why thanxgrieving?

EVERY DAY IS ASHURA: EVERY PLACE IS KERBELA: reflections on THANXGRIEVING/THANKSGIVING in a time of Ashura
November 21, 2012 at 4:35pm

DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF JON PAUL HAMMOND, FREEDOM-FIGHTER, 19.7.1960-05.11.2010
786

WHY THANXGRIEVING?
”Je dirais que le plus dur n’est peut-être pas de mourir ; le plus dur c’est de rester vivant et de se sentir étranger à son propre pays”————— Jean-Marie Tjıbaou: Cultural, spiritual and political Leader of the Kanak struggle for Independence/” I would say that dying is not the most difficult thing; i’d say rather that the most difficult things is living and feeling like a foreigner in one’s own country”
“Always depend upon the Creator, not the creation. Love all, serve all, pray for all. Help ever, hurt never” 

Hz Moinuddin Chishti, Gharib Nawaz, Friend of the Destitute, the Marginalised, the Poor
those of you who have known us since the 1990s remember the off-the-chazain Thanxgrieving parties that started back in those days in the occupied territory known as the district of columbia, moving from brookland to 13th Street and continued in the land of tonantzin in alta california in the Tree House until we left for morocco in 2005. Someone asked “WHY THANXGRIEVING”? why not just leave thanksgiving as it is? 

LOCAL TRADITIONS: oh yeah: i think i said something about them the other day in another post. in any event, as a historian of religions/ritual artist/technician of the sacred/guerrilla thea:ologian/cultural studies/gender theorist, etc., i follow closely how ritual practices start, develop, morph, transform, grow, stabilise, gradually disappear, become even larger, etc..

An example of ritual developing in response to a particular crisis: the memorial service as now practised in the US owes its existence to memorial services developed by communities surrounding people who had died from Hiv-related complications. Many of those people could not be buried by their spiritual communities of origin because those communities did not want to acknowledge them in life, let alone in death. And some families of origin didn’t want to acknowledge them either. sometimes there was no one to bury them.

Some families that did bury their dead didn’t want anyone to know that the person had died from HIV-related complications or that they had lived happy lives in a world beyond the borders of heteronormativity. Life-partners were not recognised as chief mourners, life-narratives were re-written, their artistic creations were destroyed, denying the world their gifts after death. the person who was buried was not the same person who had lived and died in the struggle with HIV.

but people began to come together to create meaningful rituals to celebrate the lives of their beloveds, thereby challenging the hegemony of the funeral industry. they told the narratives as they had experienced the lives, challenging the newspapers who would only print obituaries written in a certain way and would not mention certain things. one learned to be a ”Law and Order” medical examiner, piecing together who had died from HIV-related complications on the basis of what little was said in the paper.

but little by little this began to change. if you read obituaries in the sf chronicle today you will see that they are very different from how they were written in the 1990s. and the impact of communities taking back their dead and memorialising and commemorating them and not letting them be “disappeared” even in death soon spread around the US and gave birth to new forms.

Part of ritual is the telling of its history, of its story. And every year as we gathered for Thanxgrieving ritual and celebration, i would tell the story of how we came to say Thanxgrieving instead of Thanksgiving. not that everyone had to do it or that we looked askance at others who did not say it, but just simply explained why we called it what we called it and how we celebrated it.

AND, just keeping it real, i know that some people get pretty upset when you mess with their holidays. A few years ago, i forwarded to a friend some emails written by a white anti-racism activist in which he talked about how he was troubled by the intensely racist messages and images of repetitive and divergent languages of “whiteness” in everything surrounding christmas.

i was having one of those years where i was all about building alliances and i had really personally had about all i could take of the fake snow, the “white christmas” and the troubling undercurrents in how “christmas” was constructed and perceived in certain worlds. i thought that the white anti-racist activist who had written the mails was right on point.

the person to whom i sent them chastised me very strongly and never had any more contact with me. so, i know that people don’t like having people mess with their holidays. as someone once said (not to me), “you are not going to ruin my vacation!”

in 1995, i had a child and my whole world changed. and in a few years, my child was saying “Thanxgrieving” and inviting friends from his berkeley pre-school to come to his house for Thanxgrieving! and you know he wanted to know why we called that day by a different name and even celebrated it on a different day!

