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Catch the Details:

When: Saturday, March 1st, 2025, Noon (12p) EST

Where: Virtual, Zoom

Registration Link: right here

Read the background story of “Your Library as the Altar,” here:

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Alrighty, see you tomorrow?

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my kitchen table is an extension of my altar. but/and/also, my kitchen table is the altar, in this sanctuary that i call home.

this is where i, my loved ones, and ancestors named and unnamed, commune and abide.

in many ways, this kitchen table is the place where creation and endings coexist. where every meal had and every meal cooked is an offering, a converging point of reciprocity, a prayer, a rekindled memory.

it's the place where i cook for two, so that my mother joins me.

making this table my own has been a continual tending to being open and receptive to the ways that the Divine shows up, and i the same.

from reading the literary canon of my ancestral lineage, to writing and archiving the lived and past experiences of myself and my mother. to embracing the silence, letting daydreams take hold. to being present - thoroughly enjoying the fruits of our labor.

this table, this altar, has and will continue to be a location where time moves fast and holds still. where worlds end and birth. where all is done is remembrance.

— my reflection in answering the prompt: “what do you imagine here,” on April 30th, 2023, for the Kitchen Table Archive.

new year greetings and sending love & appreciation for the new faces who’ve joined this space! though it’s been a little min since I’ve last posted, I’m looking forward to this return and to share with you an offering that has been on my heart.

much like what I wrote about in the reflection post for the Kitchen Table Archive, for me, the years following have centered on the themes of remembrance and devotion, now leading me to the newfound location of our libraries as the altars in our homes and sacred spaces.

from my last visit to Nigeria back in December 2023/2024, I visited my grandparent’s home, taking in the fact that their furniture, dining ware, TV, shelves, year calendar, wedding and baby photos, and family photos were in their original spot — fully preserved. cabinets and the desks carried handwritten letters, some unsent, others not responded to, many with concerning care with how extended family and friends were coping, especially during the time of the Biafran genocide, filled the home.

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and after returning, I was led me to these questions:

for our home libraries as sacred sites, what are our categorical practices to preserve the literary texts & heirlooms of our ancestors and of ourselves as future ancestors? what’s required of us to commit to the preservation of cultural memory because the risk of forgetting and letting our possessions fade away is too great a loss.

how does the process of shaping and building our canons aid in the further decolonization process our souls need? What were our transitioned loved ones reading or storytelling about?

how do our books, stories, letters, journals, and oral heirlooms + archives from our lineages lead us to this unveiling (the decolonization) and becoming (our return to Self/Community/Home)?

how can we come back into our bodies and blend key somatic and ancestral spiritual practices into our process?

I want our people to live long, even if our physical bodies are no longer in this realm. I want our stories to linger within and around us like a sweet- smelling aroma. I want us to walk around with a collective knowing-ness about us and our people that cannot be swayed or toyed with. I want, in this present life, to collaborate in the continuation of these memories of our hosts of witnesses.

so, this is where I find myself now in my spiritual, cultural, and political practice, where my heart is here for a just world, void of what brings premature deaths, yet, so desperately not trying to fall into despair. My heart is currently craving for play, devotion, to remember again, to come back to my body, and to feel all the incredible sensations of being alive. as in, to love, to grieve, to learn, to read, to discuss, to commune, to hold, to be held, to carry, and to continue the work. 

and, to collaborate with people who seek to do the same.

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As such, on Saturday, March 1st at Noon (12p) EST, I’m inviting you to ‘Your Library as the Altar’ — a Black feminist memory work & political education workshop that I’ll be facilitating.

During our time together, we’ll explore three core frameworks housed within bibliomancy, architecture & communion to embed in your familial, literary & memory work, and spiritual practice. They include:

1) Remembering Your Guides

2) Seeding Your Library & Altar

3) Ritualizing Your Communion

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I’m excited that in this workshop, we’ll cover how our canon is all that is contained in our people, and our library is the home that contains our communal and internal knowledge, reminding us of why we do what we do.

We’ll begin our practice for remembering what has been generationally passed within our lineages (and gain the tools to begin), tending to piecing together the messages of our people within us.

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This workshop will be perfect for you if you’ve been:

• curious about how to begin preserving your family keepsakes

• seeking to remember the Ancestors and Guides located in your spiritual & familial lineages

• wanting to develop a personalized, curated canon/curriculum/syllabus reflecting your decolonial & anti-imperial feminist values and commitments

• wishing to know the expansive forms of altars that don’t replicate the symbolic, ritualistic, and iconographic identities of the death-making systems surrounding us

• desiring to engage in repeated communion (think study groups, etc.) with people committed to decolonial and Black anti-imperial feminist political education, study, and strategy-building.

• and more!

I look forward to sharing that space with you and to spending more time here with this newsletter to unpack what the “Library as the Altar” is all about!

See you virtually on Saturday, March 1st, 2025, at noon (12 p.m.) EST and soon for an upcoming letter!

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Here, Death Doulas are the anti-imperial cultural workers – acutely aware of the performance of and the grammars of death worlds, yet, in the midst of the wake1 and compounded grief, they are committed to survival, in sync with Spirit and tools of divination, with ritual making and with memory keeping. This care work prioritizes archiving, truth-telling, anti-imperial communal solidarity, and tending to our Land – rejecting Empire’s desire for our Bodies as non-human/machinery. 

Death Doulas rests on the fact that genocide and war are the baselines of the Western world, but that our resistance is not a metaphor and attends to the multiple ways that death appears – physically, environmentally, intellectually, spiritually, culturally, socially2 –  while most intimately aware of and committed to our Dead and those still living. 

Numerically, the year has changed, but our demand for a Free Palestine, a Free Sudan, a Free Democratic Republic of Congo, and a Free Land — void of anti-Blackness, imperial & military/police presence — will always continue until it’s so.

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Sitting with Death Doulas or Death Workers as a collective embodiment practice, there are a few thoughts I’m carrying at the moment: 

First, week after week, as COVID cases only dramatically increase and debilitate our livelihoods, we’re seeing how the US has been committed to normalizing mass death and mass disablement. They’ve continued to downplay the severity of COVID and its effect on all of us — where instead, the priority is to return to “normal” rather than fortifying structures of wellness and communal responsibility. This “return to normal” is instead a push to fulfill the means of production as soon as possible while keeping labor consistent and workers stuck in this death-churning cycle. 

Second, the ongoing genocides in Palestine, Sudan, and DRC have already and are unveiling a deeply insidious interlocking web of globalized death-making. Global-South internationalist solidarity,3 being rooted in a local grassroots organization, and political education are what keep me here and what I hope brings you here, too. I’m drawn here because of grief. I’m drawn here because I know the anti-imperial struggle is both global and connected.

Next, I’m growing aware of the linkages between the US, antiBlackness, and fascism – all of which give way for imperialism, colonialism, Zionism, and capitalism to be deeply rooted. How do these show up in our bodies, in our lands, in our demands for freedom, in what we do/don’t have access to, and as weapons of warfare? Reading Erica Caines’s article on Liberal Democracy: The Bedfellow of Fascism4 has made this more clear: 

When George Jackson advised in 1970 that we “settle our quarrels” because “fascism was already here,” it was with the astute understanding that the ongoing decolonization movements happening in the US and abroad were creating a crisis for the white world. Fascism, which emerged in Europe inspired by movements in the US like Jim Crow, did not break from the totalitarian logic and practice of European colonialism. Understanding ourselves as a colonized people within the US (politically, economically, and socially), we can understand that our lives are dictated by the authoritarian policies of a ruling class of a settler colony. The US has always been fascist from inception.

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the blood cries out from the ground

Part of the Death Doula’s/Death Worker’s priority is the right to live and die in dignity. We’re concerned with troubling what it really means to live and die – because this two-fold binary of “life” and “death” doesn’t actually exist within fascist, capitalist, and settler colonized lands (aka “death-making systems”).

The in-between shows up as slow deaths that, for us still living, we witness all around us. This looks like the “shooting to cripple” methods used by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians - meant to torture and give claims for ”self-defense”; this looks like the intentional starvation of the Palestinian, Sudanese, and colonized people in resistance struggles. This looks like the bombing of every hospital in Gaza - completely shattering the healthcare and reproductive healthcare system in its most critical moment.

These are some examples to fit under what Puar labels as “will not let die,” “let die,” “make die,” and “will not make die.”5 These horrors extend when we make the linkages that maiming and varying slow deaths continue because it is a financially generative pull within the -isms known as the rehabilitative economy.”6 The rescue organizations that only show up when the damage is “complete,” the mission trips that launch just in time to spread the message of a “savior,” the narratives written that code the colonized in their resistance struggles as helpless and in need of rescue, the adoption agencies that form new markets in the cycle of crises…

The realities of slow deaths show how maiming, injury, disablement, debility, varying levels of bodily capacity, “usefulness,” or “being a good citizen” aren’t just random coincidences and categories in this climate we exist in but are absolutely intentional harms done by imperial and colonial powers like Israel, the US, the Western world, so the work towards new futures are disrupted, and that the injured state is the permanent state -which they have already accounted for - to control the quality of the livelihoods + death conditions of the populations (biopolitics and necropolitics).

maiming functions as slow but simultaneously intensive death-making, as targeting to maim is an accelerated assault on both bodily and infrastructural fronts…maiming masquerades as ‘let live’ when in fact it acts as ‘will not let die.’ — pg. 138

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The Body / The Machine / Our Rituals

Genocide and war are not only the intentional elimination of a people group but, as Achille Mbembe calls it, it’s also a “war on life support.” This includes water, sewage, transportation, mobility, hospitals, electricity, telecommunications, access to food, schools, and all life support systems. The desecration of these by fascist, capitalist, zionist, and settler colonial regimes is, at the core, a fracturing of the communal networks we used to/do have available to us, like the birth & abortion doulas, the griots, the herbalists, the diviners & interceders, death doulas, and beyond.

Death Doulas still holds the determination that for us to build our survival tools, it is through remaining in principled struggle with one another. We learn from each other how to sustain and maintain our resistance movements. We study alongside each other, our revolutionary ancestors, and keep close to our revolutionary Guides still living.

We’ll continue to do our work day by day.

