About me: Because Audre Lorde looks different in every picture ever taken of her. Because Octavia Butler didn't care. Because Erykah Badu is a patternmaster. Because Macy Gray pimped it and Janelle Monáe was ready.
Resolved. Quirky black girls wake up ready to wear a tattered society new on our bodies, to hold fragments of art, culture and trend in our hands like weapons against conformity, to walk on cracks instead of breaking our backs to fit in the mold.
We're here, We're Quirky, Get used to it!
.... Quirky Black girls don't march to the beat of our own drum; we hop, skip, dance, and move to rhythms that are all our own. We make our own drums out of empty lunchboxes, full imaginations and number 3 pencils.
Quirky Black girls are not quirky because they like white shit; rather they understand that because they like it, it is not the sole province of whiteness.
Quirky black girls are the answer to the promise that black means everything, birthing and burning a new world every time.
Sound it out. Quirky, like queer and key, different and priceless, turning and open. Black, not be lack but black one word shot off the tongue like blap, bam, black. Girl, like the curl in a hand turning towards itself to snap, write, hold or emphasize. Quirky. Black. Girl. You see us. Act like you know.
We demand that our audiences say "yes-sir-eee" if they agree and we answer our own question "What good do your words do, if they don't understand you?" by speaking anyway, even if our words are "bruised and misunderstood."
Quirky black girls are hot!
Whether you're ready to see it or not.
Quirky means rejecting a particular type of "value," a certain unreadiness for consumption and subsumption in an economy of black heterocapital. This means that Quirky Black Girls act independently of dominant social norms or standards of beauty. So fierce that others may not be able to appreciate us just yet.
No matter what age we are, we hold onto that girlhood drive for adventure, love for friends, independent spirit, wacky sense of humor, and hope for the future.
Quirky Black Girls resist boxes in favor of over lapping circles with permeable membranes that allow them to ebb and flow through their multiple identities.
Quirky Black Girls- Embrace the quirky!
Who I'd like to meet: other quirky black girls! Join Us at http://quirkyblackgirls.ning.com/
Hey all! As many of you know, I am interning at NAMI TN this year. I urge all you talented writers, community members, and survivors to submit a piece for our upcoming anthology. The anthology will be used as an education tool and disseminated to members of support groups for mental illness. The deadline is deadline Aug 19 @ 4pm. See details below. Please do not hesitate to contact me via phone or email @ tgordon4@utk.edu.
I look forward to reading your submissions.
Thanks Melissa Gordon
CALL FOR POETRY, PERSONAL STORIES, WRITTEN PIECES FROM TENNESSEE CONSUMER WRITERS
Share your thoughts on recovery, hope, compassion, success in the face of adversity, life experiences. Your writings can be as a poem, a prose piece, but something short. Your writing can be on the theme of what faith and hope means to you, especially as a part of recovery, or other life experiences you wish to share.
Contributions are welcome from anyone in the mental health community: consumers, family members, counselors, advocates, professionals—to be part of the Service of Hope on October 12, 2008 to celebrate Mental Illness Awareness Week, October 4 – 11, 2008. We will choose entries to include in a book, and also ask some writers to read their piece during the Service of Hope.
Deadline for entry is Tuesday, August 19, 2008.
Entries may be up to 400 words in length.
You can submit your entry as a Word file to: mayavsmith@gmail.com
