Anna Wexler performs ‘Bind me Tightly to Cabral’s Words’ at Invocations of Amílcar Cabral on the 100th Anniversary of his Birth: September 12, 1924 in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau
Amílcar Cabral, revolutionary anticolonial activist and theorist, led the most effective political and military guerrilla struggle in Africa to liberate Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from Portuguese domination. He contributed to insurgencies against Portugal throughout Africa as well as to the fall of its fascist military dictatorship. Tragically, he was assassinated in 1973 shortly before Guinea-Bissau’s formal independence. Two-thirds of the country had already been organized by the party he founded into liberated zones in the rural areas where revolutionary democracy was practiced by villagers in local governing councils, schools, hospitals, and people’s stores. At the bookstore Medicine for Nightmares, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, join us in invoking Cabral’s brilliant strategic and theoretical militance through discussion, visual installation and live performances that call him into our midst as an actual force to contend with our living collective nightmares. In Balmy Alley, across the street from the bookstore, Cabral's words, “Culture contains the seed of resistance that blossoms into the flower of liberation”, are painted on one of the iconic murals of Central American wars of liberation and repression that survive there. May they reverberate into our evening of revolutionary remembrance.
Featuring;
Introduction to Cabral’s background and legacies in anticolonial nationalism: Pheng Cheah. Pheng Cheah is a professor of Rhetoric and Geography at the University of California at Berkeley where he has taught since 1999. He is a scholar of anticolonial nationalism and its cultural legacies in contemporary globalization and has written on the work of Amílcar Cabral in that context.
Visual Installation: Mansur Nurullah. Mansur Nurullah (b. 1972, Chicago, IL 60636) is an artist who currently uses found textiles as a medium to tell stories and to connect with individual and shared memories. Mansur works with San Francisco youth in alternative public school settings.
Tongo Eisen-Martin;Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker, and educator. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is the author of “Someone’s Dead Already”, “Heaven is all Goodbyes”, “Waiting Behind Tornados for Food”, and "Blood on the Fog”. In 2020, he co-founded Black Freighter Press to publish revolutionary works. He is San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate.
Dottie Payne is a performance poet/visual artist/cultural activist and international educator. As the director of her art and music lounge “Artinternationale” in San Francisco’s North Beach, she curated a series “Communities Without Borders” featuring artists, poets and musicians from throughout the world. Her book “Birthmarks” was published in 2015 by New Native Press. She most recently presented “Warrior Women”, an original history- based praise poem to the great gifts brought to the Americas by enslaved West African women, at the Afro-Cuban symposium at the University of Missouri. She currently writes/paints out of her studio in the Mission, San Francisco.
Sound and Performance: Initiated by Lucky Alley Media
BINARY, an anticolonial performance organism using ritual, lights, puppets and sound. With Gabi Mayarii, Yash Pathak, Arden Pollard, Siddre
FREE IMPROVISING QUARTET: With Luc Chasse (guitar),Matias E.A. (guitar), Zekarias Musele Thompson (alto sax, electronics),Ivy Woods (drums, broken cornet, toys)
LIBERATED ZONE UNIT, an autonomous sound and gesture making performance group anchored in Cabral’s texts and open to public participation, with drums, saxophone and vocalizing.
Event Organizer and Concluding Performance “Bind me Tightly to Cabral’s Words": Anna Wexler. Anna works with ritually inflected performance art, installation, and archival & poetic texts. She has explored legacies of visionary resistance to colonialism and racial capitalism in performances and exhibits in the U.S., Haiti, Northern Ireland and France. She recently collaborated on a memorial zine honoring Inez Williams with Aubrey Pandori of the EastSide Arts Alliance (Oakland) where she transferred her archive documenting the radical prison activism of the Soledad Mothers: Inez Williams, Georgia Jackson and Doris Maxwell. They galvanized the national and international movement in defense of their sons, three militant Black prisoners known as the Soledad Brothers (Fleeta Drumgo, George Jackson and John Clutchette respectively), who were targeted for the 1970 murder of a guard in the California prison of that name.