- for reflection -

what is out there for us when the materiality we are forced to tie our spirits to does not provide anything that can keep us alive?

- Question posed by Poet @sun.sonics in conversation & reflection on Death Doulas -

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updates & notes

• The Global Strike for Palestine starts today, January 21st, and ends on January 28th. Check out this infographic by Protect Palestine Org for the calls, actions, and steps.

the footnotes

Ella Baker, pivotal leader of SNCC and movement organizer, gave this speech, Making the Struggle Every Day, at the 1974 Puerto Rico Solidarity Rally. Though the context of this speech related to Puerto Rico, like Palestine, both have a history laced with occupations from the US to Israel. Making the Struggle Every Day, globally, still rings true in our unending fight towards destroying capitalism, settler colonialism, imperialism, and all death-making systems. 

What is the struggle? For “human dignity and freedom.” We have to “understand that they — as well as you and I — cannot be free in America or anywhere else where there is capitalism and imperialism. Until we can get people to recognize that they themselves have to make the struggle and have to make the fight for freedom every day, in the year, every year until they [we] win it.”1 

Baker’s words align us with the growing witness of the multiple genocidal atrocities that have been ongoing in occupied Palestine, occupied Haiti, the coup in Sudan, and the Global South resistance for freedom and liberation from Western imperial powers — which doesn’t stop there alone.

In “What Ella Baker Taught Us About Ferguson and Gaza,” written by Dorothy Zellner (former SNCC staff member and co-founder of Jews Say No!), Baker notes, 

Fast forward to today, it’s apparent more than ever that to change the existing systems and be free means to end these systems entirely.

Not to reform it, not to have a seat at the table, not to diversify it – end it and create anew.

Doing so explicitly looks like joining a revolutionary political organization committed to the liberation of all oppressed people under capitalism and imperialism, repeatedly making the connections of the interconnections of our lived realities – locally and globally, collectively organizing, studying our revolutionary ancestors through political education with one another, and keeping steadfast in our dedication to this work. 

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The Web Traces Back to the Same Host

It’s Free Palestine, Free Haiti, Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Tigray, Free the Black Diaspora everywhere that we are, free the people and free the land. Why? Because, like a web, every struggle for liberation, every struggle for freedom, every struggle for self-determination and dignity links back to the same parasitic host – the Western imperial and capitalistic war-mongering project.  

Collective history has shown time and time again how nation-states and settler colonial states will do all that they can and more to sustain themselves – especially through the dehumanization of our people, the demonization of all who do not fit into the white/Christian/patriarchal frame, and death - literally and socially. 

Our families, forced out of their homes as migrants, as displaced people, as captured people and made enslaved, know all too well the reality that genocide never ends, that war never ends, the theft of land never ends, the destruction of our languages and rituals never ends, and, and, and.

This is the imperial world. 

This is the settler colonial world.

This is the basis of the capitalistic world. 

This is the antiBlack world. 

This is the white cisheteropatriarchal world.2 

We know this reality all too well because not only is our struggle every day towards the liberation of all of us, but in doing so, the police within our minds, within our bodies, within the ways we relate to one another — in loving and being loved in all forms — ends. Where gender binaries and social conformities no longer bind. Where our bodies, minds, and spirits are re-balanced and synced. Where our resistance to what kills truly gives us life. 

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All of us from the Global South and dispersed across the world face daily the threat of police and military violence, of gendered violence, of patriarchal violence, of reproductive violence, of having our schools/libraries/archival homes destroyed, of having our places of refuge and sanctuaries eliminated, of being forced out of our homes, of trying to make ends meet, of trying to place food on the table, of trying to reckon with a world that claims a post-slavery/post-war/post-genocide and realizing there never is a “post” to these atrocities.  

So, to witness, most especially, the genocidal violence in Palestine brings me back to the question I asked in the last letter: who are the anti-colonial/revolutionary ancestors we call upon in our work and our being? As we live in their legacies, how and what are we crafting as future possibilities of a new world?

This global struggle is happening simultaneously on every level of this ecosystem. And, here, at this moment, to demand a ceasefire in Palestine and commit to boycotting these corporations who are fueling the Palestinian genocide and more.  Still, we have a cloud of witnesses, those who transitioned and those present, who aid us and empower us to speak with vigor, to disrupt continuously through protests and direction, and to make our demands clear.

Our resistance work is communal and spiritual, leading us to engage our ancestors and Spirit as a technology to further dismantle Western imperialism and all death-making systems.

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P.S. Part 2 of deathdoulasfortheliving is coming soon, and I’m looking forward to sharing more on re-membering our sacred practices through Spirit and our literary revolutionary feminist ancestors as an anti-colonial and resistance tool against this antiBlack genocidal world that we live in.

Additional Sources in Keeping with Sudan, Palestine, and Haiti: 

• Gaza, Haiti: The White World Trembles

• Sovereignty Denied from Haiti to Palestine 

• Fred Moten on Palestine and the Nation-State of Israel 

• No War But Class War in the Horn of Africa

As I’m placing the last edits for this piece, I’m now seeing that the internet and communications channels have been blacked out in Gaza by Israel. The IAF has been carpet bombing the region nonstop with airstrikes and white phosphorous gas to annihilate the Palestinian people, and the Israeli army is conducting ground operations. My God. This is so, so, so enraging and heart-shattering.

With Israel having endorsement from the West and creating an even more explicit environment for killing all Palestinians off-radar, may each of us keep the courage, resilience, bravery, and the practice of solidarity through refusing silence.

So, please consider these words below, a likewise grieving offering and prayer, and a commitment to refusing silence every day in this collective struggle.

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The Call - Mother, Loosen My Tongue, by Audre Lorde

Holy ghost woman

stolen out of your name

Rainbow Serpent

whose faces have been forgotten

Mother loosen my tongue or adorn me

with a lighter burden

Aido Hwedo is coming.

On worn kitchen stools and tables

we are piecing our weapons together

scraps of different histories

do not let us shatter

any altar

she who scrubs the capitol toilets, listening is your sister's youngest daughter

gnarled Harriet's anointed

you have not been without honor

even the young guerrilla has chosen

yells as she fires into the thicket

Aido Hwedo is coming.

I have written your names on my cheekbone

dreamed your eyes flesh my epiphany

most ancient goddesses hear me

enter

I have not forgotten your worship 

nor my sisters

nor the sons of my daughters

my children watch for your print in their labors

and they say Aido Hwedo is coming.

I am a Black woman turning

mouthing your name as a password

through seductions self-slaughter

and I believe in the holy ghost

mother

in your flames beyond our vision

blown light through the fingers of women

enduring warring

sometimes outside your name

we do not choose all our rituals

Thandi Modise winged girl of Soweto

brought fire back home in the snout of a mortar

and passes the word from her prison cell whispering Aido Hwedo is coming.

Rainbow Serpent who must not go

unspoken

I have offered up the safety of separations sung the spirals of power

and what fills the spaces

before power unfolds or flounders

in desirable nonessentials

I am a Black woman stripped down

and praying

my whole life has been an altar

worth its ending

and I say Aido Hwedo is coming.

I may be a weed in the garden

of women I have loved

who are still

trapped in their season

but even they shriek

as they rip burning gold from their skins Aido Hwedo is coming.

what has never been taught

you are my given fire-tongued

Oya Seboulisa Mawu Afrekete

and now we are mourning our sisters

lost to the false hush of sorrow

to hardness and hatchets and childbirth

and we are shouting

Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer

Assata Shakur and Yaa Asantewa

my mother and Winnie Mandela are singing in my throat

the holy ghosts' linguistone iron silence broken

Aido Hwedo is calling

calling

your daughters are named

and conceiving

Mother loosen my tongue

or adorn me

with a lighter burden

Aido Hwedo is coming.

Aido Hwedo is coming.

Aido Hwedo is coming.1

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Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the sight & smell of death are everywhere. 

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel has dropped over 6,000 bombs on Gaza. Now, presently bombing the Gaza area nonstop for hours.

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel has murdered at least 8130 Palestinian people and counting and over 20,400 injured.

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the global anti-colonial struggle for national liberation still continues.

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the Ministry of Health in Gaza declared the complete collapse of the health system in the Gaza Strip.2

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the reproductive health violations against pregnant Palestinians are horrific.

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – we are called human animals, children of darkness, that “must be treated as such.”3

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – the Western Media is incorrectly calling this a war against Hamas. We know this is an attack against the Palestinian right to exist.

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel claims the right to defense while destroying hospitals, Mosques and churches, schools, zones of safety, and more. 

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel is murdering and targeting Palestinian messengers, journalists, photographers, writers, and all who refuse to remain silent and concede their land.

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israel, with the support of the US and its tax dollars, is using white phosphorous and nerve gas to kill and exterminate the Palestinian people.

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – Israeli settlers are resorting to minstrelsy and zionist propaganda to legitimate themselves through mocking and dehumanizing Palestinians, at minimum.

Mother, Loosen our Tongue – do we understand the gravity of having no access to health supplies, gas & electricity, food & water, and the ability to travel safely? 

Mother, Loosen our Tongue! Because the linkages in the diaspora Black freedom struggle and the Palestinian struggle for freedom are jarring, haunting, an ever-present reminder of our collective reality against the Western empire — it is heart-shattering.

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غصة/ghassa - this lump in our throat

I’m finding myself between Audre Lorde’s “Mother, Loosen My Tongue” and the Arabic word غصة/ghassa — “this lump in our throat,” and what it means (in heart, body, mind, Spirit) to be in daily process and practice of being brave, courageous, clear, and committing to the ethics and principles of being against all systems of domination. 

As in, what does it mean to become through practice and already be — and recognize both the sacred communal responsibility and Divine equipment we’re afforded to accomplish this?

Every repetition of “Mother, Loosen My Tongue” in the poem feels like a stirring, an incantation, where our speech gets stronger and sharper with each iteration. Every repetition of “Mother, Loosen My Tongue” feels like a call to our Divine and a conjuring of their presence. To me, it feels like a release of words begging to be expressed, the truth needing to be told of the systems we live within, making clear what’s poised as “complicated conflicts,” and the urgency of reclaiming our narratives.

The true burden is to remain silent. 

