notes: poets liberation front march salon
~ archiving the ungovernable ~
march 23 2026
@ piehouse coop - amen, still standing after the floods – (a not-for-profit, worker-run, wheelchair accessible music and arts venue) – starting a radical library every other wednesday!!! deptford check it out
shoutout shubbak dodging all the ops - this series wasn't a walk in the park
lisa minerva luxx - militant poetics, interrupting death machines writing or both
alaa abd el-fattah - an honour, we always celebrate when political prisoners are released, brought some archives
dr. lola olufemi - political imagination, poetics of revolution
raising funds for shelters for african migrant workers in lebannon (down with kefala)
shoutout maqam books
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- how do we read and write practically to feed into the movement?
- archiving the ungovernable?
- archiving as life-affirming, you have to be alive to revolt - see: sudan emergency rooms
- what do we do with the remains of the revolution, in the aftermath, in the midst of counter-revolutionary conditions?
- archiving as owning the narrative, forming the counter-narrative
- whose narrative prevails? who's perspective is in the archives?
- how do we archive when we must destroy so much for safety? see: disappearing messages
- archiving has a colonial history; the colonial gaze
- the use and presence of memory in archives
- statics vs. dynamic archives
- what is the shape of the archive? can the form itself be ungovernable? how does it live in the world?
- archive is not necessarily institutional - let's come at it at a slant - disrupt your notion of the archive - your language can be an archive (what do we archive in our bodies, in our relations)
- readings ***
- settler colonialism captures temporality?? (pls say more doctor)
- intrusive thought: i like the word 'camp'
- archives to access the ungovernable
- the most radical and explosive revolutionary moments are very hard to talk about after the fact
- young people breaking into israeli embassy in cairo in response to the 2012 war on gaza - captivated everyone's attention
- unmanageable, crazy, beautiful
- state/oppressor inflicted hyper-presentism // erasure
- if we cannot neatly package your nostalgia, we will destroy or hide your archives
- whenever people mobilize, a battle of narrative always begins. and it is hard for people inside the action to win this battle
- language is so codified // the convenience of jargon vis a vis its limiting effect
- sometimes you have to make a decision and commit to being a propagandist
- "propaganda" for the interior, for the within, without this, we risk the movement
- invent a narrative that the movement can self-identify with
- the place of spectacle and theatrics in revolutionary acts
- taking hammers to the cement material of the walls of the israeli embassy in cairo which is the same material of the walls built around gaza
- archives created as byproducts of living and resisting
- the diaspora revolutionary and their stances
- how to embody revolution outside your home state, in contexts where you're not the normative subject
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ break *** book shopping and toilet lines, pies will take 20 minutes
b-sides
(what is the situation with the pies? if there is pie mayhem, we'll stop to do donations)
- political aesthetic practices // writing practices of guerilla social movements // against the conservatism of anglican traditions
- archives within and transplanted from context
- what can the cultural arm of anticolonial practice do?
- political claims as beautiful
- chants, poems, rhythms - reanimate people's sense of possibility
- archives of revolution as inherently flexible // containing strategic information to use in the present
- poetics as a necessary framework to capture? understand? the rapture of radical revolutionary eruptions
- writing to reanimate the senses (is your whole body here with me)
- temporal configurations // intimately linked to the legacies of movements
- intrusive thought: i want to mature my pen enough to write my father's grief
- it takes a revolutionary moment or a genocidal moment to express in true sincerity, earnestness // you don't worry about your tone, about irony
- conservative historiographers trap us into neat epochs - this is not the truth
- cynicism as a rhetorical devise
- detachment from others in the form of a cynicism about your political convictions
- beauty defined as reproduction/affirmation of social relations that help people survive
- luxx read something arresting
- intrusive thought: what is the poem lurking simmering in my blood
- intrusive thought: i don't want to write well if i am not living well
- intrusive thought: every day the fear loses some of its heat
- jasper bernes - poetry and revolution
- arabic oral poetic traditions as the archives
- culture as a vehicle of transmission
- affective non-rational circles of discussion and song in sudan
- intrusive thought: what poetic traditions do i come from?
- oral archiving and story-telling as modes of organizing and strategizing // as anti-capitalist
- ungovernable -> coming up to a threshold
- what do you choose to abandon?
- what is untranslateable?
- rubbing up languages against each other to create a third space, a fugitive place, between languages
- creating interiority
- archiving for a particular people
- rejecting your enemy // survival
- everything is continuous and ongoing, not finite – what does an archive that honours this look like
- it is strategic to be triumphant
the poetics of revolution show that revolution is necessarily tragic // to be in it is to see it is completely ungovernable // it is energy, and it will bloom and it will ebb // but it comes from a real place inside us // it will always be tragic to feel it and inevitably lose it // all our victories will be small victories // all our defeats will be big defeats // but big defeats are just the status quo // small wins disrupt // to triumph is then not just strategic and utilitarian // the poem always works in the future // the small triumphs materially // it will lounge in the language // and feed the next cycle.
intrusive thought: i am baking in a cloud of questions