Written from both historical and cultural perspectives, Salvation takes an incisive look at the transformative power of love in the lives of African Americans. Whether talking about the legacy of slavery, relationships and marriage in Black life, the prose and poetry of Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou, the liberation movements of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, or hip hop and…
Brown Sugar: A Collection Of Erotic Black Fiction | Edited by Carol Taylor
Brown Sugar brings together some of the most acclaimed voices in today’s black literary world — Sapphire, Natasha Tarpley, Reginald Harris, and Pamela Sneed, among them. These titillating stories cover the full spectrum of black experience and identity as they reveal sexuality and sensuality in all their varied and exotic…
“The Saint Heron Library continues the work we have been building by preserving collections of creators with the urgency they deserve,” Solange said. “Together we seek to create an archive of stories and works we deem valuable. These works expand imaginations, and it is vital to us to make them accessible to students, and our communities for research and engagement, so that the works are integrated into our collective story and belong and grow with us.”
“The collection of 50 books is free and will be available — first come, first served — to U.S. -based residents only, starting Oct. 18 on Saint Heron’s website. Once checked out, readers will have access to their one selected book for 45 days.”
happy pride reccing some anti-assimilationist, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist books and texts
BOOKS
Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2012)
“Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into "straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,” what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?“
This pamphlet is an attempt to trace the historic rise of an oppression that, as yet, has no commonly agreed name. We are talking here about people who defy the ‘man’-made boundaries of gender.
Transgender Warriors: Making history from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg (1996)
[Leslie Feinberg’s] book celebrated the resistance to transphobia and a vision of trans liberation articulated from the perspective of class struggle. It understood that no liberation from transphobia or any of the divisive and violent oppressions in class society is possible without the transformation of capitalism into socialism.
Stories told of these times make the faggots and their friends weep. The second revolutions made many of the people less poor and a small group of men without color very rich. With craftiness and wit the faggots and their friends are able to live in this time, some in comfort and some in defiance.
Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation edited by Kate Bornstein, and S. Bear Bergman (2010)
Today’s transgenders and other sex/gender radicals are writing a drastically new world into being.
Made In India: Decolonizations, Queer Sexualities, Trans/National Projects by Suparna Bhaskaran (2004)
Made In India explores the making of "queer” and “heterosexual” consciousness and identities in light of economic privatization, global condom enterprises, sexuality-focused NGOs, the Bollywood-ization of beauty contests, and trans/national activism.
That’s Revolting: Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation edited by Matilda Bernstein Sycamore (2008)
As the growing gay mainstream prioritises the attainment of straight privilege over all else, it drains queer identity of any meaning, relevance or cultural value.
How To Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm (2021)
Malm argues that sabotage is a logical form of climate activism, and criticizes both pacifism within the climate movement and “climate fatalism” outside it.
On Connection by Kae Tempest (2020)
On Connection is medicine for these wounded times.
Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Y. Davies (2003)
If you know anything about Angela Davis—anti-racist activist, Marxist-feminist scholar—you know that her answer to the question posed in the title is “Yes.” This is a short primer on the prison abolition movement
Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom by Derecka Purnell
This profound, urgent, beautiful, and necessary book is an invitation to imagine and organize for a less violent and more liberatory world.
Black Marxism by Cedric Johnson (1983)
Influenced by many African American and Black economists and radical thinkers of the 19th century, Robinson creates a historical-critical analysis of Marxism and the Eurocentric tradition from which it evolved. The book does not build from nor reiterate Marxist thought, but rather introduces racial analysis to the Marxist tradition.
The Transgender Issue: An Argument For Justice by Shon Faye (2021)
[Shon Faye] provides a compelling, wide-ranging analysis of trans lives from youth to old age, exploring work, family, housing, healthcare, the prison system and trans participation in the LGBTQ+ and feminist communities, in contemporary Britain and beyond.
Burn The Binary: selected writings on the politics of being trans, genderqueer, and non-binary by Riki Wilchins (2017)
This single volume offers a selection of Riki’s most penetrating and insightful pieces, as well as the best of two decades of Riki’s online columns for The Advocate never before collected, from “Where Have All the Butches Gone,” to “Attack of the 6-Foot Intersex People”
The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.
“This brings us to the third problem with eschatological framings of the climate crisis: they overlook the fact that for many, the end of the world has already happened. In October last year, Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani woman, mother and leader, wrote a desperate letter to the western world reminding us that for Indigenous peoples, “the fires are raging still”.”
MISC
Manifesto: An Aromantic Manifesto by yingchen and yingtong
There is a space for everyone. A space, a glass of water, and a plug socket.* Chairs and tables and cleaned toilets. So many chairs so that no one is without one.
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.
Wide open in the shape of an enormous fan splashed with violent colors, Marseille lay bare to the glory of the meridian sun, like a fever consuming the senses, alluring and repelling, full of the unending pageantry of ships and of men.
Magnificent Mediterranean harbor. Port of seaman’s dreams and their nightmares. Port of the bums’ delight, the enchanted breakwater. Port of innumerable ships, blowing out, booming in, riding the docks, blessing the town with sweaty activity and giving sustenance to worker and boss, peddler and prostitute, pimp and panhandler. Port of the fascinating, forbidding and tumultuous Quayside against which the thick scum of life foams and bubbles and breaks in a syrup of passion and desire.