I can think of so many times before where I’ve self-repressed and chosen silence — to my and other’s detriment — out of fear of fracturing what appears “peaceful.” But I know these aren’t isolated events and speak to something more. “Goodness,” “peace,” and “justice” are words co-opted into settler colonial narratives and cultural embodiments. To be good is the primary pursuit and requires total obedience. Maintaining peace requires silence and agreement. But justice? Justice requires any level of violence towards those who are not in allegiance to the narratives and scripts set by settler colonial society.

This trinity of words reinforces the death-dealing systems that we exist in today by cultivating and manufacturing the very present unjust conditions we experience. That’s how we’ll realize that what we initially deem as peaceful because of silence and conformity are no longer indicators of us being in a peaceful environment but a troubling sign that our silence fuels what silences us.

Assata Shakur said it best, “nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”4

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I ask, in the burden of silence and the gift of release, who are the anti-colonial revolutionary ancestors that we call upon to continue in our collective responsibility in the struggle towards liberation? To whom do we owe our work? Who continually benefits from our silence?

When we remember that death is a constant present and not a metaphor, what is in our arsenal to combat it? How does our posture shift, if at all, and what are our modes of resistance? Who are we leaning upon to ensure we don’t stay stuck in empire-created modes of despair and complicity?

Audre Lorde reminds us that it is the memory of our people that boils within us: “Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer/Assata Shakur and Yaa Asantewa/my mother and Winnie Mandela are singing in my throat.” We have a cloud of witnesses whom we bring back to life through reading their words, calling upon their names, keeping priority to remember them, and thus re-member ourselves. This is the power of our archives, our literature, our griots, and our messengers, who have always operated in an alternate time and space reality, to insist themselves in a world that consistently denies our humanity.

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The Solidarity with Palestine - A Radical Black Feminist Mandate: A Reading List is an incredible resource created by Black Women Radicals, especially for where we’re at in this sociopolitical reality. If you haven’t already seen it, please check it out. 

From this list, Audre Lorde, at the Oberlin College Commencement Speech that happened on May 29, 1989, said,

Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true. And every day that you sit back silent, refusing to use your power, terrible things are being done in our name.

The genesis of genocide starts with silencing. What does each day require of us, and what does each day demand of us to make freedom and liberation a closer possibility? What are the vices, comforts, and distractions that get in the way of our radicality and rightful outrage “before power unfolds or flounders/in desirable nonessentials,” which brings me to ’s latest piece on addictions as a pervasive reality of our world in ongoing genocides.

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Alexis Pauline Gumbs shared that solidarity also requires reflection as practice.5 I see solidarity with the Palestinian people that requires us to be in a continual process of re/building our muscles of courage, bravery, resistance, anticolonial knowledge, revolutionary love, application, and steadfastness against all aspects of death-making systems. Solidarity with the Palestinians, the Sudanese, the Haitians, Black diasporans, and people in the struggle against imperialism and zionism means holding a commitment to strengthening our political education and communal engagement – as in, becoming a member of a local grassroots political organization, investing and divesting through our money and labor where needed, and keeping the fight and hope alive for a new world. 

I’m holding onto these words written by Sarah Ihmoud, an organizer with the Palestinian Feminist Collective, who recently wrote in 'Ghassa,' The Lump in One's Throat Blocking Tears and Speech that to practice “feminism in the midst of bearing witness to genocide is to embrace love as a radical consciousness, as a radical decolonial politic of fighting for life.”  

To practice feminism in this moment is to hold each other through the vast darkness of our grief, to walk with each other hand in hand, to bear witness to landscapes of death, and, as Mona urges us, to tell the truth. Indeed, Mona's words invite us to break out of this  غصة/ ghassa, this lump in our throat that keeps us from speaking, and to speak loud and courageously into the wind.

Telling the truth as feminists in this moment requires rejecting colonial narratives, and boldly affirming the power and creativity of our life force that we have always possessed and cultivated as Indigenous women, the power we have always wielded in service of dismantling settler colonialism and genocidal war, thrusting its overbearingness into crisis. In the same breath, telling the truth means amplifying our visions for freedom and dignity.”6

May our weeping through words and actions no longer remain “lost to the false hush of sorrow.”7 May we push past silence to fight for the new world. Long live every resistance. Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Haiti, Free Congo, and all living in the imperial core.

Check Out:

• Stay updated with the Palestinian Youth Movement

• Connect with the Palestinian Feminist Collective

• Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions - check this page to take part

• RSVP for the Political Solidarity & Feminist Resistance Teach-In

• Download the Palestine Digital Action Toolkit

• Watch Black Feminist Writers & Palestine, hosted by Black Women Radicals

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One of the times I heard this phrase was sitting in the pews during a Sabbath sermon where the Pastor animatedly spoke on the inception of god’s creation story. When re-telling and giving homage to god for his ability to create the world, ex nihilo/out of nothing/from nothing, into a “vibrant,” “lush,” and “perfectly ordered world” — all within a week, it initially seemed inspiring. If you will, even a blueprint to world-making, where the rhetoric around ex nihilo and the Judeo-Christian heaven/earthside world-making creation story spoke to a god worthy of emulation.

He loomed over the space & place, fixed the already existing “chaos,” brought order to the dark, and it became.

When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Genesis 1:1-2, NRSV

He created beings in his image, and they continued his vision of this new world.

So God created humans in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
 male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27, NRSV

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But the ex-nihilo narratives didn’t just stop in Genesis. Rather, the insatiable desire to continually create out of nothing/from nothing transformed into the necessary building blocks for god’s world and kingdom. From generation to generation, the stories laced within the Judeo-Christian text told of god and a people who received divine authority to enter “new” lands – through decreeing, declaring, praying against, and clearing out what and who already existed in that space and place. 

There began a formation of comfortability, familiarity, and unwavering support of the Israelites in the bible to kill, decimate, and establish their land, their home – all because god had foretold of the “new” lands being theirs. They were the chosen ones, the honorable & dedicated believers who would place order where there was previously “chaos.” 

Here, any people groups, any non-Judeo-Christian faiths, were fraudulent and unreal – both necessary for extermination or treated as non-human tools to fulfill god’s promise to his people. From the Great Flood, the capture of Hagar in Sarah & Abraham’s promise of nation-building, Sodom & Gomorrah, the battle of Jericho in the Israelite conquest of Canaan, and so much more. 

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And, still, the ex-nihilo narratives of conquer and conquest didn’t stop there. But, this time, the illusion lifted.

Out of nothing/from nothing is the world-making guide for empire-building. And it shows itself through settler colonialism, imperialism, global capitalism, western patriarchy/Christianity, and all functioning systems of domination. 

The genesis story of the United States says that through Manifest Destiny, god gave the early settlers this land, and that was when freedom from British rule truly began. But the truth is that the United States is part of/is the world power, stabilizing itself and the Western world through settler colonialism and all functioning systems of domination. 

The only reason that the US exists as it does and how it does is because of the theft of indigenous land and Africans made enslaved. There is no ethicality or morality in the formation of the United States that would grant them authority to be the determiners of peace, justice, security, etc. All is an illusion when we look back to the genesis narratives of the US. 

Historical archives scream of the racial & sexual acts of violence by the Founding Enslavers (read, Founding Fathers) against Africans and African girls/women captured and enslaved to this country, the extermination and genocide of Indigenous people who carved roots and made homes on this land long before the arrival of the settlers, and the dehumanizing narratives created to keep these systems in place.

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Since this past Sunday, the escalation of the genocidal campaign in Palestine has been horrifying. At a minimum, all the living generations of 45 Palestinian families have been killed by Israeli air attacks. Keep in mind, families could include 30+ members. From the last count, 6,000 bombs have been dropped by Israeli officials on the people of Gaza. Electricity, water, and food have been cut off from Gaza by the Zionist Israeli regime and SO MUCH MORE.1 This violence is an all too familiar, ever-present, and unending grief also within the Black diaspora experience.

And, to be clear, what’s written here is not to describe the mass genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people as a religious or longstanding Biblical conflict. Instead, I want us to see the interconnections of geopolitical violence of Western empire-building and settler nations, wielding power through racism and fascism to stabilize itself. I want us to get closer to seeing not only the illegitimacy of Israel but also the illegitimacy of the US. And, in our upcoming letters, also see the illegitimacy of Western Christianity within the context of the Western Empire.

Remember again that the US holds no ethical backing in what it does, or promotes, or markets, nor does the international Western community (think all “former” colonial rulers). Let the reality of our history, us, as systemically oppressed people serve as the litmus test on where and how we stand on conflict. That is, as the US and Israel are both settler states, and in the worlds they create, they will always support other oppressive colonial states because they are one and the same.

This week, again, the ex-nihilo/out of nothing/from nothing narratives jumped out as the Israeli Army Chief - Maj. Gen. Ghassan Alian - called the Palestinians “human animals” worthy of the genocidal attacks. Alongside the theft of land and bodies, the Western empire and its building of a world require a repetitive narrative and portrayal of the “other” as nonhumans, as equal to animals, as beings void of feeling and vulnerability, to complete their project of domination.

And that’s what makes what is happening in Palestine and globally in the collective fight against imperialism absolutely horrific because dehumanization is a necessary aspect of empire-building. It’s also why narratives, truth-telling, and narrative crafting are fundamental in the face of ongoing war. Violence “cannot” be seen as violence if it is happening to the demonized “Other” because the “Other/the Oriental/the Black female/the Slave/etc.” are nonhuman. 

The ongoing project of colonization/domination would not be complete without history revision – declaring lies as truth, silencing the archive, eradicating the storytellers, memory keepers, and griots, and intentionally creating misinformation and miseducation of the masses, amping all efforts to try to wipe our memory and tell us theirs to remember.  

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I’m reminded of the importance of global anti-imperial solidarity, the need for an anticolonial/decolonial Black feminist-rooted education, developing an informed international framework, and being aware and vocal about what is happening globally in recognizing the interconnectedness of our struggles. 

In Angela Davis’s Freedom is a Constant Struggle – Ferguson Reminds Us of the Importance of a Global Context, she reminds us of the uniqueness of the Black freedom struggle, the global Black freedom struggle, and the Palestinian struggle, as well as all anti-imperialist struggles towards liberation. From policing to state terror, our struggles are linked.

