doe @exiliaex@masto.anarch.cc

The next two contributions to my “Constellations of Care: Anarcha-Feminism in Practice” (Pluto Press, April 2024) anthology could be misread as being *simply* about cooking, relegating women and queers to the proverbial kitchen. Yet they revolve around relationality as the key ingredient in both surviving and thriving.

“Communitarian Kitchens: Stoking the Flames of Memory and Rebellion” by Vilma Rocío Almendra Quiguanás, translated by @susurros:

“Our relationship with our territories is woven into the tulpas, the millennia-old fires of encounters, legacies, flavors, and knowledges. … In the uprisings, strikes, revolts, marches, encampments, popular assemblies, blockades, land recuperations, communal congresses, appropriation of factories, roadblocks, and popular tribunals, and on pickets and barricades, fire has always been present. … Communitarian kitchens and fire are a necessary couple. They have been present and vital in feeding the dignified rebellions that denounce and question the state, transnationals, and all the other powers that have always oppressed us. … [They] have sustained struggles against hunger, for land and water, as a life practice and central axis for collective nourishment.”

“Supporting the Revolution, One Stew at a Time” by Aleh Stankova and Fenya Fischler:

“The relationships we formed through our organizing were a big part of what allowed us to sustain this group for so long (to our knowledge, we’re the longest-running Food Not Bombs chapter to have ever existed in London!). Centering relationships also meant being clear about the types of networks we wanted to build: reciprocal, horizontal, caring, and supportive. We truly believe that our group survived despite the odds because of the intentionality with which we built up our political practice, aligning with feminist and anarchist values that saw us resisting engrained hierarchies and patriarchal organizing patterns, and how that manifested in the way we looked out for each other. … In short, care (including food), which is so often devalued and gendered, is in fact the invisible fuel that sustains us in the struggle.“

For more info on the book or to preorder:

https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745349954/constellationsofcare

#ConstellationsOfCare
#AnarchaFeminismInPractice

Mother Anarchy Loves her Children

Download for this and a coloring version at https://archive.org/details/mother-anarchy_202401/MotherAnarchyChildren/

As queers and exiles of all kinds, remember that it's up to us to preserve the memory our love and living practices.

Many of us had no practices instilled in us by any queers in our lives, since many of us grew up in an era without queer elders, without a history being communicated by anyone trusted in our lives. Instead, many of us were struggling alone against the heavily Christian-coded practices of capitalist, consumerist hegemony.

We had to develop our own practices.
To keep ourselves and each other safer.
To accept and express ourselves.
To develop community, and love.

It's up to us to protect the memory of these practices, their living history. We cannot expect our memory to be kept by the textbooks of machine that produces workers.

We keep the memory of our love, our life, alive.

And we have the power to do more than those that came before us, so that those after us can walk with our knowledge, our failures.

Celebrate around shrines of your love. Let them burn as bright as your heart.

Build temples of rest for exiles. Let them be sanctuaries of self-acceptance as endless becomings.