Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines

273 Pages·2016·2.57 MB·English

by  Alexis Pauline Gumbs

“There are some books that are considered to be necessary and needed be-
cause they speak to the issues that guide our heart and situate our world.
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines is one of those books.
Although it is primarily written for mothers of all ages, the issues that are
raised—about family, love, struggle, sacrifice, and acceptance—are universal
as they speak to the revolutionary that exists within all of us. It is the book
that you will turn to again and again, the one that will become a lifestyle hand-
book in your home, and the one that you will recommend as a lifeline when
folks feel that they have nothing left to give either to themselves or to others.
It is the book that mothers have been waiting for.”
—Karsonya Wise Whitehead, PhD, author Notes from a Colored Girl:
The Civil War Pocket Diaries of Emilie Frances Davis and Letters to My
Black Sons: Raising Boys in a Post-Racial America
“there is an artform in the nurturing of life. when we think of the word ‘revo-
lutionary,’ what often comes to mind is a warrior with a roar of ‘NO’ on their
lips, moving against the forces of oppression. and there is this other force, the
soil for the seed, the water for the green and fragile form, the wisdom to lis-
ten, the question that climbs under the cover where you cower away from the
psychological and socioeconomic monsters, the shoulder with a collarbone
cup for tears. the soft voice whispering, and believing, that who you are is
marvelous and miraculous and irreplaceable. this collection offers us voices
from those living into and redefining the act of mothering—in your hands is
gift after gift of lessons learned on an intergenerational front line. listen to
those who hold hands with the future—herein lies everything.”
—adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction
Stories from Social Justice Movements
“Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines is the revolutionary Black
and Brown, queer and trans, disabled, non and many partnered parenting
manual manifesto we have been waiting for. I am so grateful to see this book
in the world, collecting pieces of work I have soaked up eagerly when I read
them online, in zines, as handouts in workshops and in now out of print mag-
azines. ‘Love is lifeforce’ is a line June Jordan said, presented in an essay of
hers published here for the first time. That phrase has been on my lips since
I read it. This book is revolutionary, marginalized, resisting mama/parenting
love lifeforce magic.”
—Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Dirty River, Love Cake,
and Consensual Genocide
“Through Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, Alexis Pauline
Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams have acted as parteras comu-
nitarias, midwifes of words and experiences. This collection reflects, docu-
ments, and carries on an ancient and living legacy of practicing and defining
motherhood beyond the constraints of the biological. As someone who has
been living and writing about mami’hood, the intersection of race, class, gen-
der, sexuality and activism through the lens of mothering, this book reads and
feels like a shared collective deep breath, a shared chant/cancion of affirma-
tion, reclamation, and transformation.”
—Maegan “la Mamita Mala” Ortiz, NYRican mami media maker
“This is the book for readers who know mothering is not just about a baby
and a mother or parents in an isolated suburban nursery, but that mothering
happens in a context of generations, a context of racial history, and in a spiri-
tual context; that it takes place from the shoreline to the front line, in times of
scarcity and abundance; that it is queer and love-filled. Here, revolution, love,
and mothering are an inseparable unity. Here, the voices of women of color
feminists—mothers, daughters, childcare workers—carry on the conversa-
tion begun in the 1970s and 1980s, pick up the threads of the reproductive
justice movement which has been in the struggle for 20 years.
“These writings are grounded in the force of transgressive love. It is an
act of love by the editors and a gift for readers that June Jordan’s ‘The Creative
Spirit: Children’s Literature’ is anthologized here for the first time. Jordan
says, ‘Love is lifeforce. . . . I see love as the essential nature of all that supports
life.’
“The book’s first sentence opens in the ‘complex matrix of domination
and oppression . . . under Ronald Reagan’s cowboy capitalism.’ The dozens of
essays which follow illuminate the complexity of radical 21st-century mother-
ing. The book ends in the home, close up, with one mother and her children:
for a year, the mother has drawn a coffee cup a day to remind herself to mind
her own needs and desires. On her birthday, her children give her a coffee
cup paper sculpture which they have made. After her children have gone to
bed, she writes, ‘I savor how much there is to celebrate during this time of
transformation.’ And transformation is what this collection of inspiring essays
is about.”
—Faith Holsaert, co-editor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal
Accounts of Women in SNCC

Revolutionary
Mothering
Love on the Front Lines
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
China Martens
Mai’a Williams
PM Press BTL
2016

Revolutionary
Mothering
Praise
for Revolutionary Mothering
“Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines is juicy, gutsy, vulnerable,
and very brave. These women insist on having their children in a society that
does not welcome them, in a world that is rapidly falling apart. Their dream
for their children, based on their love of them, encompasses the sorrow and
the joy that mothers everywhere, whether human, animal, or plant, feel at
this time. A radical vision, many radical visions of how to mother in a time of
resistance and of pain.”
—Alice Walker
“For women of color, the art of mothering has been framed by the most viru-
lent systems, historically: enslavement, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism.
We have had few opportunities to define mothering not only as an aspect of
individual lives and choices, but as the processes of love and as a way of struc-
turing community. Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines arrives
as a needed balm. As Toni Cade Bambara once said, we need to ‘make revolu-
tion irresistible.’”
—Alexis De Veaux, author of Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde
and Yabo
“Revolutionary Mothering is a love offering from diverse women of color
around the globe—queer, immigrant, activist, feminist, poets, workers. An
urgent call for radical, transgressive, political, defiant mothering, co-editors
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams provide an antidote
to obligatory, compulsory motherhood which is pioneering and liberating.”
—Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies
at Spelman College
“Since i am a ‘non-bio/mothering’ female, who finds the idea of something
growing in, then popping out of my body repugnant, nauseating, and depress-
ing to even contemplate, it comes as a great and refreshing surprise that i hon-
estly enjoyed this intense, vibrantly inspiring collection about ‘radical moth-
ering.’ Not just enjoyed but learned and totally admired the range of eclectic
essays and approaches, as well as the brave, wonderful, trailblazing writers.
Recommended for any passionately thinking person who cares about the qual-
ity of life in the near or distant future. For people who want to make a major,
serious difference; for revolutionaries on a most profound and basic level.”
—doris davenport, poet/writer/educator and one of the original con-
tributors to This Bridge Called My Back
This edition first published in Canada in 2016 by Between the Lines
401 Richmond Street West, Studio 277, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada
1-800-718-7201
www.btlbooks.com
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher or
(for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright www.accesscopyright.ca.
Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. Between the Lines
would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
          Revolutionary mothering : love on the front lines / Alexis Pauline Gumbs,
China Martens, and Mai’a Williams, eds.
Between the Lines ISBN 978-1-77113-254-1 (paperback)
           1. Mothers--Social conditions.  2. Minority women--Social conditions. 
3. Motherhood--Social aspects.  4. Motherhood--Political aspects.  I. Gumbs,
Alexis Pauline, 1982-, editor  II. Martens, China, 1966-, editor  III. Williams,
Mai’a, editor
HQ759.R49 2016                                  306.874’3                          C2015-907923-3
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines
Edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams
© 2016 by PM Press
ISBN: 9781629631103
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930906
Cover: John Yates/Stealworks.com
Cover print, Heartbeat City by Favianna Rodriguez (Favianna.com)
Layout: Jonathan Rowland
PM Press
P.O. Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan
www.thomsonshore.com
dedicated to all the revolutionary mothers and all the
revolutions they’ve created, because mothering is love by
any means necessary