by Helen Thomas, University of Vienna
Content and Trigger Warning: This blog post contains a discussion of death, bereavement, sexual abuse and sexual violence. Readers may find this content difficult, confronting and challenging.
This blog post considers the ways in which four black female poet performers – Storme Webber, June Jordan, Karen McCarthy Woolf, and Shagufta K Iqbal – disrupt idealised stereotypes of motherhood by revealing the grief of maternal loss, maternal rejection from the perspective of a daughter, and motherhood as a result of rape. By analysing archival and online recordings through postcolonial and feminist theoretical frameworks, it argues that these performances (which took place between 1990 and 2015) present public instances of what the black American writer and critic bell hooks refers to as “talking back”: acts and practices of resistance against “oppressive mechanisms of silencing, suppressing, and censoring” (Talking Back 16) which hooks sees as vital to black women’s efforts to amplify silenced voices, and speak words of healing, solidarity and self-love. In particular, it is argued that these performances expose the dynamics between social constructions of motherhood, oppressive patriarchal ideologies and state-imposed violence. In “moving from silence into speech” (hooks Talking Back 9), these poetry performances transform and redefine the potential function of motherhood as a force of questioning and resistance capable of political and social collective agency. As bell hooks contends, they offer opportunities to “stand and struggle side by side in a gesture of defiance that speaks out against oppression, and make new life and new growth possible” (“Choosing the Margin” 15). Drawing on matricentric feminist critiques such as Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) and Andrea O’Reilly’s article “Matricentric Feminism: A Feminism for Mothers” (2019), it is suggested that these poet performers articulate the more complex, difficult and ambiguous layers of motherhood, including the suffering of bereavement, subjection to political violence and/or social neglect, and the impact and vulnerabilities of child-mothers whose pregnancies arise from traumatic experiences of sexual violence and rape.[1] Moreover, using an intersectional lens, this blog post highlights the ways in which these poets’ performances correlate with gendered and racialised aspects of postcolonial theory, most especially hooks’ caution that “for our efforts to end white supremacy to be truly effective, individual struggle to change consciousness must be fundamentally linked to collective effort to transform those structures that reinforce and perpetuate white supremacy” (Talking Back 119). By finding their voices and speaking out against injustices and expose the ambivalence of motherhood and the pain of maternal loss, these poet performers engage in what hooks defines as critical acts of “rebellion and resistance” (Talking Back xi) which continue to be the most powerful modes of feminist thinking and life-changing practice.
In her influential text Of Woman Born, the US-based poet and feminist writer Adrienne Rich examined the patriarchal systems and political institutions that defined motherhood as an oppressive institution. Prioritising her own experience as a mother and the struggles, rages, frustrations, extraordinary love and deep ambivalences of mothering, Rich identified motherhood as an identity and subjectivity defined by, yet also distinct from, such institutional oppressions: “I wanted to examine motherhood within a sociopolitical context, as embedded in a political institution […] and on feminist terms” (iv). Just as Rich shattered the silences and repressions surrounding motherhood – “The words are being spoken now […] taboos are being broken, the masks of motherhood are cracking through” (ix), the poetry performances discussed below expose the grief of maternal bereavement whilst shedding new light upon self-love, solidarity and healing. In her filmed poetry performance “Moving Towards Home” (1988), the black American activist, educator and writer June Jordan highlighted the plight of a mother whose child was a victim of neocolonial international war.[2] Two years later, at the Covent Garden Community Centre in London on 26 October 1990, the Two Spirit Sugpiaq, black, Choctaw poet and interdisciplinary artist Storme Webber addressed her unpublished autobiographical poem to “mothers who don’t know what love is” (0:07:50, my emphasis).[3] On 3September 2019, the British-Jamaican poet Karen McCarthy Woolf performed her poem “White Butterflies”, a memorial to her son Otto at the TEDx Talks Glasgow. And in 2015, the award-winning poet, filmmaker and founder of the South Asian women’s poetry collective Yoni Verse Shagufta K Iqbal performed a poem about the experience of a child-mother at “Public Address”, the Apples and Snakes Festival in Bloomsbury, London.
