Lullaby For A Small Death

Lullaby For A Small Death emerges from a series of collaborative propositions, compiled as a set of core references with a mind to foreground communal practices of citation, co-writing and co-learning beyond individual and institutional scholarly authority. We came together to think about our idiosyncratic and shared creative education; proposing and referencing alternative canons – re-tracing and re-centring the heritage of East African and global black feminist publishing practices from the 1960s to the 1990s; as well as referring to our own experiments with language, performance and images.

This anthology of references borrows words from past and present ancestors in an attempt to hark to a shared intellectual genealogy, mandate and history – centring care and community as infinite and timeless resources towards revolution, revelation and restitution. We use the term borrow because the intention is always to circulate and replenish. We reject the notion that cultural and creative work is privileged and we resist the colonial forms into which we have been socialised as cultural workers. In rooting this methodology; we offer gratitude to the feminist voices that have made our lives possible, we honour the transnational and intergenerational guides with whom we are in constant communion. We expand on sonic, linguistic and textual possibilities for inquiry.

We sat together to propose a set of terms that might make strategic and practical recommendations for learning and writing together that challenged the norms of conventional Western thought and academic patterns. We sought to instrumentalise our own daily practices and tendencies as an invocation of the sacred methodologies and clear intentionality of those who came before.We hoped to perform and establish a lived statement of belief; that we – working, thinking, eating, living – together, might expand opportunities for each other – reflecting, reciting, reproducing – and think deeply about the practices which have guided our arrival at language and at frame.

Citation is central to our collective practice because it gives us the opportunity to make decisions about whose voices we are uplifting. As Sara Ahmed writes in Living A Feminist Life

“My citation policy has given me more room to attend to those feminists who came before me. Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow.”

Annabel L. Kim building on the work of Sara Ahmed and the #citeblackwomen movement, writes about citation itself as an object of inquiry:

“…they articulate the way citation most often violently erases the contributions of minoritised scholars such as women and people of colour, thus abetting the continued consolidation of intellectual influence in a white, heteronormative, masculine centre.”

In that respect we are the immediate descendants of Nitakujengea Kinyumba Na Vikuta Vya Kupitia (A Home For You I Will Create With Exit Pathways), a collective intervention in Mapinga, near Bagamoyo – at one time the designated capital of German occupied East Africa – which interrogates colonial cartography and aims to build a home with exit pathways through traditionally female architecture, organised and curated by Rehema Chachage for Chapter 2 under the larger project When The Jackal Meets The Sun . We carry forward and expand upon learnings from the artists, scholars and communities present in our weeks of convening in Mapinga.

With gratitude.
r
wali chafu collective – nairobi.