“Why do I say that Ferguson reminds us of the importance of a global context? What we saw in the police reaction to the resistance that spontaneously erupted in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown was an armed response that revealed the extent to which local police departments have been equipped with military arms, military technology, military training. The militarization of the police leads us to think about Israel and the militarization of the police there — if only the images of the police and not of the demonstrators had been shown, one might have assumed that Ferguson was Gaza. I think that it is important to recognize the extent to which, in the aftermath of the advent of the war on terror, police departments all over the US have been equipped with the means to allegedly “fight terror.”

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What I wrote back in 2021 still rings true today.

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This space amps the collective demands made that the Palestinian genocide by Israel (and backed by Western states), as well as that the normalization of Zionism and Western imperialism, must end. And, because the Western world is a created project, it also can be destroyed — it’s not completely fixed.

Here, TCW stands firm on being an anti-colonial, anti-imperial, anti-capitalist space that believes in freedom from all forms and systems of domination. Full solidarity, and always, with the Palestinian people and the struggle for freedom and human dignity. Global solidarity in our collective struggles for liberation, and may it all happen in our lifetimes. 

From the river to the sea.

Resources:

1. Donation to the Palestinian Feminist collective and the Middle East Children’s Alliance - bit.ly/PFCxMECA 

2. Black for Palestine Collective Resources

3. Google Drive on Free Educational Resources on Palestine 

4. Reading list and general resource listings on Palestine

5. “Palestine Sounds” – playlist retrieved from Dream Defenders 

6. Free Ebooks on Palestine from Haymarket Books 

I first began to seriously engage with bell hooks in & outside the classroom when I came across Toni Cade Bambara’s infamous quote in The Salt Eaters, “just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you are well.” Her book, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, has been a sacred, healing read for me lately.

At that point, I felt that her words conjured the unspoken desires of my heart. To be well, not in a shallow aesthetic manner, but in a way that I know myself, am not afraid of myself, and journey towards the roots of my essence. 

To be healed, in a way that commits to struggle, [nestles in community], remains in pursuit of life and life more abundantly, that affirms the beauty of the complex soul. Reading the words and works of hooks has made me feel safe in my body, and I am grateful for the day-to-day tending of making a home within me. 

I will forever be indebted to bell hooks and the Black feminists who have saved my life – literally. They are a balm in the heaviest of seasons and a breath of fresh air in the lightest of moments. I pray for continued perfect peace as she rests. I so wish that she would have lived more years here. And for all the black feminists that have left this realm too soon. 

May the memory of her and those who have journeyed on invigorate and sharpen those of us who remain. 

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So much has happened since then. I grew deeper in my study of her literary legacy; I presented part of my research –  Holy Exorcisms at the 2023 Inaugural bell hooks Symposium in Berea College, KY, back in June and successfully defended my thesis “Standing on Demonic Grounds” that came to life from her writings.

deathdoulasfortheliving is an emerging phrase that has been swirling in my mind for the past two and half years as, again, I will never not think about my Mother and her death at the age of 36 and spending my time focused on the life story of Tabitha in Acts 9:36-42. I hold these two women as guideposts, lessons, and warnings.

Mother/ing, wombs, death, grief & love, re/birth, and all in-between have been the words accompanying deathdoulasfortheliving. For me, this has been a time of holding on to the importance of remembering and doing Black women’s cultural work, memory/memory keeping, and grieving as a way to give space for their lives, their stories, and what their legacies mean. 

I keep coming back to the same thing: what does it mean to have life and life more abundantly – especially for Black women, our Mothers, and the Mothers who don’t live long enough to see their children grow? For Black women who weren’t able to have girlhood and Black girls who were forced into womanhood? I’m thinking about the spaces/institutions/worship centers/homes + people who made these fractured experiences happen so they can keep power.

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In this space, deathdoulasfortheliving are Black cultural workers committed to caring for and keeping what has been left behind by those who have crossed to the other side. Tending to our stories, keeping their memories and descriptions of them alive, embodying their essence in the everyday. Doing recovery work. Invoking cultural memory. 

Doulas stay, remain, and tend to the entire process of birth. They are there before, during, and after, so I’m working out what it means to be a death doula for the living when death is an unexpected expected presence for Black people across the diaspora daily. Where is the tending before, during, and after? 

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Myisha Priest, in “Salvation is the Issue,” speaks to how (one of) the roles of the Black woman cultural worker is through illuminating and sounding the alarm about how Black women’s premature deaths are a cultural, political, and economic issue, but also how it’s a problem that there’s a common thread of Black women cultural workers who are also dying prematurely.

I add how the premature deaths of Black Christian women are a created reality by the Christian church to sustain itself and is a religious/spiritual issue. All are breaches in our possibility to live. 

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deathdoulasfortheliving tends to the death stories of our dead. Why and how did they die? What could have been prevented? How do we stop this from happening? This is why, from Tabitha’s story, I will never let go of how the Christian world sees Black women as labor items/commodities to keep itself expanding. 

In the next letter, I’ll go further with “deathdoulasfortheliving.” I’m curious about the significance of Tabitha’s forced resurrection (seen below), if forced resurrections of Black women still happen today, what Kimberly Juanita Brown means with “The Repeating Body,” and what are the blueprints left behind by some of our revolutionary Black Feminist pathmakers. 

I’m fixed within the pages of La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s book, How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind, where I’m thinking about a mix of things. Today’s letter is a share of some of my reflections - in progress - from this book and what’s been happening in our world.

No doubt, the murder of 21-year-old Ta’Kiya Young and her unborn child was & is both terrifying and a lot to take in. Police violence and state-led murders of Black girls, women, and LGBTQ folks continue at such high rates that they often go unaddressed, silenced, or siloed away. And, the fact that Ta’Kiya’s Mother died just over a year ago, and now Ta’Kiya’s six and three-year-old children are also Motherless, is heartbreaking.

Or, about Roda Bashe, who was physically assaulted with a brick by a man because she said no to giving him her number. What makes it even worse is reading about the men who stood at the scene, watched, and did nothing. So many videos and comments came out afterward about how her overall demeanor and stance towards men justified her assault, as in, if she met the standards of what a good Black woman should and would’ve been, maybe this wouldn’t have happened, or maybe she would’ve been defended. 

I can’t. 

There is no “perfect” victim, just instead a world that creates, maintains, and profits from a repeating cycle of Black women and Black queer people’s deaths. Black women are seen as “mad” and “crazy” for daring to speak up against the ongoing misogynoirist violence. That, with the way the world operates, we have no right to speak up against who’s killing us, what’s killing us, and narratives that are made about us. 

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In our world, violent attacks upon Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people are seen as value & virtue-based attacks rather than strategically designed war tactics from the State against us. It's an ongoing policing of our bodies, where and how we show up in spaces + places, and maintaining power & order to keep this world functioning. 

We’ve become desensitized to antiBlack gendered violence and this is the daily status quo. It is a communal ritual of being baptized into this, which becomes the basis of our world – not that these violences come out of nowhere. That’s because Black queer people and Black women are seen as objects, as things, as nonhumans, as empty vessels, and automatically owe what’s demanded of us. 

When it’s chanted, posted, or repeated that we need to “Protect Black Women,” what does that really mean? And repeating Malcolm X’s quote that “the most unprotected person in America is the Black woman” can’t be the only thing in the arsenal to virtue signal men & people out of communal responsibility. Hopefully, we can move past the performative care of Black women. 

Because who does the protection if all too familiar events like Roda’s only continue? Who’s worthy of protection if Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people are automatically seen as guilty first, then maybe “innocent”? 

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In chapter four - A Portrait of the Artist as a Mad Black Woman of Burr’s book, I’m curious about how patriarchy shows up in the home and publicly. Coincidently, as this letter’s going out today, Saturday, or the Sabbath for my Adventist readers, I’ve been thinking lately about “Sanctuary” and what that means for Black women’s livelihoods. 

For sure, Sanctuary implies safety, a “hide me under your wing” type experience for the weary. But what happens when even the Sanctuary no longer provides Sanctuary? In the piece, I wrote earlier this year, “Your Yes Will Kill You,” the Church and the State are two sides of the same coin where both use communal scripts, sacred texts, possession & property, and silence - just to name a few - in similar and uniquely catastrophic ways. 

Where the secular communal space would need a “perfect victim” to save, in the Church - mainly through its practices, salvation seems only reserved for the “perfect sinner” - the one who follows the religious scripts and passages of the Bible – who both then can have “legitimate” hope for being part of that “Chrisitian number when Jesus returns” and keep special protection in this physical world. 

Only then would the promise of the “sanctuary” be experienced, if at all. 

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In both cases, safety or salvation remains an afterward conditional. A, after you complete these steps, then you can unlock the protection. We have to continue to build awareness around how the Church & the State materially weaponize protection and safety through the alley of allegiance. 

To be out the bounds of what affords you safety leaves you at high risk for financial insecurity, housing instability, social rejection (especially through who you love, if you are “worthy” of love & care, and how you identify), and SO MUCH MORE. 

If protection and safety are not in our hands, but through those who can determine who receives them, then safety and protection are volatile assets that, at any moment, can be taken away or shifted to capture a new audience.

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So, back to the home + public space. 

We can then see the communal space as an extension of the home where nuclear family models of God/State, Father, mother, and children are the social orders that infiltrate the bedroom, the living space, and publicly - like schools, workplaces, Churches, prisons, and more. 

Here, the husband/father/male figure won’t have to rely only on himself to reinforce the power structures in place, but literal patriarchs and those who uphold patriarchy can depend on the external home to strengthen this hold. 

As in, the public sphere and the internal home are both sites of terror, policing, violence, surveillance, and constant monitoring reinforced through religious messaging, silence, watching when violent attacks occur and not interfering, and still seeing Black girls, women, and gender-expansive people as property to which its “not our place to tell people what to do with their things.”

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Then we can see that the deaths of Black girls, Black women, and Black gender-expansive people are a calculated, globalized, communal project that is part ritual, part war tactic to further stabilize white supremacy. 

In world making, I see silence as a creative womb for a space & place that that needs Black girls/Black women/Black gender expansive people dead to function.

I see silence/silencing as an immaterial guard within this panopticon prison of antiBlack gendered violence. Its presence or perceived presence kills the greater likelihood of rebellion, where passiveness and neutrality fuel this reality to continue. 

