On Survival

“what you talkin’ ’bout did I love you? girl, I stayed alive for you…”

-from Sula by Toni Morrison 

It never fails. Every time I return from visiting home during the holidays I come back in need of three things: 1) a stiff drink 2) a 2-3hour debriefing session with one of my sistafriends (preferably while sipping on that stiff drink) and 3) a week of reflection and writing (‘cause I can’t seem to do either one when I’m at home).  This year was no different.

The fact that I’m treated as though I never aged beyond my 12^th birthday while I’m home is not what drives me into the abyss after every Christmas holiday.  As hard as it is, I’ve learned to stomach such treatment for at least the holiday season. 

Nor is it having to put up with the indignant silence, interrogating questions and ignorant assumptions about my appearance (weight, hair, skin, clothing) and my love life. Not only am I confident enough in my appearance these days, I’ve also learned to constructively use my skill of answering a question-without really answering a question-in order to ward off all inquiring minds (and the downright nosy).

So, what is the source of my frustration and need for deep reflection after every holiday season?  It’s watching the plight of the women in my family and my community at home, that’s what.  I don’t think there is anything else that makes me feel more frustrated, more enraged, more depleted, more…helpless.

Like most Black women, I come from a long line of women who know what is to survive.  My mother, aunts, cousins and other-mothers have survived poverty, abuse, addictions, prison, low-down husbands, dead-beat fathers, foolish children, and all forms of illness, dis-ease, and tragedy.   Up against all of this, survival itself is a revolutionary act.  And without question, I am proud to be apart of this legacy of survival…that is, until I remember that while all of these women know how to survive, very few of them know how to live.

Before going any further I should say from the outset that I do not take for granted the legacy of survival among the women in my family.  They are apart of a larger narrative that chronicles Black women’s historic battle against racism, sexism and other systems of oppression.  Indeed, it is because of the ingenious survival tactics of Black women warriors like Willie Summerville, Ma Beck (both my great grandmothers), Eva Mae Summerville, Sarah Davenport (both my grandmothers), and other more notable Black women that I have been given the privilege to live. 

And yet, as I reflect now on the lives of my mother, aunts, and cousins, many of whom have spent their entire lives “waiting on God,” living from paycheck to paycheck, and putting up with abusive men for the sake of financial and emotional “security,” I find myself wondering: perhaps Black women’s legacy of survival is a double edged sword.  On the one hand, this tradition of survival is the means through which women in my family have stayed alive.  And on the other, their natural instinct to “do whatever it takes to survive” has also undermined their ability to claim their right to live with agency, choice and intentionality. 

By no means am I dismissing the systems of oppression that leave many Black women (young and old) merely surviving on the brink of disaster, depression and despair.  But after being trained in tactics to survive and withstand these oppressions, many of us don’t know what it is to move off the brink and escape to stable ground.  Even when presented with opportunities to claim our God-given right to live purposeful, passionate, fulfilling lives, we somehow find ourselves back on the brink, convinced that we have no other option. We navigate our way through life, remaining just a prayer, paycheck, relationship, or donut away from disaster.  For many Black women, the measure of their suffering determines the extent of their faith: it’s understood that the more they suffer, the more faith they have (and thus, the more “holy” they are).  Unlike our foremothers, whose survival was a means to an end, our survival is often the end itself.

For many years I’ve chided myself for being so insensitive to the women in my family. How dare I sit in judgment when my education has afforded me the privilege of being exposed to different ways of life and living?  But the truth is I’m not all that different from my mother, aunts and cousins.  Despite the schools I attended, the degrees I have, the countries I’ve visited and no matter how much I’d like to envision myself as this independent, free-thinking young woman who lives only according to her own sense of purpose and agency, there are times (more than I’d like to admit) when I find myself crouching in a corner somewhere, settling for whatever is handed to me instead of courageously taking life by the reigns.  Perhaps this is why I’m riddled with frustration and anxiety when I visit the women in my family:  in their blank stares, their fits of rage, their fanatical pronunciations of faith, in their addictions to substances, habits and other people, in their reckless search for anything that will enable them to feel alive and/or escape reality, I not only see myself, but moreover, I see women who desperately want to live.  They just don’t know how.  

*The artwork is a piece by artist Deborah Roberts.

Creating Myself a Clearing Spot

Somebody should have told me. Somebody should have warned me.  Somebody should have sat me down and explained that just as your 20s are about basking in the freedom of asserting your independence, your 20s are also about milling around in the muck and drudgery of asserting your independence.   

