Williams

to make the radical practice of mothering visible as a key to our collective liberation. The practice of mothering that inspired us to create this book is older than feminism; it is older and more futuristic than the category “woman.” We are investigating and amplifying the nuances of practices that have existed as long as there have been people of different ages with different superpowers invested in each other’s existence.

Maybe when we say “mothering” in this book, we really mean “the creative spirit” or “love” itself. We find Jordan’s definitions of creation and love and life and power useful; we find her queer, utopian, hopeful and critical articulations of mothering crucial to the questions about and experiences of mothering we explore in this text.

it seems to me that I am always about a most sobering task, the task of survival, for myself, and for those who may carry what I offer to them, into their own lives.

Children are the ways that the world begins again and again. If you fasten upon that concept of their promise, you will have trouble finding anything more awesome, and also anything more extraordinarily exhilarating, than the opportunity or/and the obligation to nurture a child into his or her own freedom.

And I want to say to children let us look at tiger lilies blooming to their own astonishment, and learn to cherish their own form and orderliness and freedom for our own.
And I want to say to children, tell me what you think and what you see and what you dream so that I may hope to honor you.
And I want these things for children, because I want these things for myself, and for all of us, because unless we embody these attitudes and precepts as the governing rules of our love, and of our political commitment to survive, we will love in vain, and we will certainly not survive.

o answer death with utopian futurity, to rival the social reproduction of capital on a global scale with a forward-dreaming diasporic accountability is a queer thing to do. A strange thing to do. A thing that changes the family and the future forever.

would it mean for us to take the word “mother” less as a gendered identity and more as a possible action, a technology of transformation that those people who do the most mothering labor are teaching us right now?

means that “mothering” is a queer thing. Not just when people who do not identify as heterosexual give birth to or adopt children and parent them, but all day long and everywhere when we acknowledge the creative power of transforming ourselves and the ways we relate to each other. Because we were never meant to survive and here we are creating a world full of love.

“we disturbed a continent like seeds.”

“New energies of darkness,” the poem says to contextualize the middle passage, “we disturbed a continent like seeds.”