Introducing GEM

We arrive here tired of being sacrificed for dominant imaginations of law, order or liberation. Colonisation created conditions that make lives unlivable: our bodies have been rendered disposable in worlds centred around profit. This brutalises and erases us from the bodies that we live in; while enabling others to brutalise and erase us via the policies, policing and imperialism that it justifies. 

When we spoke about our pains, we were asked to straitjacket our experiences into consumable, publishable ‘proof’. We were told our realities were divisive; our knowledges irrational; our worldviews incomplete. And slowly, it became easier to be dishonest about the bodies we write from. Even when we worked within community spaces that claimed to fight for a collective liberation, we were compelled to wait for justice and erase our bodies – ourselves.

No.

We’re building a different reality.  

We refuse to isolate our embodied experiences from our engagement and production of critical scholarship. We refuse to ‘cover up’ the brutal systems that stick and swirl around our bodies. We are not asking for integration into systems that were never designed to house our realities. GEM is about honouring life by honouring our embodied homes. We dwell in bodies that are policed and surveilled: we are sick, we are caring, we are dying, we are grieving, we have repressed traumas submerged within our bodies, we are nourishing others, we have data collected about our bodies, we are seen and unseen, we are (un)gendered and brutalised, we are reduced to hashtags and folded into statistics, and today, we are – due to power –  hyper vulnerable to both violence and virus.

We are a research community formed with one intention: making our lives more livable.  We write, dream and dwell within the messiness of our lives. We respect boundaries and work through care-full conversations. We reject any world where our lives are treated as a minoritised problem or statistic. As we reimagine the worlds we live in, we centre systems of care that honour our different embodied beings and traumas. GEM is about creating space for us to breathe; and more importantly, space for us to shine.

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We function as a research centre that is unmoored from, yet responsive to, the institutions that we work within. We hope to play with ideas of knowledge: who has it, who remixes it and for what purposes. Our website will be the collective’s main public-facing output. It will be a place where we share some of the conversations that we are having on different platforms. We hope to make our praxis visible by foregrounding care for ourselves and each other: loudly, unapologetically and messily.

We hope GEM will be open to our wider community of Black, Indigenous and brown liberation dreamers. As for now, we are taking some time to figure out how we take up space and be whomever we need to be, whatever we choose to do.

Written collaboratively by Azeezat Johnson, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, Amber Swaby, Oluwatosin (Wasi) Daniju.