I’ve spent much of my life looking forward to my 20s as though this decade held the keys to the Promised Land, only to get here and wonder, “How in the heyell did I get here?”  Paying ENDLESS bills.  Struggling to hit my stride in the rat race we call the “job market.” Negotiating salaries.  Building a network, but somehow losing a sense of real community.  Realizing that the end result is not always determined by how hard you worked.  And, oh yes, finding out that while you may be smart, while you may be bright, you need a good amount of shrewdness to make it.  Some folk were confronted with all of this before their twenties.  But I’m a late bloomer.  It hit me around the age of 24, when I suddenly looked around and said to myself, “You ain’t in (Ar)Kansas anymore, Toto.”  Being a full time student all of my life has certainly had its advantages:  the longer I stayed in school and  consumed myself with abstract theory, the more I could prolong a face-off with bottom-line practicality.

When I lamented not being told about the tumultuous twenties to a wise a woman I know, she pointed out that even if I had been told in my late teens about what it would be like in my late twenties, it’s likely that I would not have understood the warning nor would I have taken it seriously.  Truth is, she’s right.  Somebody probably did tell me.  But I was too busy buying the first ticket out of my parents’ house to listen.  Some things you just don’t “get” until the rug has been pulled out from under your feet. 

Moreover, it occurs to me that no one could have adequately warned me back in the 1980s about what it would be like to be 20something and woman and black in 2007.   While paying bills and stumbling through the rat race has wreaked havoc on my sense of comfort and security, what has really knocked me off my feet and left my head spinning is taking on these new responsibilities while also navigating my way through a world that uses mass media, technology, religion, politics, music, violence and the ole’ fashioned good ole’ boy network to demean and dehumanize black women.  

Oh, but don’t be fooled. I’m not so naive to think that the dehumanization of black women is anything new.  It is so woven into the American historical and cultural tapestry that it is just as American as baseball and apple pie.  But what makes the 21st century mass dehumanization of black women so distinctive is that it has become like a staple crash crop within the black community.   We feed off of it as uncritical patrons of mainstream media and, at rates unlike any other in history, black folk are participating as purveyors of this dehumanization. We package it in music videos, books, television shows, sermons, movies, clothing lines, etc. We profit from it and give it names like,  ”entrepreneurship,” “creativity,” and my personal favorite, “a word from the Holy Ghost.”   The dehumanization of black women is so insidious within the black community that we don’t even recognize it when we see it…even when it glares at us in the face (daring us to call it out). 

No. No one could have warned me of what it would be like to become a critical thinking, independent, assurred black woman in the midst of all this.  

I often find myself searching for an outlet.  A way to process, confront (and escape) what I see and experience as a young black woman.   As an avid book reader, I naturally turn to books for solace and wisdom, particularly my “sacred texts” written by black women writers.  Writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and Pearl Cleage give authentic voice and texture to the complexities of black women’s lives.    In their work I find insight, inspiration and… healing.  And just as movie buffs have their favorite scenes from their favorite movies, I have favorite “scenes” from books written by these women. 

Recently, when I was in a particularly self loathing and defeatist mood, I reread one of my favorite “scenes” from Toni Morrison’s  Beloved.  In this passage she describes what occurs among a community of former slaves in a place called “the Clearing”: 

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got all mixed up.  Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.  In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

 She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more.  She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

 She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.  That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

 

For the 19th century former slaves in Beloved, the Clearing was at once a ”wide-open place cut deep in the woods” and a site of community and communion.  At the urging of Baby Suggs, an elderly woman who had a Harriet Tubman-like presence, the people gathered at the Clearing to laugh, dance, cry and validate their collective humanity.  There, in the midst of an oppressive and dehumanizing existence, they cleared for themselves a space to hear the prophetic words of a wise woman. ”The Clearing” was a space to confront reality and re-imagine a new one. It was a space in which to be made whole.

After reading this passage in Beloved, it dawned on me: That’s it. That’s what I need in the midst of all the responsibilities, craziness and foolishness that characterize my life and social context: a “clearing” spot of some kind in which to respond to and make sense of what it means to be a 20something Black woman.  While I have various places and relationships in my life that I consider clearing spots, I wanted a place to ”record” my responses, critiques and laments in a creative way.   So here I am.  As virtual as it may be, I’ve cleared for myself a spot in the blogosphere in which to not only navigate my way through the joys and pains of newfound independence, but to also actively confront problematic and oppressive realities by re-imagining new and liberating ones.  And maybe, just maybe, I’ll  stumble upon my own authentic voice in the process… so that I, too, can be made whole.