undercurrents (issue #7)
Tender ferocity, the transformative power of art and more by guest curator Anisa Sima Hawley
I am delighted to welcome my dear friend, collaborator, and Green Dreamer’s co-editor and community weaver, Anisa Sima Hawley, as a guest curator for this issue of undercurrents. Enjoy!
1. Something affirming ~ on tender ferocity: organizing as a world-making
In times of grief, rage, and rupture, I’m moved to sing along with the spells and medicines of our political, spiritual, and ancestral elders. I live by the practice that composting structures of white/capitalist modernity goes hand-in-hand with dreaming up new worlds of collective liberation — where liberation and healing are not ‘end goals’ to be met, but ongoing commitments to love.
I am enlivened by fierce tenderness: the ferocious softness which pierces the illusion that soft equates with powerless. Audre Lorde reminds me:
“We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit” (full quote from Sister Outsider here).
I call on the words of speculative fiction writer and elder, Ursula K. Le Guin who recalls:
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”— Ursula K. Le Guin
And I am inspired to live by ‘visionary-presencing’ by the fabulous adrienne maree brown who shares in her book Emergent Strategy:
“It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future. All organizing is science fiction. If you are shaping the future, you are a futurist. And visionary fiction is a way to practice the future in our minds, alone and together.”
2. Something creative ~ on entangled weaving as emergent process
Practices of ‘weaving’ have emerged in my life as an instrument of nurturing connection and holding contradiction. I love weaving together contrasting textures, colours, and shapes — being moved by collaborative energies that unfold in the creative process. For me, practices of weaving involves engaging in conversation with spirit and matter, and tending to process over outcome.
I recently came across the work of an artist named Kelly Leonard who I felt deeply inspired by. As shared on their website, Kelly “believes that struggles for social justice and environmentalism cannot be separated from each other and are inextricably woven together. Themes such as trust, the importance of relationships, different evaluations of time, risk taking and the ethics of care are important considerations in how she makes work and how work is shown to an audience. Kelly views weaving as an open-ended world making practice though which new patterns can emerge.”
Learn more about Kelly Leonard’s work here.
3. Something heart-shifting ~ on inspired reads
A book that lingers with me to this day is the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
It was through the the undercommons that I discovered the work of Caribbean scholar Édouard Glissant and his book The Poetics of Relation, and later, Dr. Erin Manning’s For a pragmatics of the Useless.
These thinkers (along with countless others) have had a radically deep impact on my life and activism in ways that I find nearly impossible to express with words.
Also, at the moment, I’m reading a deliciously imaginative speculative fiction book called Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072 by M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. The book contains a collection of fictitious interviews with people of the future: “Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes [who] recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative… and a radically new social order is forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse”.
4. Something moving ~ on the transformative power of youth, art, and activism
I am inspired by art as a poetic act of love — a way of disrupting the status quo, and subverting linearity. There are so many ground-breaking folx and movements that touch my heart. I would like to share two of them today.
In 2021, I came across The Freedom Theatre — a Palestinian theatre programme fostering activities that “introduce, particularly the young generation, to theatre and drama, providing them with important tools for dealing with the hardships of daily life under occupation. The Freedom Theatre stages original theatre productions that reflect, comment upon and challenge the realities of contemporary Palestinian society.” It grieves me to share that as of December 12, the theatre has been raided, and come under attack, with many of its members, including the Chair of the Board, taken hostage.
I also want to highlight an inspirational initiative of a beloved friend of mine, Fiston Muganda, who co-founded Full Circle Learning Uganda with the children of Nakivale refugee camp to foster the power of art. Fiston writes:
“Through this initiative, we sought to promote not only academic enrichment but also holistic development, including community service, character education, conflict resolution, and art enrichment. At the core of our approach lies the recognition of art's integral role in every facet of human experience—a realization that has profoundly shaped our efforts to foster positive change within communities.”
