What We’re Reading This Month
"Alexis Pauline Gumbs pushes us out of our comfort zone and into the sea, where other species are moving and mothering in ways that can teach us how to survive.... Undrowned is a gift and its message is clear: The natural world offers solutions if we just pay attention."
-Dani McClain, author of We Live for the We
It’s been a little over a year since we launched TL. We’re extremely grateful for everyone who has joined us in growing, learning, struggling, and even grieving together as we’ve read selections from the thinkers and the doers who write to move us Toward Liberation.
Shortly after TL began, we shifted our main focus to growing our understanding of the Palestinian occupation and freedom struggle in the wake of the assault on Gaza last October and what has become a brutal genocide.
We felt it critical to use this space to ground ourselves in the political education necessary to move in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle. For their struggle has always been a struggle for our collective liberation.
We know that we must never stop fighting, never stop resisting what has been made so evident these last months. Yet, we also know that our freedom dreams must be imagined, created, and rehearsed. We must, because we are able, hold multiple truths at once. We are called to do many things. To resist and fight and also to dream, create, rest, and breathe.
Where and how do we learn to center all of those things during these tumultuous times and beyond?
How do we use what we know is precious and sacred to inform the world we must create?
It is our intention to use the next several months to engage with texts from writers and thinkers who have been exploring these ideas.
We hope that you will join us on this journey Toward Liberation from the perspective of a different but equally critical lens. A lens that will center the natural world, the future, and ways to imagine and create the possibilities for the life affirming world that we all deserve.
Read more about this month’s book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs here. We hope you’ll share your thoughts as we read together this month and stay tuned for an invitation to our end of the month discussion group.