It’s how breaking the silence of the body & mind violations within the home are seen as betrayals instead of rightfully exposing what is not well. 

It’s where I think about my experiences of being silenced and getting out of that space. I’m thinking about Black women who are silenced from not telling their stories about harm and violence – and also rightfully determining which spaces are equipped to hold them/if they decide to share at all. 

Or the silence from bystanders who witness what happens + how neutrality is a killer and the community that thrives on silence and where silence becomes another form of the police. 

More to come.

Things that caught my eye lately…  

1. Simone Leigh Lecture Series: Amina Shumake (Vanderbilt University) . I grew hearing so many sermons, Bible studies and explanations about the story of Hagar. But this, this lecture series presented by Amina has wrecked my mind since listening and I absolutely had to share. 

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This newsletter commemorates the study of Black August — where, “study, fast, train, fight” honors and keeps alive the commitments made by our revolutionary Black ancestors who fought for Black liberation, the freedom of all our political prisoners, and self-determination. And, as TCW centers on decolonial Black feminisms and womanism as it’s guiding principles, I’m looking forward to continuing in this Black August being rooted in prison abolition — and abolition in many forms — by keeping Black women & gender expansive people at the forefront in this collective fight.

Read more about Black August and Black Liberation, here.

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commitments:

Shoutout to Lauren of @ / yespleasebooks on Instagram who made this graphic! One of the core commitments I’m sharing here is that I just started learning about Safiya Bukhari and their pivotal role in the Black Panther Party and Black Freedom Movement.

Sacred devotion is also what comes to my mind when I think about Black August and how I plan to shift things in my every day life to reflect this practice.

I shared in my last letter about lingering presences and memory this question:

How does being in a state of remembrance, or, holding onto what should be remembered, inform what we do? why we do them? how we do them?

and it’ll be at the center of my reflections this month.

What are some of your commitments?

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Black August reading list (not limited to!):

• Assata Shakur - Assata Autobiography

• Mumia Abu-Jamal - Live from Death Row

• Safiya Bukhari - The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther, Keeping the Faith in Prison, and Fighting for Those Left Behind

• Thomas Sankara - Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

• The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is

• Mary McLeod Bethune the Pan-Africanist

• Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

• Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment

• Ruth Wilson Gilmore - Golden Gulag

• Gerald Horne - Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising And The 1960s

• Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

• Huey P. Newton - Revolutionary Suicide

• Joy James - Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture

• Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson - As Black as Resistance

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articles & websites:

• bringmumiahome.com

• Black August is ending but these Black political prisoners still need your support

• theblkcollective.org

• Black August and the Fight to Free Political Prisoners

• George Jackson dragon philosopher and revolutionary abolitionist

• Airbrushing Revolution for the sake of Abolition

• Black August and Black Liberation

• Black August and Black liberation: Study, Fast, Train, Fight

podcasts:

• Millennials are Killing Capitalism

• Groundings

• Beyond Prisons

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holy exorcisms + bell hooks

December of 2021 was a really pivotal year in taking my political engagement and being a student of radical Black feminisms and womanism to a deeper level. To which, bell hooks, Joy James, Audre Lorde, Ella Baker, Ijeoma Umebinyuo, alongside many many others, really clarified and sharpened the way I conceptualize, move, and engage both in my world and the world. 

At this point, I had been one year out from my transition away from my church, and had a surge of questions about Church at-large, Black women, our labor and participation in those spaces, and if redemption or reformation from what was not well was possible. 

So, in going through the works of bell hooks and finishing one of my papers based on her works on Dec. 14th, I then heard of her passing on the 15th and was gutted. That moment for me really shifted gears when it came to sitting with and remembering the lives of Black women that’ve been cut short, and marked by all systems of domination. I had to come back to my Mother and her story, revisited once more to story of Tabitha (Acts 9:36-42), and I remain thankful to bell hooks, and the Black feminist and womanist thinkers and people for bringing me back, “home.”

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Last weekend, I was grateful and excited (and nervous!) to present at the 2023 Inaugural bell hooks Symposium in Berea College, KY! Within the Black Feminist Theory section, I taught “Holy Exorcisms” which is a combination of my thesis work - “Standing on Demonic Grounds: A Diasporic Womanist Hermeneutical Biomythography of Blackwomen within Seventh-day Adventist Church Spaces.”

In thinking about holy exorcisms, and how/if/what does holy exorcisms have to do with bell hooks, I’m exploring the possibilities of this ethic as it relates to the systems of domination that hooks identifies - imperialist white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy.

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For this space, I define Holy Exorcisms as…  

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Using biomythography and hauntology, Holy Exorcisms goes further to address how the Christian Church (space, place, people) is another segment of the imperialist white supremacist cisheteropatriachial Empire, that partners with these systems, to solidify an environment where the Church needs Blackness to remain the nonhuman other so that any violence done, particularly to Black women, aren’t seen as violence (because Black people/women are viewed as things and not humans in this antiBlack world.)

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I’m concerned about the lingering presences of the deaths and terrorizing of Black women, their bodies, and their flesh as the currency that builds this Church. My questions include - what is an exorcism? How is it used here? What is “demonic?” How is it used here? What is death? How is it used here? And, what do I mean that the Christian Church is an unrelenting death site that requires Black death(s) including and beyond the physical to function?

If whoever has the power to kill (or keep alive) can also determine what evidences remain or are thrown out, then a reclamation of the dead, is a necessary, critical, and loving work.

As exorcisms are the “expulsion or attempted expulsion of a supposed evil spirit from a person or place,” here, engaging in holy exorcisms aims to rebuild the gaps between those in the physical and transcended realms.

Registration Link

I’m hosting a teach-in on “Holy Exorcisms” on Wednesday, July 5th at 6-7:30pm CT! I would love for you to attend. Register here using this link and receive all details. Stay connected here, and through TCW’s instagram in the meantime.

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Holy Exorcisms - A (partial) Reading List

• bell hooks

  • All about love - chapter 11

  • Belonging: A Culture of Place - chapters 1-3

• Christina Sharpe - In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 

• Joy James - In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities 

• Katherine McKittrick - Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle

• Jennifer C. Nash - Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality

Black feminism focuses on the connected realities of race, gender, sex, class, and beyond — and emerges from our life experiences. It looks at how these connected realities take shape and form in the lives of Black women, girls, femmes, and gender non-conforming people.

This “but some of us are brave” reading list is titled from the work of Barbara Smith, Akasha Gloria Hull and Patricia Bell Scott’s All the Women are white, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. 

Black feminism is best practiced in the everyday and this space recognizes that the “best” form of Black feminism is one that’s rooted in radical politics, decoloniality, abolition, ending carceral systems (think prisons, surveillance places, gender, etc.) and destabilizing neoimperialism + neocapitalism. 

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It’s a committed struggle against fascism, towards liberation and freedom, towards the destruction of class, race, gender, and cisheterosexual / patriarchal oppression, committed to the accessibility and presence of reproductive justice, and creating beneficial conditions of our lives. 

This decolonial Black feminism holds the importance of Black liberation globally and is best exemplified and practiced in local, grassroots, political organizations that center the same values, and not, what Khadijah Anabah Diskin calls a “white liberal feminism in Black faces.”1

From this reading list, to what’s practiced everyday, a Black feminism that’s not centered on representation politics (voting for/endorsing people just because they’re Black/woman/etc.) or reformism/fortifying the status quo, and is concerned with the political and economic position of Black people, women, femmes, gender-expansive folks, and girls — globally, are good markers to keep in mind.

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Pillars 

• Black Feminist Thought - Patricia Hill Collins2

• Ar’n’t I a woman: Females Slaves in the Plantation South - Deborah Grey White3

• The Combahee River Collective Statement - The Combahee River Collective4

• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book - Hortense J. Spillers5

• Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality - Jennifer C. Nash6

• All the Women are white, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies - Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith7   

• The Black Feminist Reader - Joy James, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting8 

• The Black Woman: An Anthology - Toni Cade Bambara9

• Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement - Barbara Ransby

  

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Novels & Biographies

• Beloved - Toni Morrison 

• Sula - Toni Morrison 

• The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

• The Salt Eaters - Toni Cade Bambara 

• Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler 

• Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston 

• Assata Shakur  

• The Color Purple - Alice Walker 

• Our Sister Killjoy - Ama Ata Aidoo  

• Left of Karl Marx - Carole Boyce Davies

  

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Theory & Thought 

• The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery - Alys Eve Weinbaum 

• Sisters of the Yam - bell hooks 

• Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance - Moya Bailey 

• The Black Woman: An Anthology - Toni Cade Bambara 

• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments - Saidiya Hartman 

• The Invention of Women - Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

• Black Trans Feminism - Marquis Bey 

• Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism - bell hooks

• Decolonization and Afro-Feminism -  Sylvia Tamale

• Male Daughters, Female Husbands - Ifi Amadiume

• How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  

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*this reading list is living. with time, some books may be added, changed, or removed. consider this introductory and a helpful starting point to engaging through reading, Black feminism.*

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Footnotes

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Things I want more of…

1. warmth

2. long hugs 

3. word games 

4. slow mornings

5. comfortable clothing 

6. alignment w/ Spirit

7. tending to gifts well 

8. curating

9. galleries

10. reading

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1. creative discovery of self 

2. passion — in all forms, in many ways 

3. mystery, miracles and magic 

4. humor

5. belly laughter 

6. destruction

7. accuracy

8. thick comforters 

9. curiosity as intimacy 

10. soul-fulfilling community 

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1. photographs

2. pictures of my mother

3. queerness - in love, in friendships, in being 

4. being held 

5. slowness + compassion 

6. multiplicity of sensations 

7. touch

8. beautiful experiments 

9. tenderness

10. vivid dreams 

1. lavender

2. questions

3. Black feminism - in being, in reading, in practice 

4. speaking + learning Igbo

5. creating a home

6. creating memories + capturing them 

7. citrus perfumes

8. dancing

9. taking up more space 

10. emotional bravery 

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1. celebrations

2. Igbo highlife 

3. food from home 

4. hand written letters 

5. seeing cardinals 

6. flower gardens 

7. cookie butter lattes 

8. stimulating conversations 

9. bitter lemon drink

10. massages 

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1. rose scented oils 

2. writing what feels true & honest

3. witty dialogue 

4. sunday afternoon readings 

5. rubies

6. traveling

7. the color red 

8. slow cooked meals

9. comfortable silence 

10. evening walks 

what would be on your list?

