feel restored to wholeness. I made this piece. I think it was before the first surgery. It was shown in an exhibition that was dedicated to the black panthers and a woman who lived in back east and one of the Carolinas bought it. When I shipped it to her. It arrived. The head was broken. She sent it back to me. I had heard. I thought about putting it back together, but I had heard about a Japanese technique of mending broken pottery called Kansugi, which I'm probably not pronouncing properly. While in our country, we tend to mend broken things so the seams are invisible. Japanese philosophy holds that there is beauty in imperfections. And so broken pottery is repaired with gold. I repaired this piece. A few YouTube videos later in the head became part of another piece, which also incorporates the multi-hued humanity theme. Here are some additional pieces in the multi-hued humanity series, which I for various reasons have not made as many of us I hope to make in the future. In the old days and even now, black women sewed and mended scraps of cloth and created quilts, which in addition to providing warmth and comfort were also works of art. I now see my work both as a doctor and as an artist as a kind of mending. It's a small thing, mending. The work of Sister Fanya guiding the youth along paths of peace and non-violence. The work of Sister Amara in lifting the body and dance and ritual. The work of sisters in urban community gardens. The work of sisters Kamala and Stacey, the squad, our foremothers Shirley Chisholm and Fannie Lou Hamer in the political realm. All of us mending whatever fragment of Frabric we have in our hand. Together we create a quilt, a work of art that will bring beauty and wholeness to our nation and the world. My deepest hope and belief is that we as black women are the wounded healers of our wounded world. Thank you. I think there's one more image. This is multi-hued humanity, nurturing black. Everybody's child. Lovely. Lovely. Yeah, thank you so much, Sister Arlene Lorraine. And I just wanted to make everyone aware that we are, wow, we filled the time and we don't have a whole lot left. However, Sister Fanya. Wow. I'm glad that you two went first. I did experience all of this. I'm still vibrating from it and I'm still ingesting it and holding it. And I will be for some time to come. There's not a whole lot really I want to say. You know, the aftermath of all that you have gifted us with. But obviously the theme here today is mending. It's healing. It's making whole. Whether it's you, Wanda, who having co-founded or founded the Maafa project. Are healing the wounds. On both sides of the Atlantic. That were inflicted by the middle passage. Offering burial ceremonies. To our ancestors who were lost. Of the Atlantic Ocean. And who never received burial rights. This is a work of ancestral. Or whether we're talking about Shauna and her. Healing through healing self and healing communities and ancestors through amazing poetry relating to the experience about four mothers on the auction blocks. Lorraine, you were a physician. You're still a healer healer. You're an artist of the human body, but of the human spirit. Of community. You're a sculptor who heals through art. And through using the media of earth and water, both of which are feminine mediums. The earth, the feak and fertile wound like ground for rebirth for renewal water, the water of life. And so the medium of renewal. And Amara, you are just. Premier healer using your body. The spirit, the divine feminine. Embodying it all. Healing. Our bodies is African American women as humans. You're walking the streets of Oakland. You're bringing the divine into our everyday. The spirits of wholeness and healing and. Of disruption. Into our bodies and into our lives. You're sacralizing the body. You're making it whole and holy. And I do my own kind of healing work. In our communities and schools in my family. And I had my own journey and then continues, of course. On journey into healing. And so it kind of. Started after about 30 years of being an angry activists and trial lawyer litigating and fighting racism in the courts and fighting it in the streets and. And anger from the loss of my friends in Alabama anger from. When the police invaded my apartment almost killed my husband and me. And I had a sister who was targeted with the legal lynching. But thank God. Thank the goddesses and thank the people of the world. She was freed. Angry from. All of the. Violence that we talked about earlier. That permeates and pervades and saturates our lives. I fell out of balance and it almost had affected my reproductive organs. And I knew that this was Spirit's way, the ancestor's way of inviting more healing, of asking me to invite more healing energies into my life. All of the hyper-masculinity, hyper-aggressivity, hyper-bellicosity and combativeness that I was forced to