WHY THANXGRIEVING?

for years, i had a hard time conceptually giving thanks on a holiday when the major players in the holiday had been massacred and their lands had been invaded and occupied: whoa! how to give thanks for that, dude?! i mean, just sit with that for a moment: if you look at it from that perspective, other than commemorating it so that no one would forget what had happened, would you really want to celebrate that day?

i’m just saying, looking at it from that perspective, from that place, from that location, from being those people… i mean, i could be grateful to the earth for the blessings bestowed on us; i could thank ar-Razzaq/the Bestower of Sustenance for the gifts of life,
but did i need that one day a year to do it
if i strived to do it everyday,
to make life a multicoloured/multitextured/
multimedia/multidimensional of shukr, of gratitude,
of shukru bil qalb/gratitude in the heart,
wishing the best for all of creation and working for that,
expressing gratitude, and using the divinely-given gifts for all of creation?
shukr/gratitude, the twin of sabr/patience: gratitude and patience in the unfolding of life.
that one day was a good reminder though….

but how to hold that gratitude in the face of the prison-industrial complex, homelessness, no universal healthcare, abuse and destruction of the earth, denial of First Nations’/Native American sovereignty rights, the intersecting oppressions that keep us all from the fulness of life?

WHY THANXGRIEVING?

my partner and i having lived most of our lives far away from family of origin, made family of choice with people with whom our lives intersected, with whom we struggled for the transformation of the world. But since we were far from having family of origin holiday obligations since we were usually on the other side of the world, we were particularly aware of the lives of people who were cut off from their families of origin because those families had decided they no longer belonged.

So, since we didn’t “have” to do anything with anyone, we decided to raucously sing Rumi’s song. we sang to whomever would hear:

Come, come whoever you are: wander, worshipper, lover of leaving,
vegan, vegetarian, omnivore, pescatarian,
non-defined, fluid/non-fluid, poly,
post/pre-whatever:

COME! COME! Ours is no caravan of despair: Come, yet again come!!!!
Soooooooooooo, we’ve got a house full of people to overflowing every year, a house of people who sometimes would have had nowhere else to go: everybody was grateful to be together. and AMAZING food grounded in attempting to recognise the global implications of our celebrations.

It also became an important time for invoking presence of ancestors who had died in the preceding year, ancestors fallen in the harshest years of the HIV pandemic at that time. in Roman Catholic tradition, november was already a month for praying for the dead. as good residents of la Alta California, we followed the Mexican traditions of el Dia de los Muertos: by the time we got to the Thanxgrieving celebrations, our memorial tables-altars were already dressed, the orange marigolds in vases, the copal smoke wafting, the white candles in glass whose light reflected on the frames of fotos of the ancestors, new and old; the ritual foods on the ancestors’ table, this table like the table of Prophet Ibrahim Halilullah, there to feed all, the peoples of all worlds.

”The blood of the ancients runs through our veins, forms pass by, but the circle of life remains”….

”Those who have gone before us, rise up and call their names!”.

Blessed water was flying in every direction and we sang and wept and laughed and wondered when and if we would eat. And we laughed……. There were children who grew up with these celebrations and they helped pour the libations and lead the chants and tell the story of WHY THANXGRIEVING. and they still talk about it today…….

WHY THANXGRIEVING?

Part of my main purpose in writing about WHY THANXGRIEVING? is that doing this is part of my assignment in the world to REMEMBER THE “FORGOTTEN”, especially those who lost their lives in the HIV pandemic. Many people whom we knew and loved were radical social transformers, creating revolutionary beauty with every gesture. and although people talked about them for a few years, as time went by, they were mentioned less and less. it has always been my assignment to keep their memories alive, to keep them present.

My best friend at that time, Craig Gerard Joachim Harris, HIV pioneer, pro-feminist/pro-womanist writer extraordinaire and fellow Vassar alum (Vassar: Represent!) was one of the first to challenge African-descent communities to become educated about HIV and to be communities of inclusion.

