We Hold Your Name: Mormon Women Bless Mormons Facing Exile / Edited by Kalani Tonga and Joanna Brooks / Feminist Mormon Housewives / 2019
In a recent interview with RadioActive on KRCL, I was asked the gigantic question: how do you define poetry? After a few minutes of scribbling, I came up with this: prayer and blessing through story and song. Prayer I believe points to desire and to an attempt to access greatness. Blessing is product of my own goodwill, as a poem can certainly be a curse. In either case, it is a wish to transform the other. Story points to the need for meaning. Song points to the need for meaning beyond the literal words.
We Hold Your Name is an open mic, a hearth of women gathered in vigil, a collection of poetry written largely by unpublished and non-professional poets. If what you’re looking for is mind-blowing imagery or deft line breaks, this collection is not for you. What you may find, instead, is a home, a community to weather with you your doubt and exile.
Gina Colvin
The collection was written and gathered in preparation for Gina Colvin’s December 2018 excommunication court. For months, it looked like Colvin, a prominent and fierce Mormon feminist personality, was going to go down the same route as other Mormon intellectual icons and critics of the past decades and be excommunicated. Colvin’s community, the international coalition of women she helped organize, nurture, and connect to Heavenly Mother, came through for her with letters of support to Colvin’s bishop and poems to help strengthen Colvin during her difficult trial. The poems they sent were collected and presented in We Hold Your Name. For those unfamiliar with Colvin’s work, this interview is pretty good.
The poems range widely in tone and purpose, a reflection of the breadth of Colvin’s Mormon community, even a reflection of how wide and varied the Mormon experience is in the 21st century. There are sharp little barbs, like Kate Kelly’s poem, “Fuck the Patriarchy, A Poem”:
F
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k
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p
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y.
Amen.
There are priesthood blessings like Kathryn Elizabeth Shields, which opens with the snarky and touching lines mimicking and inverting LDS priesthood blessings: “O Woman, / having been given no authority, / Neither from on high or by man, / I give you a name and a blessing.” There are also simple offerings of peace, such as Jami Kimball Baayd’s poem, which describes a sacred space Baayd has visited, one where Colvin would never be excommunicated from for speaking her truth.
The power of We Hold Your Name is its ability to represent, and thereby create, alternative ways of being Mormon with different relationships to the institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. There’s a chance that if I had known of the Mormon Feminist Housewives and the intellectual class of Mormon thinkers in my teenage years, I would have found a path for staying inside the church. Because leaving the church did require letting a believing part of myself shrivel up, these poems offered a profound relief for that choked limb, allowing it to feel the blood of love and the possibility of belonging again. I found myself so moved in my first sitting with the collection that I read through more than half in one sitting. The poems read easily and won’t belabor you in search of their meaning. That’s not the intention of this collection. Rather, it’s to create a community in the absence of approval and acceptance from those with the so-called authority. As Sara Hughes-Zabawa put it in her poem, “…it is in our un-belonging we found you, and that has been the greatest gift. Following your insight, it was the map to belonging to ourselves for the very first time.”
The act of empowering and comforting a silenced community is poetry at its finest.
A close friend asked me today, “Do you think you’ll keep up this relationship with Mormonism your whole life?”—this relationship where I keep returning to its literatures, histories, and scriptures, wrestling with their meaning. The truth is, I don’t know. But I do know I believe in the literary power of Mormonism, in the ability of its metaphors, imagery, and histories to reveal profound truths about human nature and the divine. That is enough for me for now.
I recommend this collection for anyone interested in feminism, religion, and Mormon studies.