In their performances, these poets centralise the experience of motherhood and align with O’Reilly’s theory that in a sense, motherhood constitutes:
[T]he unfinished business of feminism. […] A matricentric feminism seeks to make motherhood the business of feminism by positioning mothers’ needs and concerns as the starting point for a theory and politic on and for women’s empowerment. This repositioning is not to suggest that a matricentric feminism should replace traditional feminist thought […] Indeed, a mother-centred feminism is needed because mothers arguably more so than women in general – remain disempowered despite forty years of feminism. (O’Reilly 51-52).
In their efforts to talk back and speak in their own voices about maternal loss, these poets embark on what hooks identifies as the efforts of marginalised groups to struggle for self-identification, self-representation and self-realisation. In fact,hooks cites lines from Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” – “this is the oppressor’s language, yet I need it to talk to you” (“Choosing the Margin” 16) – as the source of inspiration for her own theoretical work.[4] “Language is also a place of struggle […]. Dare I speak to oppressed and oppressor in the same voice? […] The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance. Language is also a place of struggle” (hooks Talking Back 28). Thus, hooks defines “talking back” as “speaking as an equal to authority figures,” as “speaking for oneself,” “object[ing] to practices of domination,” “challenging the existing social hierarchy” and refusing “silence” as the “right speech” for the oppressed (hooks Talking Back 2, 5, 18, 19, 25). Silence, she contends, is not the lack of speech but an act of submission. Conversely, in the “emergence from silence to speech,” the poetry performances discussed here present courageous acts of speaking “when one is not spoken to” (hooks Talking Back 5; my emphasis). In other words, their speech act performances are not addressed to specific individuals, but function as liberated acts of sociopolitical critique, poetic acts of risk and daring in which their voices not only perform counter-hegemonic discourse but also critical consciousness. It is within poetry performance that these artists can move beyond silence and censorship, creating “invent[ed] spaces of radical openness” in which solidarity and self- and communal healing can take place with “mind intact, [and] with an open heart” (hooks “Choosing the Margin”4).
Mothers Grieving: June Jordan and Karen McCarthy Woolfe
In their performances about maternal loss, the poets June Jordan and Karen McCarthy Woolfe disrupt social taboos, problematise Sigmund Freud’s definition of melancholy as a private, interior psychological process and expand Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s framework of the stages of bereavement (1969). In Melancholy and Melancholia (1917), Freud defined mourning as “the reaction of the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on,” (244) and suggested that “we can rely on [mourning] being overcome after a certain lapse of time” (ibid.) In contrast, as Jordan and Woolfe’s performances suggest, and as contemporary grief theorist such as Robert Gaines proposes, a person may mourn for a lifetime:
Mourning is not something that can be finished. Rather, it is a process that is carried on continuously, at times nearly quiescently, and then, at times of change or developmental progression, it is reintensified as one again confronts the sadness of one’s loss and experiences in a new way the need for a sense of continuity and connection with one’s departed objects (Gaines 144).
It can also be argued that poetry performance practice constitutes a version of what Freud termed “the work which mourning performs” (Freud 244). In the context of maternal loss, the work of mourning is actually a work of remembering, which serves a double and ambivalent function of binding and unbinding the mother to her lost child. As Woolfe remembers her dead child and shares that experience with her audience via her poetry, Otto is made present or “psychically prolonged” (Prodromou 17), whilst this same work of mourning enables a detachment or freedom from the beloved (Hagman 14-15). Poetry performance provides a vehicle for asking questions rather than providing answers; it is a form that allows for the expression of gaps, absences and irresolution, the loss beyond words. In How We Grieve: Relearning the World (1996), Thomas Attig defines bereavement as “a state of deprivation that arises after a person dies and we see his or her absence in the world of our experience as a loss” (xxvi-xxvii). For Attig, this life-altering experience “redefines and limits our life circumstances and possibilities” (xxvii). Moreover, he argues that grieving is active: “Grief is more than just grief reaction; it includes grieving response […] Grieving is our reaction when we experience the death of another as a loss” (xxix – xxx, emphasis in original). I would argue that in a sense, Woolfe’s audience takes on the role of caregiver as defined by Attig, as it witnesses “a continuing, albeit transformed love for the deceased” whilst “listening patiently and understandably to the pain” of the loss and the “narrative of the life now ended” (Attig 189).