Craig had just died days before Thanksgiving 1991 (and he always threw a legendary feast, long before people were calling themselves ‘foodies’ and blogging about it: he used the phone!). That shifted things and added great urgency to how we would “celebrate”.

Craig had made me promise that i would lead his funeral services and i was terrified at the thought of having to bury my best friend in front of everyone who was anyone in the world of HIV, the arts, activism of every sort. it was bad enough to have to bury my best friend, but with that kind of audience in NEW YORK CITY???!!!

So, how to do Thanksgiving? ACKNOWLEDGING THE ANCESTORS was very central to our expressions of gratitude. one of those ancestors is one of the very new ancestors, JON PAUL HAMMOND, who was the person who gave to me the word THANXGRIEVING. i did NOT INVENT the word: it came to me from JP and i want that to be known. I want him to be acknowledged as the source of this word, at least as it came to me. This is important to me, because I really dislike when people get erased and other people get credit for their work: it makes me profoundly sad........."

Let me tell a little bit about the history of how and why we started using the word. Hint: it was during the very bleak years of the HIV pandemic. 

WHY THANXGRIEVING?

I met JonPaul Hammond at an ACT/UP action in DC in fall of 1991. we had friends in common and therefore knew about each other, but we had never met in this world. but since there were not that many dreadlocked men of colour visible at ACT/UP actions, we bumped into each other at the end of the day.

ACT/UP came to our anarchist house in brookland (northeast DC) before going back to Philly. it was sealed: JP and i were friends, long-lost cousins reunited in our work to allow people to have life and to have it more abundantly. it was clear that we had known each other in the world of the souls, so we had some catching-up to do! JP and his partner, Wende Elizabeth Marshall, one of the fiercest thea:ologians whom i had ever met, were soon to become close members of our family; in fact, our families soon overlapped completely.

When craig harris, may his memory be as a blessing to all generations, died, i had to call JP to tell him and to have someone with whom i could talk about craig. craig had died just days before thanksgiving: how in the world were we going to make it through a holy day meal that afternoon? we struggled as we prepared our beautiful organic veggies and organic turkey and made craig’s mac and cheese: we worked as though anesthetised.

zawadi baba, rahmatullahi aleyhi, was weaker and weaker and we were forever getting phone calls about someone or other going to the hospital or almost dying or dying.
Here was our dilemma: Gratitude for all that ar-Rahman had given us; gratitude for the gifts of our Mother, the Earth. Sorrow for the dead and those dying. Anger at a government’s inaction in face of the HIV pandemic, anger at how racism, classism, economic injustice, immigration policies, lack of health care, sexism, prison-industrial complex, militarism, lack of housing, imperialism, erotophobia, disappearing people with disabilities, transphobia, homophobia, continued abuse of First Nations’/Native American sovereignty rights, AIDSphobia, aparthAIDS, etc.. conspired to make it ok for the most incredible people to die without anyone seeming to really care. and our beloved Zawadi baba, rahmatullahi aleyhi, the original whirling dervish, was dying. Another friend would die shortly after Craig’s funeral. And the other ancestors?

What about all of those “forgotten” (they were never really forgotten) people who built up the Americas, indigenous people, brown people from all over the earth, poor white people?……this was not just a seminar-induced dilemma: this was a real-life problem! how was it spiritually possible to hold these things together?

so jp and i talked about this and cried and laughed and cried and laughed. we were tempted to just cancel the dinner, but it seems that JP whispered into my ear the word that held it all: THANXGRIEVING! we give thanks for our multiple blessings; we express our gratitude for all things and we grieve land stolen from people, not being in right relationship with the earth, living in intersecting oppressions, etc., but we were going to draw strength from the Friends of the BELOVED, our ancestors, new and old.

