For October’s Reading Room, we continued our study from September’s gathering on Zora Neale Hurston, this time by way of Alice Walker. Instead of reading, we sat with Walker’s 2003 Barnard lecture, “Finding a World That I Thought Was Lost: Zora Neale Hurston and the People She Looked at Very Hard and Loved Very Much.”

There was much to glean from this talk, both in Walker’s reflections and in what it means to return to Zora through the care of another Black woman writer.

There were many beautiful moments in the lecture:

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs beaming as she introduced Alice Walker.

  
  

• Walker shaking a rattle and declaring, “This is to banish the academic air.”

  
  

• Walker reading poems she imagined Zora would have loved.

In this talk, Walker models a way of communing and being in relationship with the archives and the ancestors, one full of joy, reverence, and grief.

Watching this footage more than twenty years later, one cannot help but meet its pixelated, blurred image of Alice Walker. The poor quality adds to its intimacy. It softens the edges, inviting us to feel rather than simply see.

It brought to mind Alexis Pauline Gumbs again and a passage from her biography of Audre Lorde, Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde. Gumbs reflects on Lorde’s experience of being legally blind at a young age and what this experience might have offered her. Through Fred Moten’s notion of blur, we are invited to consider blur not as failure but as possibility, a space where boundaries loosen and the self can be remade.

Perhaps that is what the blur offers here: an opening.

A reminder that clarity is not always the point.

That seeing through history, through grain and static, can itself be a practice of devotion.

As we watched Walker’s lecture, the weight of the present moment felt particularly palpable. The U.S. federal government is edging closer towards abandoning children, elders, and disabled folks through the defunding of programs like SNAP. Against this backdrop, Walker’s sharing of Langston Hughes’s poem “God to a Hungry Child”, a poem she said Zora would have loved, landed with even greater resonance.

Our conversation turned toward community as we reflected on Zora’s coming of age in Eatonville, FL, and her opposition to integration. Someone said, “Integration can be a loss of community." Together, we pondered what community even means, a word overused, yet one that continues to call us back.

Perhaps community forms not from sameness but through shared ritual and return. Perhaps, as one participant offered, “The body is a community", a collection of organisms working in concert.

Our next Reading Room will continue our study of Solidarity and Survival through June Jordan’s “Report from the Bahamas, 1982”, followed in December by excerpts from Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us.

The Reading Room at House of the Lorde continues to be an intimate and generous space for togetherness, study, and reflection.

Come Thursday, November 20, 7-9 PM for our next Reading Room at House of the Lorde

As always, we'll provide copies of the text and tea.