A noted figure of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay had an itinerant career—travelling widely in Europe and North Africa, and eventually forsaking the Marxism of his early years for Catholicism. This vibrant satire, begun in 1929, later abandoned, and now published for the first time, follows a West African stowaway on a boat from Marseille to New York. Discovered by the crew and shut in a freezing room, he loses both legs to frostbite, but, in a twist based on real cases, wins a large settlement from the shipping company and is able to return to Marseille a rich man. Encompassing a huge diversity of perspectives—including memorable evocations of Marseille’s black Marxist scene and of its queer subculture—the novel remains radical in its clear-eyed assessment of racism and unsentimental depiction of disability.
And again destiny played its game, when I saw you that night. I saw you were with her and worse was the fact that you two looked perfect, unlike us. You never looked at me the way you were looking at her, totally mesmerized like the blind had finally gotten his eyesight and could now see the colourful world. Was she your world? Was she that anchor you used to talk about? It was getting more and more difficult to breathe. I felt like my chest was on fire and no ice in the world could cool it down. I felt the walls coming closer to me, engulfing me.
Over the years that I’d spent away from you, I had lied to my heart continuously that I had moved on, that I wasn’t stuck in that place which felt so much like home. Oh, I wish all of that were true. I wish I had left that place. But wishes are known for not getting fulfilled.
Us humans are so strange. Begging to forget the love we carry for someone just because it couldn’t work out.
You fixed her dress. I remember one night, when I spilled wine all over my dress, you had stood there and laughed, like I were some clown.
And as all these thoughts filled my mind, someone fixed my hair and I looked by my side and found the one who loved me.
She stood there, six feet away from me. Oh, how much I wanted to take those six steps and scoop her up into my arms. The wind blew and I wanted nothing but to become the hair that vined around her neck. And the moment she looked at me and smiled the smile of half angel, half satan. My heart broke into thousand pieces and the brightness in her eyes glued those pieces back together. And that was the moment I knew how fragile my heart was.
I could feel the hate radiating from her. I could see it in her eyes. I knew she didn’t recognize me anymore. Of course she didn’t. Who was I? Nothing. I had known it for quite a long time. I had seen the flashes of that monster inside of me, gradually becoming more prominent day by day.
I was sure though. I was sure that I would never hurt her, my princess, my girl. Yet here she was, standing in front of me, begging for mercy, asking to let her go.
“Show her what you can do. Show her the power you hold over her.” Said the voice I had been trying to fight for months. It always got the best of me.
Not today. I thought. With my heart breaking and my soul dying, I asked her to leave. I couldn’t look her in the eye. But I saw the hurt cross her face. Like she was expecting me to stop her from leaving.
*Trust me baby, I want to.*
I didn’t say a word though. She stood there for a few minutes, trying to find the person she had loved her whole life. I had been trying to find that person as well. And then suddenly, she started walking away. Her footsteps matching the pace of my heart breaking into tiny shards.
And in the end, we are just mere human beings. Drunk on the idea of love, living on broken pieces of affection. Pretending to have the time of our lives, trying to love the life we have even though we all know, that when the end comes, it’s all going to turn to dust.
No matter whether we like it or not, there will always be someone who gets left behind, someone whose love will be left wanting. Nothing happens the way we want it to be. You like him? Ahh, but he is not the one for you. You will have to live with someone who doesn’t even know you the way he does. But alas, he will never be yours, because he has found that someone with whom he wants to argue for the rest of his life.
Life is so unpredictable. I used to believe everyone finds someone. Everyone has a soulmate. But the reality hit me hard and now I’m lying on the cold ground. I can’t move or breathe, because I need him to survive. And he, will never be mine. Because there is something that lacks in me. Something he needs. Something he desires. The thing is, we never know if we will find the love of our life or, like our parents, we’ll be confined to that house of formalities. I don’t want stable love, I need the burning passion, that even burns after my death, on my grave.
I feel that burning passion for him, everyone feels it for someone. But if one is lucky, in fact, the luckiest of all, then maybe, the person they love, might love them back. One day. One day.
I am no master in this art of love. Yet, every time I see you, my heart contracts, my lungs forget to make oxygen, my hands shake like some bird struggling to get out of a cage, my legs go limp like marshmallows and my soul shatters only to get glued up again. I try not to show how badly I want you, how strongly I adore you. When you play with your raven-coloured hair, I get mesmerized by the beauty of it. When you smile with your eyes, I hold myself back from touching you. You are fire, my darling. And like a moth, I am drawn to you. You are the sky, and I am an injured bird. I see you talking to the moon at nights and I can’t help but wonder how lonely you must be. In these past few years, I have learnt things about you that no one knows. How you like your space, how delicate your hands are, how much obsessed you are with the colour olive, how you like your tea cold and not hot (I question you for that every day), how you like to go on the roof once everyone is asleep and gaze at the moon, for you think only she can understand how lonely you actually are, how you smile when someone mentions any great poet, like you know all of his works line by line, word by word, how you have this diary that you carry around everywhere– to cafes, to bookstores, to that sunset point that you adore so much and finally, how you carry infinite love in your heart, that has now started to turn into grief. Oh, my dear love, oh my world, I would light myself up on fire if you were cold, I would serve my soul on a plate to you, if you were hungry, I would become a paper, if you ever craved to write. Oh, the things I would do for you are indescribable and unspeakable. Just know, if all the red vanishes from this world, I would pour my blood in a glass for you to paint.
I am Lilith. The greater demon, the monster of night. I don’t hide in the shadows but dance on the blood bathed streets with my hands raised to the hells above. You ask me if I have ever loved and I laugh, like a fallen angel, beautiful and deadly. Yes I have loved. The sun, the light. But the night is too much in love with me, so I stay. My home is the moon, I own it. We drink champagne from skeleton cups, me and the moon, grieving our love for the sun. But oh, he is pure and monsters like me must love the dark nights.