Archived at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, the recording of June Jordan’s poem “Moving Towards Home”, which she delivered at the “UNICEF Humanitarian Relief for the Children of Lebanon” event hosted by Congressman Conyers in Detroit in 1982, begins with the words spoken by a mother who has lost her child during the violent Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982.[5] Jordan’s performance focuses on the massacre of circa 3,500 Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut, an attack which was officially declared an act of genocide by the United Nations General Assembly.[6]
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about. (00:24-00:46)
In the recording, we hear the patterns and texture of Jordan’s voice carry the rhythm and intensity of her words, her body absolutely still, as if she must hold herself back while she delivers her poem.
For Jordan, motherhood is a site of loss in the midst of inhumane terror: “the woman who shoved / her baby / into the stranger’s hands before she was led away” (00:50-00:57). This mother’s actions take place during the “unspeakable events” that Jordan cites as being enacted by those “who dare / to purify / a people,” who “close the universities, abolish the press,” who “tighten the noose” and haul families “into / the world of the dead” (02:30-02:45). The poet will not speak about this mother’s loss because it is too immense for language to shape. The violence of genocide is erasure, and words have been taken from her. The practice of freedom and talking back is transformation and creativity of imagining amidst the chaos of immense grief. Jordan seeks to create a “living room”, a space where she can sit without asking “Where is Abu Fadi?”:
I need to speak about home,
I need to speak about living room […]
where my children will grow without horror […]
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home (03:35-04:42).
In Jordan’s poem “Moving Towards Home”, motherhood becomes a site of solidarity between women of the African diaspora and Palestine; they too have lost loved ones, have been exiled from their homes and made to live a life, the parameters of which are increasingly tightened and restrained:
I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
It is time to make our way home. (04:44-05:11)
Jordan’s words demand living room for the millions around the globe who face colonisation, dehumanisation, and brutal oppression from a ruling elite (such as Nicaragua, Lebanon and South Africa) while others speak out against injustice and the poverty gap in America. Her final line, “It is time to make our way home,” (05:09-05-11) addresses the listener as a call for action and change, demanding they participate in the poet’s manifesto of hope, anger and power. Poetry, as she passionately warns, is not a “soporific daydream”. It is “political action […] exorcism, and lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life” (Jordan xvii).
Whereas Jordan’s poem talks back to a mother’s loss of her child in the context of war, McCarthy Woolf’s poetry performance in Glasgow in June 2019 breaks the silence around mothers’ experiences of loss due to neonatal death during childbirth, albeit in a small, wavering voice. Woolf’s poem about the birth of her stillborn baby, “White Butterflies,” begins without introduction, is slow-paced, punctuated by pauses that allow the audience to take in the full weight of her words, her hands moving only occasionally to indicate the “artichoke spikes” (00:15) that white butterflies land upon in a walled garden. She holds her body perfectly still, turning her body slowly to look to her audience without moving her feet, as if she too has been frozen in time, thus presenting embodied poetry in which the body and the emotion are relived intensely.
The “wind in the leaves” causes a “rush of sighs” (00:27-00:32) which the poet elongates to orally recreate the sounds of the natural world. Up until this moment, the poem’s symbolism resonates predominantly within the confines of a lyricised ‘naturalised’ garden landscape of white lavender borders and white hydrangeas. As the narrative perspective moves inwards to “linen on the bed” and the “white curtains shrunk in the wash” (01:05), a juxtaposition occurs between the external and interior scene that is mapped onto the dissonance between the poet’s controlled delivery of the poem and the emotional turbulence of the labour that ended so unexpectedly. Only now does the poem reveal itself as an elegy uttered to an absent addressee, “you”, and the significance of the fragile butterflies’ momentary “flutter” and the “spikes” of the artichoke (the only object of colour in the poem) gain depth. As the poet itemises the “white muslin squares” (01:10-01:11) and “your tiny white vests unworn” (01:17-01:19), we feel the absence that the unworn garments register, and the audience is held, as if within a spell.