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Why is there a fear of betrayal to a church that does not truly have any commitment to you?

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Betrayal implies some sort of a previously established connection. That there’s been agreements made beforehand between the two (or more) parties on how to show up in space and place together. And, I’m thinking about how betrayal is an almost uncomfortable word to use here, too, because it doesn’t quite fit. To say that the Church (or Adventist Church in particular) has betrayed the member assumes that there was a high level of concern and commitment from those entities on how they show up, or provide, or care, or love, or coexist, or tend to those in connection — and some can say there hasn’t been.

The question of “why is there a fear of betrayal to a church that does not truly have any commitment to you?” has been weighing on my mind this week when thinking about the increasing visibility of Black women’s refusal to “take the higher road,” play into respectability politics, rush into forgiveness when whiteness and disrespect show its head, or being a humble servant of God, and also that we’re in the midst of Holy Week, especially as this is sent to you on Good Friday.

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Looking back now, I realize I was scared — and excited/curious/partially apprehensive — but still scared of what was to come. I wanted somewhere or something soft to land. Have you felt that before?

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In some ways, I feel that the words I wrote below conjured a series of events in my life that I would have never thought possible — but needed.

Ironically, I find myself in a familiar position now almost two years later. New job, new changes in my day to day, though same town, in a “returning to myself, wiser each time” phase of life.

I’ve written before on how Igbo names and their meanings calls things into form and being. And this letter is no different. Destinies, prayers, and petitions enshrine the ones who bear these names, and whose ears hear.

But especially for those of us of the Black Diaspora. Whereever we find ourselves in this “herenow.” Whether already at home or trying to return to what is “home.” From the putting aside of nicknames/something easier to pronounce/palatable forms of ourselves to revisiting prayers towards expansive forms of God — Ijeoma is the recognition that there’s power in being able to name, to declare, to envision, and to create.

Ijeoma is a poem I wrote both honoring the language of my family and a prayer of grace for those seeking communion in periods of the known and unknown.

Daily, these words and I visit each other. Daily, these words take new meaning.

- May each step forward and each step returning be blessed. Ijeoma.

Chinyere

There is a welcoming portal we have when entering our unknowns. 

Ijeoma, meaning ‘safe journey’ in the Igbo language, uniquely describes this experience. 

Ijeoma. A prayer. A promise. A covenant. 

Ijeoma.  A knowing that all journeys may not initially be smooth, but so remains our prayer. 

Ijeoma. That for the days in which sea-like transitions seem engulfing, smooth & steady shores billow our landing. 

Ijeoma, as you take time to unearth the deep-rooted parts of you, previously unknown. 

Ijeoma, as new seasons, new months, new ventures, new opportunities, begin. 

Ijeoma, as you choose to return to yourself, wiser each time, unashamedly, authentically, freely. 

Ijeoma, as multiple voices petition on your behalf when personal prayers are difficult.

May each step forward and each step returning be blessed. 

May your days be ever kissed with blessings. 

May your nights be filled with restoration. 

May grace abound you. 

May peace surround you. 

Smooth landings. Smooth landings. 

Safe journey. 

Ijeoma. 

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Kyle, @books.andbouquets, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

Debra Laws sings ‘all my love is all I have and my dreams are very special.’ Recently, the utility and practice of the word ‘devotion’ has manifested in both my dreams of day and those of night.

wandering and wondering: what conjurings, which rituals, must be enacted and offered unto each Other and the Movements we are accountable to?

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Breaking Bread: insurgent black intellectual life is an invitation to the communion table of disciplines and such dialogues between bell hooks and Cornel West.

these songs of our Spirit remind us that we exist among a broader choir, a wider congregation. 

re-membering this ‘old-time religion,’ we sense a tethering of blessings and of blues. we provide testimony in our tunes. 

In struggle. In solidarity. 

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Chinyere, @theconflictedwomanist, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

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“Love heals,” as bell hooks begins and ends chapter nine of Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. 

When thinking about love, whether as a healing salve, a language, or a catalytic radical agent, I can’t help but also think about what love is not. 

In the breadth of womanist and black feminist scholarship, being and doing love cannot and does not exist where systems of domination, control, harm, or abuse exist (hooks).  

If love is not there but can be crafted elsewhere, I’m finding that in the moments of reshaping ourselves – by ourselves, taking courage to see deeply who we are, persisting in refining our political commitments, confronting what kills and re-directing our personal and collective energies to the tending, care and emotional keeping of our people, Black diasporic people – breathing ourselves back to life, through love, is what love is. 

Love heals, not in a way to keep us bound to what seeks to wound or make do with what cages us. 

Love heals, in the “I see You, You see Me.”

Love heals, in the sacred pull to relentlessly expand and refine who and what we believe is “worthy’ of our love. 

Love, heals. 

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Let me re-introduce myself. I’m Chinyere, a writer and editor trained in womanist theological ethics and conflict analysis – hence the name The Conflicted Womanist. I always have questions about the world, people, our stories, and ourselves, so I’m curious to find the answers and connect with others along the way.

I’m Nigerian-American, a Gemini (if that’s your fix), and a lover of all things scarlet red and gold. I’m also pretty sure that carrot cake is the best dessert to exist! Read more about me, here. 

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TCW, The Conflicted Womanist, birthed in November 2020 but in space for much longer than that, is a tender creation of mine that I’m most proud of. This is my baby. TCW’s gone through many revolutions since its public launch, but consider this space a living educational laboratory to the expansive realms of womanist, Black feminist(s), critical theory, political education, & African diaspora literature for personal and social transformation. In short, TCW is a commitment to the love, study, care, and keeping of Black diasporic people. Read more about TCW, here. 

As shared in the last post, TCW is offering some new things for readers this season. Free subscribers receive occasional public posts like this one. However, TCW is a labor of love, and, as an independent writer, this is part of the work I do to support myself. In short, I thoroughly believe in paying Black women for their labor. 

Paid subscribers receive frequent posts, in line with what TCW’s about, including access to the full archive. For $7 a month, or $75 a year, you’ll receive reading lists, study guides, reflection questions, or topic-centered “syllabi” for personal and group study. 

Currently called “The Footnotes,” these resources are meant to identify, read and engage with the conversation partners whose works inspired the latest piece. Because I believe so much learning can and does happen outside the academy, these resources are meant to encourage and facilitate critical thought and sharpen engagement with the world(s) we live in. 

I’m excited for the revolutions to happen through TCW as a living educational laboratory, and give thanks to each of you for your support through sharing, commenting, liking, and subscribing. Thank you! 

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The Footnotes: Your Yes Will Kill You

*Readings (all are hyperlinked to online formats for free accessibility. The book, “Antiblackness,” is not.) 

In case you missed the post…

Read, here!

Womanist Theology - emilie m. townes

When drafting this piece, I first thought of the Black religious women of my upbringing. My mothers, my aunts, the Deaconesses, my sisters, and even my previous time in leadership at my Church. The (extensive) time spent in church, the reminders given by the elders about what good Christian young women are supposed to be like, and how “the Mothers” seemed to give so much and receive so little. Looking at their stories began to show cracks in what it means to believe that God deserves our all. 

Taking a zoom-out approach to what I found happening to/with those in my immediate circles, I began to see connections in the lived realities of Black religious women across the Diaspora and how the Church gets tangled up in the mix. From my graduate thesis on the story of Tabitha in Acts 9:36-42 to the Church mothers wrapped in the archives of our home churches – it’s there, a faith that needs you dead to function. 

Rev. emilie m. townes (my beloved dean!), one of the prominent voices and innovators of the field of womanist theology and womanist ethics, provides this foundational resource on who & what is God/god to the Black woman, and vice versa. townes’ resource of Womanist Theology is foundational for understanding the intersecting ways that class, gender, sexuality, and race are absolutely theological problems and realities to contend with. And without doing so, it’s clearer to see how “We are all one in Christ” can quickly become a cop-out verse. 

It matters the way that scriptural texts such as Romans 12:1 (I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship.) and Matthew 16:24-26 (Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?) are taken up, preached, and how these words take flesh upon congregants’ bodies, and more specifically, Black religious women’s bodies.

townes goes further in this piece to differentiate between Jesus and Christ by keeping in conversation one of Dr. Jacquelyn Grant’s notable works, White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (see pg. 166 in Womanist Theology for this excerpt). Here, Jesus knows more intimately the experiences of Black women and works on their behalf. Christ, however, still upholds an elitist, male/white-dominated society that transcends time and space. Growing up, Jesus and Christ were seen as one, but it wasn’t until reading these works that I began to see the difference. 

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Alice Walker’s Jesus: A Womanist Paradox

“In search of rescue and comfort, the character writes to the only god she knows—the god of an alienating form of Christianity, a false and crippling ideology handed to Black people from enslavement, “a God designed to guide and further the desires of another people, a God who thought of blackness as a curse” (Walker 1982, 1992, location 14). Celie addresses her epistolary prayers to a white, male god whom she does not know and who does not exist in history nor within Black women’s self-defined principles of faith. Because this god is an ideological counterfeit, a lie of white supremacy, he cannot answer. Instead of comfort he leaves Celie alienated within cries for help going nowhere to no one.” Celie ends this communication when she meets a woman named Shug Avery…Shug redirects Celie’s understanding of the divine. “God is inside you and inside everybody else,” she says. “You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it...God ain’t a he or a she, but an It” (Walker 1982, 195).2 With this text, Walker joins other women of the period in questioning the gender of God as well as male-scripted faith and Christology.” 

Debra King wrote this article based on Alice Walker’s 1982 novel, The Color Purple, and how Walker challenges the view of God as automatically Christian. What will it mean to view God beyond a Christian lens? What gets left behind, and what gets taken up? As in, it’s easy to equate God as Christian, but God is not. 

