Joseph McKeen Visiting Fellow Toshi Reagon hosted an evening discussion at Pickard Theater on February 10 focusing on the beauty and power of intergenerational learning as part of her yearlong inquiry into racial justice, climate justice, gender justice, and faith.
Reagon, a musician, singer, composer, producer, and curator, was joined by two other groundbreaking artists as they fused their wit, spirit, and minds to discuss themes inspired by the idea of motherhood.
The guests were poet and author Alexis Pauline Gumbs, whose recent work Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals won the 2022 Whiting Award in nonfiction, and writer/scholar Rachel Elizabeth Harding, associate professor of Indigenous spiritual traditions in the department of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, Denver.
As this year’s Joseph McKeen Visiting Fellow, Reagon is bringing to Bowdoin her Parable Path framework, a project based on Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, a dystopian 1993 novel set in the near future and addressing issues of social inequality and climate change. As part of this framework, Reagon’s fellowship is focusing on student engagement and community-led activities surrounding the belief systems and interrelated social issues that impact healthy living in Maine and the world.
The Parable of the Sower also inspired an opera of the same name by Reagon and her mother, Bernice Johnson Reagon, herself an acclaimed singer, scholar, and social justice advocate. The opera is being performed in Portland on April 14.
The February 10 event featured music, storytelling, readings, and reminiscences, as Reagon and Harding recalled their lifelong friendship, which began as children in the ’60s, when they shared a house in Atlanta with their activist parents.
Guitar in hand, Reagon got proceedings underway with a performance of “Oughta Be a Woman,” a song cowritten by Reagon’s mother describing the challenges often faced by Black mothers as they assume the roles of both breadwinner and caregiver.
Later in the evening, Reagon performed a song from her opera, a soulful and bluesy number exploring the “wholeness” of the universe, and how life, death, light, and dark are all part of the same entity. The lyrics, explains Reagon, were taken from another of Butler’s works, the Parable of the Talents, a 1998 follow up to the Sower.
Both Harding and Gumbs read excerpts from their works. Harding read a chapter from Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, and Mothering (2015), a work she describes as her mother’s spiritual autobiography and which she cowrote with her mother, Rosemary Freeney Harding, who was active in the civil rights movement.
Gumbs chose to read a segment from M Archive (2018), described as “a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm.” Gumbs described the work as an acknowledgement of the women who became before her—“drawn from the archive of infinity... placed in me by all the books I have read by Black women writers, radical women of color.” One of the books that inspired the work, she said, was Harding’s Remnants. Both readings tackled the ideas of motherhood—literal and metaphorical—and how we are all interconnected.
Reagon further explored these themes as she made an impassioned plea for humanity to take more seriously the environmental challenges facing the planet.
“The idea of safety is false; the idea that you can hide from yourself and from the legacies of [people who have been] the most destructive force in the universe. You have nowhere else to go,” she said.
“If there was ever a time to run out of your house flying towards the light, this is it.”
To take advantage of Reagon's recent campus visit, Kelly Stevenson ’25, Ladi Nzeyimana ’24, and Weatherspoon ’25 invited Reagon to join them and other students for an informal discussion at the Schwartz Outdoor Leadership Center on February 9 about the intersections of youth, gender, race, and leadership.
"In many ways our marginalized positions prepare us to succeed despite the failures and shortcomings of society," the students said.
After taking questions from the audience, Reagon concluded the event with a rendition of her song Freedom. In this song, Reagon once said, “I testify to Freedom like she is a known entity that exists all the time and is hard to find on the planet Earth. I think humans say ‘freedom’ a lot, but some don’t know what it means.”
Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the opera, created by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon and presented by Indigo Arts Alliance and Portland Ovations in association with Bowdoin College, will be performed at Portland’s Merrill Auditorium on the April 14. Click here for more information and tickets.