Fiston continues and shares with me:
“As an individual who has experienced displacement firsthand, spending nine years of my life in a refugee camp, I have had the opportunity to work closely with both refugees and host communities. Throughout this journey, I have cultivated a deep appreciation for the transformative power of inclusive art—an admiration rooted in my childhood experiences.
I am continually amazed by the profound impact that art has had on individuals of all ages, from young children to young adults. It serves as a powerful medium through which individuals can express their past traumas, present emotions, and future aspirations. I have observed how art has the capacity to unite diverse groups, inspiring collective participation in global movements and campaigns dedicated to the greater good.”
Learn more about The Freedom Theatre and Full Circle Learning.
5. Something expanding ~ on embodying a “Library of Future Feeling”
“To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.” – bell hooks (Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics)
About a year ago, two dear co-conspirators and I birthed a collective named “The Library of Future Feeling” (LOFF). Together, we sink deep in the process of dreaming up this space, ‘with-nessing’ its evolution, stewarding (and being stewarded by) its metamorphosis. Through online and (occasional) in-person meet-ups, we gather to sense into emergent presencing that seeks to uncover, celebrate, and document, the echoes of a holistic healing future.
LOFF is a liquid container where we find ourselves lost in somatic awareness, without the aim or certainty of producing answers. A cauldron where we can subvert how we meet failure, where we welcome and explore raw, unfiltered neuro-divergent and queer politics through our lived realities. We come together to alchemize strange and beautiful objects, stories, and feelings, in which we might transform lead into gold, data into dreams, facts into feelings. LOFF is a corporeal internet that bridges the artist and the engineer—a collaborative emergent entity, art without the artist, artists without the art.
We ask questions such as:
What technologies of relationality are needed to guide us in these times?
What is “enough-ness”, and how does it feel in this moment?
What are the boundaries that are important but not here/unimportant but still here?
What are the many shapes, forms, and ways that community can look and feel like?
How do we disrupt the cycles that keep us stuck, without reproducing the structures that uphold those cycles?
…..and many more.
Dive deeper with us in The Library of Future Feeling here.
About the guest curator ~ Anisa is a friend, child, sibling, shapeshifter, and all-around goofball whose emergent praxis of “fielding imaginative futures through presence” is guided by acts of radical care, tenderness, and subversive failure. Anisa is moved to engage with place-making, hold and metabolize grief/joy, and sit with the paradoxical urgency of slowing down. Shaped by their ever-unfolding relationship with axes of queerness, neurodivergence, and liminality, they are enchanted by modes of “nepantla” as dreamed through dance, textile art, and ceramics. Learn more about Anisa here.
Recent / related episodes from Green Dreamer…
“Grief tending and healing collective justice,” ft. Sophy Banks
“Palestinian seeds of survival, shelter, and subversiveness,” ft. Vivien Sansour
What I’m reading and engaging with…
This article, “What’s the difference between Indigenous nations co-managing or co-stewarding their land? A lot.” by Taylar Dawn Stagner
New Means, a Substack publication by my friend Joshua P. Hill
This article, “To Know What They Know: On misapprehending Palestinian children” by Yasmin El-Rifae
This infographic Instagram account, @key48return — “voluntarily run & fact checked by an ordinary Palestinian, waiting to return to Palestine herself.”
This resource on actions to take to become ungovernable by establishment systems, by Indigenous Action
Take action…
“Pōhakuloa Training Area (PTA) [of Hawaiʻi Island] is 132,000 acres, 23,000 of which are state lands (also known as seized or “ceded” lands) under a lease set to expire in 2029. The army proposes retaining 22,750 of these lands. Remarkably, the other 250 acres are owned by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and the army has been using them without permission
One of the steps in the armyʻs proposal is to prepare a ‘draft environmental impact statement’ (DEIS) to receive and respond to public comments. Through this process, the army is required to respond to your comments, explore reasonable alternatives to proposed actions, disclose significant impacts of proposed actions, and include mitigation measures for disclosed impacts.”