Afropessimism - Frank B. Wilderson III / Antiblackness - Moon-Kie Jung, João H. Costa Vargas

I see TCW moving towards solid engagement with Afropessimism as a grounding theory to help understand why the world does what it does and operates in the ways it does. Especially regarding Christian religion, Blackness, relationships, and “life”/”death.” Along with Frank B. Wilderson III, I also plan to read more into the works of Hortense J. Spillers, Sylvia Wynter, Joy James, Christina Sharpe, Zakkiyah Iman Jackson, and more who are in this realm. 

One of the drivers for this piece was trying to move the needle beyond believing that just because a Church is externally up-to-date or says the right keywords in service, it’s automatically a safe place. I’m concerned with what’s recognized as the norm and if those areas still enable accentuated harm in an already harmful place. I’m seeing that conversations around dismantling racism lean more towards trying to edit the current environment to “fit” ourselves into the picture or finally having a seat at the table. Understanding that the world itself is antiBlack and what actually directs what happens in our world shifts our movement from “editing” to “ending” a world that kills. 

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In the Wake: On Blackness and Being - Christina Sharpe 

What a powerful, powerful book, and it’s looking like the next upcoming letters will spur from it, so I’m looking forward to seeing what comes to light. Chapter one of this book was part of the grounding for the last letter. Just yesterday, a great piece on Sharpe’s In The Wake came out by Hafizah Augustus Geter. Take a read.

Reflection Questions

I’ve been chatting with a few people after this last letter, so I have a few questions I would love reading your insight(s) on. 

1. What does it mean to be in God’s will/in alignment with God? What do you know to be true about this God?

2. What comes up when sitting with the idea/reality that the Church produces, requires, and worships death in its day-to-day dealings and more broadly?

3. Why is there a fear of betraying a Church/church that truly does not have any commitment towards you? 

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As always, I greatly appreciate you being here and extending your support, and I look forward to what’s in store for this space. Please consider sharing this publication with your community members and/or giving the gift of a subscription to a loved one.

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Traditional Christian Church spaces are antiBlack. Not only that, but they are incapable of harboring “true love” or living up to the ethic of communal responsibility and care — that’s unattached to hidden costs. Whether the Church is non-denominational, “allows” you to wear pants (hooray?), is up to date on the latest technology for online streaming, or has a visual priority to have “the youth” in leadership, no matter how it’s spun, or what the outside looks like all churches, all Christian churches, at least within the United States, necessitate, engage in, and ritualize subtle and blatant forms of antiBlackness under the guise of uniformity in Christ and being Christ-like, to exist. 

Perhaps the all too often and widely repeated phrase your yes will cost you everything rings a bell? Whether said as transitional words during a praise set, laced between a lengthy sermon, or affirmed in a small group session, your yes will cost you everything, along with the reminder to follow the call to pick up your cross, deny yourself and follow Jesus are illuminations of the death world in which we already exist. And these deaths expand beyond the physical. 

From what I have observed, Churches embody what I call a faith that needs you dead in order to function. More specifically, the “you” within these Church spaces are the congregants, members, and leaders who are baptized into and engage in antiBlackness under the guise of religiosity. 

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*Definitions of terms I use throughout this piece for better clarity.* 

Afropessimism 

Is a lens of interpretation, a way of analyzing and understanding social phenomena, much like marxism, feminism, or postcolonial studies. (38)

True afropessimism is not animated by reformist desire to end discriminatory practices in the world; it is animated by an understanding that [the] world itself is unethical and needs to be undone. (39) 

Afropessimists argue… all other various categories within the same species, that species being the Human (woman/man, worker/boss, native/settler, queer/straight are, in various paradigms, antagonists, to be sure, but they are also all Human beings), the Black or Slave is not a category of Human. (39) 

Key afropessimist tenet: that there is no analogy between the suffering of Black people and those others who find themselves subjugated by unethical paradigms (such as patriarchy and capitalism). (40)

Afropessimists interrogate the historic development of the Human, and what that development has meant for the creation of the Black as non-Human. (41) 

Jesus & Christ

Depending on the denomination, Jesus & Christ appears interchangeable or starkly different. In this letter, my use of Jesus includes what would also be perceptions of Christ yet remains aware of the realities of, as Dr. Jacquelyn Grant would title, “White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus.” 

I blend the realities of “Christ’s significance is his humanity, not his maleness [and] “when theology uses Jesus as a symbol and sanctioner of male or white or economic supremacy, this imprisons Jesus in an elitist, racist, and sexist symbol system that often results in a notion of servanthood that devalues the humanity of Black women and oppressed others. This understanding of servanthood has been used to reinforce obedience and docility in those who are oppressed socioeconomically, thus allowing the privileged to deny the existence of Jesus’ real servanthood by changing his poor status into a royal one. (166)

God

God/god will be interchangeably used in this letter. As I’m personally working through what’s written in this letter, ‘god’ may appear more fitting than “God.” I’m reflecting on townes’ explanation of God as who “directly speaks to poor Black women through Jesus, and through God’s revelation of themselves in the Bible… This is how God and humanity meet.” 

Church 

The Church, as in, inclusive of all denominations and understood as within the United States. The Black Church is part of this definition of Church and how it engages the phrases, “your yes will cost you everything.” 

Scripture:

Matthew 16:24-26, NRSV

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 25 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. 26 For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

Antiblackness 

Antiblackness is an antisocial logic that not only dehumanizes Black people but also renders abject all that is associated with Blackness. (8) 

The Human, the modern human, defines itself in opposition to the Black (alleged) nonbeing…Frantz Fanon places this fear and hatred of Black people at the core of what he describes as the modern collective unconscious. The hatred of Black people is the hatred of the nonbeing, of the placeless, of the alleged nonhuman. (5)

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A Church That Preys

Quite a bit of preying happens within Church, so I’m concerned with Churches that run with the model of (death) discipleship. As in death to self, death to desire, death to the belief of our inherent goodness, death to trusting self, death to the belief that morality can exist independent from a belief in a higher power or specific higher power, and beyond. 

I’m thinking about how often I hear the call to pick up our crosses and follow Jesus and the community policing and the disciplining of bodies into function that happens between church members to enforce this. I’m thinking about how this call to say “yes” to Christ leans heavily on external performance and increased praises of how much someone self-deprecates as a way to show their loyalty to god. But I can’t get my mind off how a culture of demanding your full yes creates an enclosed cycle of ingraining a false belief of our innate unworthiness, sinfulness, and evil and the Church profiting from that lie. 

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The Church is not only antiBlack but also insidious because it poses itself as a holy and worthy place compelling you to say “yes” while truthfully needing you dead to operate. And death, specifically of Black bodies, includes a social death, in what Orlando Patterson describes as – “the enslaved is ‘a socially dead person’ or, alternatively, ‘a social nonperson.’... to be enslaved is to have no recognized social existence: in and against the social world but not of it.”(3). 

One of the ways that this preying happens is through recognizing that enslavement has not ended and capture still exists. Christina Sharpe describes this as, “in the wake, the reappearances of the slave ship in the everyday life in the form of the prison, the camp, and the school,” and I would confidently add the Church. (21).  The preying that happens is the creation of an external fear of the other, an internalized fear of resembling any marker of Blackness, to feel a false sense of safety within what is actually the danger and to keep you tethered to this location. 

If we are in the wake, how are our sensitivities to what kills de-sensitized so that we are exploited? When are we, Black people, ever not in the wake? 

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This Faith Needs You Dead to Function. 

The Church needs Blackness to remain the nonhuman other so that any violence done particularly on Black people isn’t seen as violence because Black people are viewed as things and not humans in this antiBlack world. The death and terrorizing of Black people, their bodies, and their flesh is the currency that builds this Church. 

So it’s a lie when Churches say that your yes will cost you everything because there are two camps – those who can afford to lose and those who have nothing to gain. And those who have nothing to gain always pay more of this cost compared to those who can afford to pretend as if they’ve done something (all nonBlack humans). 

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This reminds me of the experience that James Baldwin wrote about in “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy” between himself and Norman Mailer “there is a difference between Norman and myself in that I think he still imagines that he has something to save, whereas I have never had anything to lose.” 

The reality is that in this world, the “yes” to Christ/Jesus/God is still hierarchical. If Baldwin had nothing to lose because nothing was there to begin with, just as with Blackness as a site of negation, the foil of Norman having something to save - his beingness, shows that we are not equal in this body of Christ. For Norman to be able to engage in the friendship with Baldwin and reap the fruits of that dynamic, there still requires a cost from Baldwin that determines the ability for Norman to have the option of still having something to save. 

In other words, when the call is made for Christians to say yes with their life, to deny themselves fully, and to recognize that their yes will cost them everything, it still hinges on the fact that white Christians can still hold onto their beingness as their “something to save.” Their humanity remains in the process of external commitment, so they never really fully give of themselves to the Lord because they do not have to, and they can reap the earthly benefits of this “yes” – social inclusion, financial security, perceived salvation guarantee, etc. Whereas with Blackness, in this antiBlack world, the requirement is their all, without question. There still remains spiritual labor to ensure that all citizens of the Kingdom can have life more abundantly, but not the laborers themselves.  

So this can be seen in who is found performing labor within the Church, who serves, who gives of their time, and who is assumed to be a “humble servant.” For white and nonBlack humans, their yes and the perceived benefits of that yes, hinge on those who have been forced to say yes and what they have been forced to give. 

It’s not enough to rest in the self-assurance that Churches are becoming “less” racist, sexist, or more welcoming. Cool, but no. What remains and what will is the undergirding of antiBlackness in Churches, and that’s because the world we know is antiBlack, and no space, relation, or interaction is immune from this reality. What are we now doing to end these spaces?

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Again, the Church is antiBlack. Please find God elsewhere!  

AP theory holds that the Black and the Slave are nonhuman. And according to the plan of salvation, Jesus came to Earth so that humans can have life and so that Jesus can bridge the gap of communication between God and humans. Again, AP theory holds that the “Black” and the “Slave” is nonhuman. In that case, that means that God still does not engage with Blackness and Slave because both are not recognized as human within this plan of salvation. So who was really saved, and who is salvation for? 

Gleaning from Christina Sharpe, Black people have still remained to assert our existence in a world that sees us as nonexistent, which, alongside Lauren Olamina’s Earthseed’s tenets of shaping God, we, as Black people in the wake, make, shape and craft God into a being that can potentially save us. But the reality is that in this zone of non-being (from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins White Masks), we are the ones who have saved and continue to save ourselves. 