cultivate to be a successful trial lawyer and activist had gotten me totally out of whack. I had too much fire, too much anger, and I needed healing waters. I needed healing energies, energies of the divine, energies of women, of the feminine. And so at that point I ended up shutting down my law practice and threw a whole lot of dreams and synchronicities, which I won't get into now because of time. But I ended up in the HD program, which allowed me to go to Africa and study with healers and did that for some years and came back to Oakland and ended up learning about restorative justice, which is a healing justice. A justice that instead of adding to the harm seeks to interrupt cycles of harm, a justice that instead of damaging relations further like our justice system does, it seeks to heal damaged relationships. A justice that is rooted in indigenous core beliefs about the goodness, inherent goodness of humanity and the equal moral worth and dignity of all. A justice that is rooted in ideas about who I am because we are, and we are because I am. A justice that is rooted in Lakesh, I am the other you. A justice that is rooted in Mitaki Oyasi in the Lakota Sioux. We are relatives. We are family. We human beings have come to earth to learn to take care of one another and ourselves. And that's that discovery of restorative justice propelled me to do the work in schools that I'm no longer with Arjoy, by the way, and by the way, I saw that there is a co-founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth Arjoy in the audience, and I want to give a shout out to her, Nancy Nadel. I'm no longer with Arjoy, but the work continues. And I just want to close by saying that it's just been such a deep honor, a privilege, a pleasure, revelation, an inspiration to be here with you today in the panel, on the panel and in the audience. And, you know, this gets, we talked about this being a time of heartache and hope. You are the hope. You know, the earth and clay are the hope. The spirits walking the streets and dancing the streets of Oakland, and on the waters are the hope. Alpha is the hope, and Shauna, you, as a young person, you are the hope. You as someone gifted with the power of poetic word or the hope. And all of you in the audience who are here today, I'm sure you're here because you too are healers in some way. And I just want to honor all of you. Yeah. Wow. Gosh, but thank you so much to start Fania, to start Lorraine, and to start Amara, and to start Shauna, and to start on the controls, Anissa, for this wonderful conversation. We do make the road by walking, and we should definitely continue to be more intentional, and I really like the idea of, you know, gratitude, you know, that we are here. You know, there are a lot of people that want to be here that aren't here. And gratitude also to the ancestors who are always with us, but we don't call on them enough. We don't recognize them enough. And so just call on your angels, you're never really alone. You just think you are. And I want to turn this back over to Shauna, and thank you so much. And this particular program is available, and hopefully we'll have more conversations. And Amara, I don't want to put you on the spot, but I was so loved to be a part of your company and your work, because I just really admire it. And I really love it. Absolutely. Absolutely. No pressure. We'll see you at the next episode, right? Oh, totally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And to the audience, thank you so much for putting your thoughts and your prayers and your reflections in the river. Continue to do so. We have access to that as well as you do. And if you want to save it, there are three dots you can click on them, and you can have the river, because, you know, the water is good. It's good. It's really good for the soul just to keep it flowing. So please take the river with you. Take us, take the river with you. We'll all be connected that way. Thank you all for being here. The words, the art, the dancing was all so wonderful. And thank you, Wanda, for hosting, you know, for moderating this wonderful program. I think you've got someplace else to go now, right? Yeah. West Oakland, the West Africa poetry reading, the final reading is at the African-American Museum and Library at Oakland until three o'clock in Zoom, but I'm not on until the end. Okay. It was great meeting you all and, again, so much gratitude. Thank you all. Have a good, have a good afternoon. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Wanda. Thank you, Shawn. Thank you. Thank you so much. It was wonderful being able to spend time with you. Everyone. And just, probably, wonderful. Until we meet again. Right? Yeah. Let that be soon. All right. Thank you. We're setting up the whole slideshow thing. I really appreciate your tech support. Thank you. Yes. Thanks, Anissa. All right. Signing off.