The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Rush

Right now, it is frightfully easy to accept, without interrogation, that the world is ending. But there isn’t just one world, and this isn’t the first time much has been lost. Having children can be an act of radical faith that life will continue, despite all that assails it. In her essay “m/other ourselves,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, “To answer death with utopian futurity … [is] a strange thing to do. To name oneself ‘mother’ in a moment where representatives of the state conscripted ‘Black’ and ‘mother’ into vile epithets is a queer thing … we were never meant to survive and here we are creating a world full of love.” For Gumbs, mothering is action: it both resists historic violence while also creating the context for other futures. “The radical potential of the word ‘mother’ comes after the ‘m.’ It is the space that ‘other’ takes in our mouths when we say it … all day long and everywhere when we acknowledge the creative power of transforming ourselves and the way we relate to each other.”