Julia McKeown's tattoo inspired by the poetry of Andrea Gibson.
“When I left my body I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.”
- From Love Letter From the Afterlife by Andrea Gibson
I had hoped to meet Andrea one day. Convinced myself that somewhere in the overlap of our shared Venn diagrams (trans, disabled, poet, community builder) we would cross paths and I could show them my tattoo inspired by their words, tell them the myriad times and ways they had seen me, had saved me, and which of their poems I considered friends. This morning I realized I would never get to shake their hand. I sat on my front porch and wept. I would never get to tell Andrea how their mere existence, a disabled trans elder storyteller, was a beacon. I sobbed loud enough to worry the neighbors.
And then, as I often do in difficult moments, I turned to their words.
Growing up in the spoken word and slam poetry community Andrea Gibson’s name was always in the air but I didn’t really meet them until a winter in rural Morocco. I had spent that season of my Peace Corps service hiding from the cold under several blankets and hiding from myself in a gender I’d grown deeply uncomfortable with. Alone, I laid in bed and alternated between listening to and watching the video for the poem Your Life on repeat while having feelings. I didn’t know what the poem meant to me yet, only that it meant something. By the time I returned to the states I’d given a name to the “something,” added a new pronoun (they/them), cut off most of my hair, and began the messy and unending process of choosing my life.
One of the closest explanations I’ve ever found for my gender is this line from Your Life:
“I am happiest on the road, neither here nor there but in-between
that yellow line running down the center of it all like a goddamn sunbeam”
And so I got a tattoo representing that, mixed with lines from another poem of Andrea’s I Sing The Body Electric; Especially When My Power Is Out
“I said to the the sun
Tell me about the big bang
The sun said
it hurts to become”
I did this to remind myself of who I was and who I was becoming. This poem also performed the magic that poetry often does, translating one person’s lived experience into an affective image, giving others deeper insight into who we are. I even used Your Life as a foil for my first grad school paper, The Monster Builds a Staircase: The beginning of a non-binary scholar’s search for identity in the academy. So many things in my life didn’t survive the transitions from Peace Corps to grad school, from woman to non-binary, but Andrea and their words were always there, making me more visible to myself and better able to explain myself to the world.
In moments of great change I often find myself feeling vulnerable, fragile, and poised to harden towards the world, as I have done many times before, rather than let it hurt me. I, like many others I know, have had to learn how to be soft again, how to be unafraid to feel deeply, to let the world have an effect on me. In this too I had companionship.
In their poem Acceptance Speech After Setting the World Record in Goosebumps, Andrea says:
“I wasn't by any means a natural.
Was not one of those wow-hounds
born jaw-dropped. I was tough in the husk.
Went years untouched by rain. Took shelter
seriously, even and often especially
in good weather, my tears like teenagers
hiding under the hoods of my eyes,
so committed they were to never falling”
And I knew what they meant. They then describe seeing Maya Angelou walk on stage and how it allowed them to break open, saying:
“Then one day, in a red velvet theater
in New Orleans, I watched Maya Angelou
walk on stage. Seventeen slow steps to the mic.
She took a breath before speaking,
and I could hear god being born in that breath.
My every pore reached out like a hand
pointing to the first unsinkable lotus in the bayou
of the universe. I'd never felt anything like it.
Searched the encyclopedia for the feeling's name
when I got home: ‘Goosebumps.’
Afterward, I thought - I can do this.
Started training morning to night,
Crowbar swinging like a pendulum at the wall
of my chest. Tore the caution tape off
my life and let everything touch it”
And I knew what they meant. I too have been training, every day since I read this poem, to tear “the caution tape off my life and let everything touch it.” This is no easy task. I know because while trying to learn the skills for softness myself, I’ve also been trying to teach them.
My current role as the Campus Bridging Project Specialist with the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley places me squarely on the stage of people’s fears. I come into conflict, into spaces of misunderstanding and long histories of hurt and dangerous mediatized single-story stereotypes, and I ask people to be soft with each other and to save their hardness for the structures we need to challenge together. I invite them to listen to the details of one another's lives and perspectives and try to see people where they have been taught to see “others,” to see “them” as a threat. This skill, of connecting across differences and “see[ing] what’s missing but…pointing/to what’s still there,” is a difficult one to practice, especially in contexts of deep divides, so often I begin my workshops with art. I ask participants to warm up to each other and to the work of bridging by discussing a piece of media together and searching for moments of bridging or struggling to bridge.
Andrea’s The Year of No Grudges has become one of my favorite teaching tools some of its evocative lines scattered throughout the poem being:
“I know most people try hard
to do good and find out too late
they should have tried softer
* * *
I love you
because we have both showed up
to kindness tryouts/ with notes from the school nurse
that said we were too hurt to participate.
* * *
You’ve walked on water
so many times you know grace
is super, super slippery.
There’s literally nothing else anyone is more likely
to fall from
* * *
Being right is boring”
Really inviting participants to connect with each other around the vulnerability of trying to bridge and to consider:
- What would it mean to invite softness into the work of “doing good?”
- What makes us feel incapable of showing up with kindness? What hurts keep us from participating?
- What would it mean to acknowledge to each other how slippery this work is? And to let go of the fear of failing and the need to be right, and trust others to show us some grace as we try this whole “walking on water” thing?
- What would it mean to cultivate a sense of care, or warmth, or love that emphasizes what we do share between us, rather than what’s missing?
All of these actions we undertake in trying to make our way towards each other, in trying to push the circle of human concern outward, are part of the bridging process. In bridging with each other and between our different groups we are often making mistakes on slippery ground. Focusing on what is there instead of what isn’t, acknowledging the baggage we carry, and still choosing to center connection and softness brings us closer to a world where we can all experience our full belonging. Andrea’s poem The Year of No Grudges speaks to all of this and their words act as my co-facilitator, a collaborator, as I too slip and fall and try to look for what’s still there.
Sitting here, a day after Andrea’s passing, I find that the grief of this moment is strangely shaped. I feel like an imposter claiming it in the face of so many who knew the poet better. I worried in writing this about a trespass of familiarity, calling Andrea by their first name. And yet every one of Andrea’s poems feels like an invitation, a provocation to call the world in and let it know you, an encouragement and reminder in difficult moments, to be curious and kind in knowing each other.
A friend told me that in Andrea’s last few months, as their community gathered around them, their wife Megan Falley requested that people bring Andrea their problems. Until their last day on earth Andrea wanted to be elbow deep in the messes and triumphs of those they loved. Why would all the days after they departed be any different? And I believe, truly, that Andrea spent their life trying to love all of us.
So I sat on my porch with Andrea, with all my poem-friends, and all my grief about their passing, about the state of the world, about what I worried would become of my trans disabled body, my family, my hopelessness, my questions of how we survive this.
And Andrea was there as they always had been, reminding me to choose my life, let it marvel me – and to do the hard work of trying softly.
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Editor's note: The ideas expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the Othering & Belonging Institute or UC Berkeley, but belong to the author.
