Freedom Scripts

Freedom scripts are communiographies and embodied expansions of the liberated hymns from Mother Mother’s ancestral mothers. Commonly referred to as “negro spirituals,” Mother Mother has reimagined these songs as freedom scripts, ancient mantras coded with the dream of liberation when her foremothers sang them long ago. As a dancing mother, she activates kinetic and textual communions within these sonic scriptures by singing them, and then dancing inside the frequencies they reveal. These are some of the movements and visual stories that are emerging.

Mother Mother has been softly and slowly discovering these movement patterns since 2016, dancing by the light of the sun to feel into the depths of the reclamation labors in her body. The movements that are coming are a part of a constellation of dances rooted and sourced by the frequency of freedom, a frequency long-seeded and long-prayed for by Mother Mother’s ancestral mothers. The dances are a part of a continuous exploration of movements to dismantle and dissolve the imprint of capitalism in Mother Mother’s body. As a daughter of many foremothers who were bought and sold, their wombs forced to generate profit over people, Mother Mother consciously recreates pathways of possibility for her fertility and her futures by dancing to undo the stranglehold of capitalist mandates on her womb, her children, her family, and her creations.

ITALICIZED WORDS DEFINED AND EXPANDED ON IN THE GLOSSARY

Mother Mother sings Mother Wahlaiyoh’s song, Oh Freedom, and dances inside the long labors of Mother Wahlaiyoh’s dreaming. Mother Wahlaiyoh is one of Mother Mother’s ancestral mothers who is in bondage while crossing the Atlantic Ocean in the 18th century. Heart-sickened over the separation from her older children when they were kidnapped from the riverside, Mother Wahlaiyoh defiantly clings to a thread of hope. She is sitting with possibilities, several moons along with a child that will be born into a world she can not begin to understand. Miraculously, amidst the horrors of Middle Passage, Mother Wahlaiyoh uses every breath she has to imagine the liberated futures she will never again know in this lifetime. Still, she chooses life, and it is because of this insistence on life that the possibility of Mother Mother’s existence some many generations later is preserved.

Oh Freedom

Oh, oh freedom/ Oh, oh freedom/ Oh, oh freedom over me/ Over me/ And before I’ll be a slave/ I’ll be buried in my grave/ And go home/ To my Lord/ And be free/ And be free

No more moanin’/ No more moanin’/ No more moanin’ over me/ Over me/ And before I’ll be a slave/ I’ll be buried in my grave/ And go home/ To my Lord/ And be free/ And be free

They’ll be singing/ They’ll be singing/ They’ll be singing over me/ Over me/ And before I’ll be a slave/ I’ll be buried in my grave/ And go home/ To my Lord/ And be free/ And be free

Oh, oh freedom/ Oh, oh freedom/ Oh, oh freedom over me/ Over me/ And before I’ll be a slave/ I’ll be buried in my grave/ And go home/ To my Lord/ And be free/ And be free

Communiography notes

Mother Mother films this freedom script inside the morning labors of munchkinland. In the background you can hear her children getting dressed and ready for breakfast with their father downstairs. To prepare for filming, Mother Mother sings Oh Freedom as she clears the floor of toys, laundry, paper, and books to dance and determines the best camera angle for this sequence.