As Woolf slowly contextualises the poem, explaining that her first reading of it took place at her son’s funeral, she grasps her hands together as if to still herself (01:36) and her gaze wanders momentarily away from her listeners as she pauses and sighs. The shock of loss registers once more as she explains that leaving the hospital without her baby had been completely unexpected; before, she had been concerned with the demands of juggling her life as a mother and a poet. Yet her voice deepens, and her gaze turns towards the floor as she articulates a critique of a system using language that echoes the labour: “Up until that point I’d had complete faith in a system that literally failed to deliver” (02:10-02:18). The National Health Service, staffed by exhausted medics and sabotaged by government policies intent on making profit, fails her.
As Woolfe goes on to explain, Otto died of heart failure during the process of labour; his death was classified as a stillbirth as he did not draw breath or utter a sound. But the words “his death” do not flow seamlessly on from the words that precede it; the poet needs to take a breath and gather herself. Similarly, having explained that such classification prompts people to mistake her experience as that of a miscarriage, Woolf reveals that it was very different to the three miscarriages she had experienced, that Otto weighed 8.5 pounds and that she could put “his feet into the palm of her hand” (06:56-07:05).
Woolf discloses that after Otto’s death, writing and performing poetry offered a means of processing loss and reconnecting with the world. It also inspired a form of “talking back” via a political reassessment of society’s treatment of women, their reproductive health and maternal loss, whilst generating her own new life.
So I lost my son and I discovered that poetry and creativity and art can transform trauma. Poetry can make people feel differently. It can make people think differently. It can change behaviours. It can make people act differently. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that poetry can save lives. It saved mine. (10:37-11:14, my emphasis)
Whilst elegy pervades Woolf’s poetic performance, her speech act also functions as a form of testimony and transformation in the context of solidarity. For her, poems “connect to other people’s stories and grief […] [That is] when I feel the poems are doing their work in the world”.[7]
Breaking Taboos: Lost Childhoods and Mothers “Who Do Not Know What Love Is”[8]
As captured within the Apples and Snakes archive, Storme Webber’s performance in London on 26 October 1990 negotiates racialised intergenerational trauma as the poet talks back to an absent, abusive, unloving mother.[9] Via poetry, she publicly voices her mother’s neglectful and abusive treatment of her as a child, a behaviour informed by the racist and capitalist drug-fuelled economy of the U.S. during the 1960s and early 1970s. In her paratextual introduction to her poems, Webber explains that her mother would dismissively refer to her as the “ancient racist joke about her being the prodigal child” (07:56), “the only brown one” (08:13), possibly as the consequence of rape by a white man, and “the only lesbian one” (08:23), words which function as painful “razors beneath [her] feet” (08:41). The trauma of abandonment and attempted suicides, when her mother leaves her on the bank and wades into the stream, causes her incredible pain. She states that “the stream became a river with all we never say but a vast dark […] transoceanic conversation […] a sea [that] divides us” (08:42). By means of her performance, Webber daringly speaks out against her mother’s ostracization and cruelty, yet despite her skill as a wordsmith, she concedes that some of her words “never make the [3,000 miles] trip” (09:00), falling instead “just above my collar bone where they lodge” (09:05) – i.e. communication is no longer possible. However, the poet shares the fact that creativity and poetic performance constitute her “healing tools” (09:09). She explains that the poems she is performing are unpublished pieces and dedicates her second untitled poem to her mother. However, this dedication takes on an unsettling aspect when we discover that her mother “is the catalogue of too many caseworkers / and too few friends” (10:25): “So many of her [mother’s] contemporaries [have] gone / Od’d in motel rooms, on kitchen floors / One dealer’s head run over by a car / But still she persists / her spirit is numb covered over by layers of hurt and meaness / the bitter sap of self hatred” (09:55-10:14).
The poem also marks a turning point as Webber begins to see the complexities of motherhood, i.e. her mother as both a victim and perpetrator of abuse and shatters the silence surrounding her lived experience: “Hepatitis, seizures, addiction and violent rape at the age of four, mean that she is 44 going on 84 […] And no other way out […] My mother. My child / The Lazarus lesbian rising up from death for more times than I can remember […] lurching on / ‘I fucked to feed you,’ she spat” (10:30-11:01). As Webber articulates in the introduction to her poem, it is the incompleteness of her mother’s life that informs her own – that pushes her on as the inspiration for her creativity and her wish to inspire others to imagine their lives differently:
I was born in a web
of race, class, sex conflicts
The lifelong task is
to extricate myself
To explicate for others.
