The Black feminist acapella ensemble, Sweet Honey in the Rock, first launched their version of Lebanese poet, visual artist and philosopher Khalil Gibran’s 1923 poem, On Children, into the world of justice politics in 1988. A tender, loving and powerful statement that disrupts the assumptions and terms of the heteronormative family and the hierarchy of generational authority and power it inscribes and reproduces, whether these words are engaged visually through the eye as text, or sonically through the ear as song, the profundity of its injunction summons the reader/listener to attention as it poses surprising questions about an aspect of life that often goes unthought and unremarked. That this is so is in many ways astounding since the terrain it disrupts is one that is central to many areas of social movement activism, including queer critique of heteronormativity and the coloniality of cis-gender normativity as the pivot of technologies of social and biological reproduction of the human.

And yet, despite On Children being a manifesto – or ethical directive – about social relations of generation, the issue of the intergenerational (familial-political-cultural) as a complex nexus of the distribution of heritage and obligation, gift and responsibility, seems strangely muted in the landscape of social critique and reimagining futures, at least as it plays out in the UK, the place from which I write, live, think, experience. 11 Some sense of why the call to attention signalled in On Children could be inferred from the provenance of the poem/song: the Arab world in the inter-war years; and Black feminist cultural production in the post- Civil Rights/Black Power years of the USA. ( … )