Intro: What do a 4 am wake-up time, the base of a pyramid, and the origin of a mathematical graph have in common? In Liu Chen’s post on the workshop led by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, they reflect on priorities in oral history practices, intuition, and the value of darkness.
“What comes first?”
When Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs used this question to explain how she conceptualizes her priorities, it threw me for a loop. We talk about our priorities—in life, in our projects, and in our personal lives—all the time, but this was the first time someone put it quite so succinctly to me. Dr. Alexis went on to complicate her own straightforward formulation, expanding that we could visualize our priorities in a multitude of metaphors that are different from her own time-based one: as the foundations of a pyramid or at the center of a circle, for example. As oral historians, most of us—including myself—think of listening to others as being what ‘comes first,’ what is at our center, and/or what is at our foundation. Given the focus on our narrators in oral history, this outward focus is an understandable priority for us to have, and it will continue being one of the components at the center of my own practice. However, what I have learned from my own life experiences and from our workshop with Dr. Alexis is that another practice of listening must also be at my center: listening inward to my own intuition.
The ethereal topic of intuition has been the subject of much study, scrutiny, and spin, so what exactly do I mean when I talk about intuition? Intuition is formed by a lot of things that make logical sense: our formal and informal educations, what our parents taught us when we were young, and the personal experiences we have had. Intuition is also made up of what some see as New Age nonsense: the wisdom of our ancestors, the wisdom in our bodies, and the wisdom from our traumas and joys. Unlike Daniel Kahneman or Steve Jobs, I do not see intuition as merely a guide for decision-making or success but as something that is absolutely essential for our existential vitality. Intuition can be thought of using the words of Audre Lorde, a central thinker of Black feminism and a shared influence of mine and Dr. Alexis’s:
“a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises… These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling.”
An old, black-and-white photograph of Audre Lorde with her classic, short Afro and a Kente cloth sash around her neck. She is mid-sentence, holding a wired microphone in her left hand while her right hand is outstretched, palm upturned, gesturing at the audience in urgency. Photo credit: Dagmar Schultz.
In formulating the place of internal, intuitive wisdom as one of darkness, Lorde complicates our culture’s white supremacist understanding of knowledge as light and ignorance as dark. Furthermore, according to Lorde, the dark spaces of our intuition are the most perceptive, authentic, and powerful parts of ourselves, because they have been kept safe from the chaotic external world that we cannot control.
Dr. Alexis further amplifies Lorde’s lens by thinking of her work as seeking “a deeper, deeper darkness.” Attendees of Dr. Alexis’s workshop got the chance to practice a few exercises in seeking “deeper, deeper darkness” through ceremonies of listening with a partner. Crucially, we needed to listen just as much to our own intuition as we did to our partner’s words because the exercises asked us to tap into our ancestral wisdom, write poems, and create physical gestures in response to our partner’s reflections. The purpose of these exercises was not to explain our intuitive responses nor to “enlighten” a solution for our partner. Rather, the exercises taught us to deepen our practices of listening to others through listening to ourselves. By engaging in both channels of listening, a greater sense of connection between ourselves and our partners was built. Through this, we could be more vulnerable and both learn more from each other than we would by only using one type of listening.
As Dr. Alexis demonstrated her model of dual listening, I kept thinking back to the advice she’d given us earlier in the night during our discussion about priorities: “All decisions are creative decisions. The only real questions are about your values and your practice of those values.” For Dr. Alexis, she likes to put what is important to her first, chronologically, and what is most important is honoring her ancestors, elders, and community members using her intuition. So, she wakes up early while the sky is still dark to meditate, and writes praise poems and performs improvised dance before asking her narrators to share their wisdom. For me, I like to visualize my priorities at my center and Dr. Alexis’s workshop firmly affirmed that I must put greater value on my own intuition. So, I will be continually engaging in my two channels of listening—listening to my narrative elders and to my own curiosities, enthusiasms, and spontaneous feelings—at every step of my process.
Is listening to your intuition a priority of yours? If so, how will you do it? In other words: if the only creative decisions are your values and how you practice them, what will you decide?
Liu Chen has a background in history and black studies. Always a troublemaker, they hope to combine technology, education, and storytelling to disrupt silences upholding white supremacy, colonialism, and queerphobia. Solidarity Forever.
This post represents the opinion of the author, and not of OHMA.