To dream for the dreamless mothers. (11:25-11:36)
Rape and Child Mothers
On 25 October 2015, the British-based poet Shagufta K Iqbal performed her opening poem, at Public Address III, part of Apples and Snakes’ Soapbox Tours at the Bloomsbury Theatre, London. As captured within the archive, Iqbal peaks in a haunting voice and describes the plight of her teenage friend, possibly an allusion to herself, or all victims of rape: “She’s not an Irish myth […] she is real” (0:13-0:25).[10] Her performance unfolds to reveal the unsettling uncertainty and fogginess around sexuality and sexual consent as experienced by young adults. During their conversation, the poet’s friend tries to appear grown-up: she “tries to blow [cigarette] smoke / like a film star” (04:01-04:05). Although the friends are trying to have a frank conversation, there are gaps and silences between them, the language of abuse, sexuality and pregnancy are not fully owned by them, and there is a sense of unspoken cultural prohibition: “She folds the truth into the pit of her stomach” (04:18). Deftly capturing and illuminating the untold stories of women’s lives, Iqbal’s performance dares to publicly speak out against the lived experience of child sexual abuse and patriarchal oppression.
Yet despite this act of bravery, the pain and trauma continue to surface in Iqbal’s poem: her friend was “manhandled and broken” by boys at school, and just as her friend has lost her childhood, she herself appears to have lost her friend.[11] “Yeah, I let him touch me” (03:10), her friend announces casually, but the speaker understands that her friend will never recover from such trauma: “Wishing will not give her body back” (01:50-01:52). Together, they begin to learn that black girls’ currency is “that of their bodies” – the region from their “lips” to their “legs” (03:47-03:48). In addition, despite the speaker’s rage against her friend’s experience, she now understands that none of her schoolteachers will seek justice or retribution on her friend’s behalf: “I anticipate tsunamis. I wait. Nothing happens […] Bodies like hers were made for violence” (04:24-04:46). Moreover, her friend’s silence about the abuse suggests that the act of ‘talking back’ is still partially muted, so she, the poet, must speak without her, yet on her behalf.
While it seemed that her friend’s “pregnancy could have stayed a secret / almost / almost” – as if by reciting a chant or staying in the water, “she could have slowed time down” (01:20) – these lines suggest the poet’s friend’s denial or lack of understanding about her body. The words uttered, “She still feels like pieces” (02:29), indicate the continued impact of her friend’s experience and it is not clear whether she suffered an involuntary abortion after 24 weeks, or whether her child, having been “ripped” from her womb, was taken away from her. Either way, Iqbal’s poem captures loss on a profound level. Motherhood in this context registers continued sexual inequality and the absence of social justice within a contemporary democracy, whilst marking the failures of Britain’s social and educational systems.
In their efforts to talk back, the poet-performers discussed here bravely uncover restrictive silences about maternal grief, maternal rejection and the complex emotions and consequences stemming from sexual abuse and rape-related pregnancies. By moving from silence to speech, the poetry performances of the black American and black British poets Jordan, Webber, McCarthy Woolf and Iqbal advance efforts to overturn oppressive systems of censorship and control over women’s bodies, experiences and narratives. As such, their performances both inform and reflect racialised matricentric and postcolonial feminist theoretical frameworks. As hooks suggests, “[m]oving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible” (hooks Talking Back 9). It is the expression of our movement from object to subject — the liberated voice. Poetry performance helps us – poets and audiences alike – to end the silence and connect in solidarity with those who live in silence.
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DR. HELEN THOMAS (she/her) is a poet, author and researcher whose work focuses primarily upon Black British writing, history and culture, and the medical humanities. After completing a BA in English Literature and American Studies, she received a DPhil in Literature from Oxford University. She is the author of Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge University Press, 2000) and other critical works including Caryl Phillips (2004), Malady and Mortality: Illness, Disease and Death in Literary Culture (2016) and a free 500-page book entitled Black Agents Provocateurs: 250 Years of Black British Writing, History and the Law, 1770-2020 (2020). In 2022, she published 1562, a volume of poetry voicing the fictional lives of 6 black women from 6 ports in C16th Britain. In 2022, her semi-autobiographical poetic / dance play, Salve, was showcased at the Theatre Royal Plymouth and in 2023, her historical poetic drama was longlisted by the RSC’s 37 Plays Competition. Currently, she is a postdoctoral researcher with Poetry Off the Page at the University of Vienna.