So, we got on the phone and called people and told them the meal was on, it might be a bit subdued since we were in major mourning with the understanding that we were just entering into a long season of mourning, but we were going to keep on moving because there was civil disobedience to be done, actions to be held, memorial services to perform.

i’ll never forget that first THANXGRIEVING: we acknowledged the Friends of the Beloved, our ancestors and in particular our new ancestor, Craig. we ate his food and told his stories and laughed and the phone rang non-stop. and when it was all over, we prepared to go to new york so that i could perform craig’s funeral. wow. AND! JP and wende drove down from philly to DC to be there for what they knew would be a difficult first THANXGRIEVING. we made music and danced and JP did his wild-jungle-bird calls. and thus, THANXGRIEVING was born.

we were actually able to really celebrate. we received strength from honouring our dead; we experienced deep GRATITUDE and in brilliant darkness we experienced profound joy. the Friends of the Beloved are living…. The love flowing from and towards the Friends of the Beloved absolutely transformed everything and everyone beyond our wildest imaginations. Acknowledging the ancestors might sound morose and weird to some people, but for us it was accompanied with lots of singing and noise-makers and water flying in all directions, good smells and an atmosphere of celebration grounded in the pain of separation and loss AND the acknowledgement that the “circle of Life remains”, as the song says. There’s nothing like hearing little children drumming and chanting, “those who have gone before us, rise UP and call their names!”

soon, people were asking already in summer, “is there going to be a THANXGRIEVING celebration in November? i know what i what to bring; i know what i want to do!” it brought healing and joy; wholeness and fun! The celebration became so popular that people were getting upset because they had family obligations and couldn’t come and would therefore have to miss it! So we moved our celebration from thursday to early friday afternoon so that everyone could come; sometimes it flowed right into kabbalat shabbat! 

WHY THANXGRIEVING?

So, once again, people will come together and meditate and celebrate, insha’allah; let us commit to resist our lives becoming someone else’s occupied territories. i would like to return to where we started when we asked WHY THANXGRIEVING? by sharing these words , written in 1998 by Standing Deer, aka Robert Hugh Wilson, at the time a 65-year-old Choctaw man incarcerated in the “control unit” at Estelle prison in Huntsville, Texas, USA…. Standing Deer is a tireless prison activist. (i was going to work on the language to make it more inclusive, but i felt deeply called to leave it as it is. i am in no way going to alter the voice of an incarcerated First Nations holy person!) this poem follows a letter that you can read by going to this link: (http://www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/sdeer-poem.html).

“WHAT IS IN YOUR HEART THEY CANNOT TAKE.
DO THEY FORBID YOU TO HAVE A SWEAT LODGE? YOU ARE SITTING IN ONE EVERY DAY.
THE ROOF OF YOUR PRISON IS THE SACRED COVERING: THE BARS THE SACRED WILLOW;
THE STONE FLOOR IS YOUR MOTHER;
THE SACRED ROCKS ARE HEATED IN THE FIRE OF YOUR INDIAN HEART. TAKE THE WATER FROM THE SINK IN YOUR CELL AND POUR IT OVER YOUR HEAD AND YOU SHALL BE PURIFIED.
DO THEY TAKE AWAY YOUR PIPE, YOUR FEATHERS, YOUR MEDICINE, OR YOUR PRIVILEGES?
WHO CAN TAKE YOUR POWER?
WHO CAN TAKE YOUR DREAM?
WHO TAKES YOUR VISIONS?
YOUR PIPE IS YOUR SOUL.
IT HAS NO FORM.
YET, LOOK AT YOUR BROTHER.
D0 YOU SEE THE LIVING PIPE?
YOU HAVE NO FEATHERS? THEY ARE INVISIBLE.
YET WAKAN TANKA KNOWS YOU WEAR THEM AND PRAY WITH THEM.
YOUR HOLY MEDICINE IS YOUR TEARS.
IT IS GOOD TO CRY LIKE A MAN FOR WISDOM.
WHEN YOU SEE YOUR BROTHER CRYING, GO TO HIM AND LICK THE TEARS FROM HIS CHEEKS AND YOU SHALL HAVE MEDICINE.
THESE ARE YOUR PRIVILEGES.
YOUR POWER IS TO RESIST THROUGH YOUR WILL.
STRENGTHEN YOUR WILL.
WITH EVERY TEAR YOU GROW STRONGER BECAUSE THEY FEAR YOUR WILL TO ENDURE. THEY ARE ALREADY DEFEATED BECAUSE THEY ABUSE WHAT THEY CANNOT CONQUER. YOUR LIFE IS THEIR DEFEAT.”