Testimonies of Love

a communal reflection

Hi, everyone! As this month — focusing on Black history and love — comes to a close, I’m sharing a collaboration myself (IG - @theconflictedwomanist) and Kyle, the creator of IG - @books.andbouquets, crafted. In this piece, I’ve included our reflections on the expansiveness of Black love and community from the works of bell hooks and Cornel West. Connect with our growing work on IG here and here.

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

“Testimony is an integral part of the Black religious tradition. It is the occasion where the believer stands before the community of faith in order to give account of the hope that is in [them] .. not only to strengthen an individual’s faith, but also to build a faith of the community.”  

James Cone, My Soul Looks Back

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?

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

“Systems of domination exploit folks best when they deprive us of our capacity to experience our own agency and alter our ability to care and to love ourselves and others. Living in a capitalist economy clearly informs the way Black people think about love.”

bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

“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.