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To cite this blog post: Thomas, Helen. “‘Talking Back’ in Poetry Performance: Black Feminist Thought, Matricentric Feminism & Maternal Loss.” Poetry Off the Page, 06 March 2025, https://poetryoffthepage.net/talking-back-in-poetry-performance-black-feminist-thought-matricentric-feminism-maternal-loss/.
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Works Cited
Attig, Thomas. How We Grieve: Relearning the World. Oxford University Press, 2011.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (1917; repr. London: Hogarth Press, 1953) edited by James Strachey, Vol. 14, pp. 243-4.
Gaines, Robert. “Detachment and Continuity: The Two Tasks of Mourning.” New Models of Bereavement Theory and Treatment: New Mourning edited by George Hagman. Routledge, 2016, pp. 130-147.
hooks, bell. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, No. 36, 1989, pp. 15-23.
hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Routledge, 2015.
Jordan, June. The Essential June Jordan, edited by Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller. Penguin, 2021.
O’Reilly, Andrea. “Matricentric Feminism: A Feminism for Mothers.” The Routledge Companion to Motherhood edited by Andrea O’Reilly, Melinda Vandenbeld Giles, and Lynn O’Brien Hallstein. Routledge, 2020, pp. 51-60.
Prodromou, Amy. Navigating Loss in Women’s Contemporary Memoir. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. W.W. Norton, 1986.
[1] Although the definition of the term ‘mother’ has only recently been established under English common law, R (o.a.o. TT) v The Registrar General of England and Wales (2019) (controversially, according to this author) affords the status of motherhood solely to a person who undergoes the physical and biological process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth. For the purpose of this blog post, ‘motherhood’ is defined as the experience of caring for and protecting one’s children regardless of their biological origin. ‘Maternal loss’ signifies the loss of a child, where a child as defined by UK law is a person who has not reached their 18th birthday. ‘Neonatal’ refers to the first 28 days of life of a newborn.
[2] June Jordan, ‘Moving Towards Home’, poem recited at the UNICEF Humanitarian Relief for the Children of Lebanon, event hosted by Congressman Conyers Detroit (verify location), 1982. Available at Harvard Milton Public School Sound Recording Database. “Moving Towards Home (if available).” Milton Public Schools Sound Recording Archive, https://mps.lib.harvard.edu/sds/audio/442985101. Side 1 Program 14 (Accessed 09.01.25).
[3] Storme Webber, Apples and Snakes Archive, 26 October 1990; Apples and Snakes, 1990 Cassettes 90-10-26, ‘Storme, Leonora.WAV’ (07:49).
[4] bell hooks is quoting from Adrienne Rich’s poem “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” published in Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change: Poems, 1968-1970.W. W. Norton & Company, 1971.
[5] June Jordan, ‘Moving Towards Home’, ‘UNICEF Humanitarian Relief for the Children of Lebanon’ event hosted by Congressman Conyers Detroit, 1982; https://mps.lib.harvard.edu/sds/audio/442985101 Side 1 program 14.
[6] United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 37/123, adopted 16-20 December 1982.
[7] Karen McCarthy Woolf, “In conversation with the Forward Arts Foundation”, 1 July 2015. https://forwardartsfoundation.org/in-conversation-with-karen-mccarthy-woolff.
[8] Storme Webber, Apples and Snakes archive, Storme Webber’s performance in London on 26 October 1990; Apples and Snakes, 1990 Cassettes 90-10-26, “Storme, Leonora.WAV.”
[9] Storme Webber, Apples and Snakes, 1990 Cassettes 90-10-26, “Storme, Leonora.WAV.”
[10] Shagufta K. Iqbal, Apples and Snakes, Film Archive 3, 2015, Tours, Public Address Podcasts; Public Address Podcast_Shagufta K.wav
[11] Iqbal, Apples and Snakes, Film Archive 3; Tours.