With a closer look, in the Church, the reality is that personhood is unseen and rather a body part in the collective body of Christ – until it is time to reprimand you as an individual when your actions are not approved or when efforts made to actualize yourself go against the accepted grain. 

For the Black and the Slave, you are no thing until you need to be criminalized, to which citizenship/recognition of a pseudo-humanity is granted so that the criminalization is executed. Sharpe continues that “to be in the wake is to live in those no’s, to live in the no-space that the law is not bound to respect, to live in no citizenship, to live in the longtime of Dred and Harriet Scott, and it is more than that.” 

AntiBlackness and enslavement remain and undergird the structure of the Church. It is what keeps the Church alive. If all holds true, then the only freedom is the death of this world, including the Church. We’re past the point of reforming and external revising. Let God be found elsewhere because surely this god, or this world, is not worthy of our yes. 

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Links: 

1. Womanist Theology - emilie m. townes

2. Alice Walker’s Jesus: A Womanist Paradox

3. Antiblackness - Moon-Kie Jung, João H. Costa Vargas

4. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being - Christina Sharpe

5. Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon

6. Dred Scott Case

Special thanks to Taqiyyah Elliott and Ozioma Erondu for reviewing this piece.

I first began to seriously engage with bell hooks in & outside the classroom when I came across Toni Cade Bambara’s infamous quote in The Salt Eaters, “just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you are well.” Her book, Sisters of the Yam: Black women and Self-Recovery, has been a sacred, healing read for me lately.

I felt that it was at that point that her words conjured the unspoken desires of my heart. To be well, not in a shallow aesthetic manner, but in a way that I know myself, am not afraid of myself, and journey towards the roots of my essence. 

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To be healed, in a way that commits to struggle, remains in pursuit for life and life more abundantly, that affirms the beauty of the complex soul. 

Reading the words and works of hooks has made me feel safe in my body, and I am grateful for the day-to-day tending of making a home within me. 

But, I’ve also found hooks’ life, teaching, and being that remove blinders on the realities of this world. That hooks isn’t (and it’s a disservice to deduce her to) one that only teaches and promotes love in a romantic-commodified/co-opted sense. 

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This love embodies commitment and is the merging of Spirit and self. Love speaks the truth- relentlessly, love conjures, manifests, actualizes, guides, and radically revolutionizes ourselves and our world. 

Love is a daily practice, coming against forces of domination, power, abuse, and all that do not make us well. 

I will forever be indebted to bell hooks and the black feminists who have saved my life - most literally. They are a balm in the heaviest of seasons and a breath of fresh air in the lightest of moments. I pray for continued perfect peace as she rests. I so wish that she would have lived more years here. And for all the black feminists that have left this realm too soon.

May the memory of her and those who have journeyed on invigorate and sharpen those of us who remain. 

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What has bell hooks taught you?

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honestly speaking, i just did not realize how much i was operating on E with all the different areas of my life. it’s been a moment of stepping back from commitments, reevaluating my capacities, prioritizing rest and healing, and taking time to self-nourish and be nourished alongside others in my community. i’m still processing what my time away meant, but i’m equally excited for what’s in store for the future.

TCW isn’t going away (not a chance, ha!), but i am glad for this (unintentional) time away to find a new balance between this space/ virtual community and how i show up here.

our ‘year with bell hooks’ project continues. this time, we’ll be closing out the year with “Sisters of the Yam: Black Women & Self-Recovery” — a timely read for sure. All About Love and Sisters of the Yam are profound pieces to journey through.

tomorrow evening, there will be a guest letter sent, which i find to be a heartfelt piece. i’m looking forward to reading your thoughts and reactions on that.

so, this letter is both a gratitude note for being here and a mark that the letters will continue — *slightly tweaked* :)

- until our next letter and with love,

chinyere

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Now nearly a week after Easter and after 13 letters of journeying through the words of bell hooks in All About Love, what tools do we have to create what can be life-giving and love-producing? How do rebirth, Easter (+Jesus), and the Angels speaking of love from chapter 13 lead us to wellness? 

I’m thinking of a quote from Melanie May’s book A Body Knows: A Theopoetics of Death and Resurrection. May wrote that

to be alive is precisely to change. It is the rhythm of reckoning what is life-giving and what is death-dealing that characterizes a fully embodied life. 

I’m writing through, in real-time, the practice of

loving making it possible for us to change our worship of death to a celebration of life. [to engage in a love that] empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.

All About Love - p. 196, 197 

So, I’m not fascinated with death in a creepy or gory way. I know these past few letters have touched on it more than usual. The realities of Black girls, femme’s, and women’s premature death - in various ways, are on my heart and mind. It sometimes feels that I have endless questions about how places and people cause those deaths to happen. How actions - service, commitment, care, giving, and more - are exploited and weaponized against those conditioned to serve, commit, care, give, and more until our deaths.

Audre Lorde said that your silence will not protect you. So this writing is a way of speaking and letting it out every day, and more and more, seeing what can be, and creating it so. It’s a hunger to love well. A prayer to be well. A practice of being more present and living fully. 

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Can I be honest? I’m still wrestling with the reality of Easter. Jesus died a state-sanctioned murder, and James Cone writes about that in The Cross and the Lynching Tree. I’m not saying that Jesus’ death does not offer us anything (and even the fact that his death has to offer us something for it to have meaning is uncomfortable).

Just why does Jesus have to be killed for us to have life?  

I believe that the Resurrection can give hope and comfort in our personal and collective journeys. Especially for us who look to Heaven as a place to be reunited with those we are physically separated from.

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I’m seeing that in the “celebration” of Easter weekend, it makes us align with believing that the goriness of the Fridays (the crucifixion) and the reality of the Saturdays (Jesus’ full death in the grave) is the only way to experience the Sundays (the Resurrection). 

Why must deaths caused by power, domination, abuse, and oppression be the “valid” way for us to experience newness, rebirth, and resurrections? And, if to align with the Scriptures that say that Jesus’ death paid it all, did it really? Because these similar deaths are still happening.

bell hooks shared a quote by Matthew Fox from Original Blessing that

Western civilization has preferred love of death to love of life to the very extent that its religious traditions have preferred redemption to creation, sin to ecstasy, and individual introspection to cosmic awareness and appreciation.”

(bell hooks) “For the most part, patriarchal perspectives have shaped religious teaching and practice. Recently, there has been a turning away from these teachings towards a creation-grounded spirituality that is life-affirming. Fox calls this “the via positiva”: “Without this solid grounding in creation’s powers we bored, violent people. We become necrophiliacs in love with death and the powers and principalities of death.” 

All About Love - p.192

I say (that in some cases from the jump or as time has shifted) Christianity as we know is patriarchal at its core. And if patriarchy needs the worship of death to function and exist and if patriarchy is opposite of what love is, what does embracing the resurrection “sunday” from Jesus do with the reality of the church as we know it? 

Embracing, embodying, and committing to the love ethic that bell hooks lays out in chapter 1, means that anything rooted in domination, oppression, and abuse can’t coexist with love. Even if it tries to disguise itself as loving. 

The love that bell hooks and other Black feminists and womanists show us in their writings is a different narrative than what we see in our worlds. It offers us the tools to imagine what life, love, abundance, and possibilities can be. 

Because of that, the Christian church as we know can’t exist in the same way. 

It’s troubling that rhetoric disguised as biblical/straight from the Word of God/holy has us to believe that we immediately exit the womb in need of a Savior. I lean towards no. That God will love and accept us more if we learn to hate our flesh and its desires. I’m having some issues with believing that for our relationship with God to thrive, we must go through any extent necessary (to purge the sin within me) for God to accept us, even after acknowledging that the “price’s been paid.” 

Why must the feeling of guilt be the prereq of receiving God’s love and acceptance? Or even receiving the love and approval from the God constructed to be in the (Christian) churches that we know? 

Who was the One who made us? We only know that we are. Not before we were.  

I want to know that the foundation for loving God isn’t because God brought me out of my sinful state and decided to accept me. That God loves me in spite of me. As if I am bad? 

I want to know that the foundation for loving God is because we choose to commune life together. 

What would it be for us to know ourselves as innately loved by God. Made in love, by love, for love. In all the beautiful ways that bell hooks brought us through these 13 chapters? 

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So back to Easter. For Jesus to live again after death shows that life is still possible even after all we’ve been through.

It was Mary Magdalene, who was the angel in human form that “bore witness. (All About Love, p.225)” Mary, a marginalized, working-class woman, bore witness to all - generation after generation of this transformative moment. I imagine her saying more about the Resurrection along the lines of “good news, good news, He is risen, rebirth is here, transformation is possibile, newness can be, nights do come, but so do days.” 

Black girls, women, femmes, and non-binary people have been the same to shout this good news to us in their writings, living, choices, refusal, rage, and more. 

They are the angels in human and spirit form - who ask, directly or indirectly,

Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.

The Salt Eaters, Toni Cade Bambara

They are the ones who remind us that death - wrongful death, is not a prerequisite to love. That Jesus’ Resurrection requires that we continue to probe with what is not well and what is not right so that violence, needless death, unjust living, and all that is not well - ends. 

Jesus, (as complex as he was during his time here), along with the girls, women, femmes, and non-binary people who proclaim this new Gospel, day in and day out, declare that true Resurrection is still possible. 

They embody the Divine in beautiful unorthodox ways. 

They warn and remind us that new wine into old wineskins isn’t the mission. 

They say new faces in old places isn’t the goal. 

They are “the guardians of the soul’s well-being.”

They show us we can face our fear, knowing that thousands upon tens of thousands stand beside and behind us. 

They are the ones who give us the tools to continually create what we need to thrive. 

They are the angels that bear witness. 

Jesus died. Jesus rose. And if we partake in the new life that his death “affords,” then we can know that

no matter how hard or terrible our lot in life, to choose against lovelessness (no fluffy type of love) – to choose love – we can listen to the voices of hope that speak to us, that speak to our hearts – the voices of angels. When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.

All About Love, p. 237

Thank you for journeying along these 13 chapters. Communion by bell hooks will be our next read. So, until our next letter, and with love,

Chinyere

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