# 1 : Life-saving tools & initial inquiries
When I first started research for the thesis that ultimately became Sankofa Shadow Work™ and my debut book, I was, as usual, looking to save my own life.
The book is an in-depth nonlinear look at how I did that work. The work of saving my own life.
Womanism was my tool of choice for a specific reason. I found In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose on my mother's bookshelf.
I found that book before my ancestral initiation at McLeod Plantation.
Before grad school, Afrofuturism, and epigenetics.
I found Alice Walker’s definition of Womanism, and it was like a balm of affirmation plus the best kinda Sprite from McDonalds. Activating. So necessary for understanding my own queer southern Black girl life.
Particularly as I licked the wounds and stoked the illusions perpetuated by my predominately white liberal arts college that started allowing Black people to attend in 1968 - the same year Dr. King was assassinated.
Back to the tools and the life-saving.
Back to the initial inquiry.
Around the mid2010s, there was an obvious cultural renaissance afoot. A heightened awareness. A desire to reconnect with ourselves and our ancestors.
There was a lot of Gullah Geechee cultural pride going on…
…But it still didn’t feel safe TO ME.
“We are proud of our cultural heritage and our significance in the broader African Diaspora, AND we are also very patriarchal and want to uphold that shit with everything we got.” Nobody said this with words. It was my lived experience. Something akin to the patriarchal violence we know was present in all of our civil rights and liberation movements. Septima Clark, Grandmother of the Movement, spoke about this in her autobiography, Ready from Within: Septima Clark & the Civil Rights Movement, A First Person Narrative. And Toni Cade Bambara illustrates it brilliantly in The Salt Eaters.
“We have a common goal, and if you aint a cis hetero able-bodied man (or at least performing like one or for one), shut the fuck up and do this work. To freedom!!!!!!!!” Again. Nobody said that to me. I heard it all the same.
I wanted to know why we were proudly reconnecting with our African diasporic heritage, and celebrating the special creolized cultures we created in relationship with this land and all the elements, yet we couldn’t seem to imagine beyond patriarchy.
So much misogyny, hyper individualism, queerphobia and transphobia present in our “cultural pride.”
That shit was weird to me because all the learning we were doing about our African & African American ancestors was happening in tandem with the revelations about gender, sexuality and humanity that could also free us all.
Anywho, I wondered how Womanism - the tenets of womanism that pre-exist Walker’s definition might impact how we be together.
I am saddened and disappointed that 4 decades after publishing this sacred, life-saving, expansive, liberatory text on Womanism, Walker chose to publish a violently transphobic...blog...(?), seemingly in defense of an evil white lady from the UK who erases indigeneity for fun/craft, and wouldn’t piss on Black women - trans, cis or nonbinary - if we were on fire. Like. Please. Wtf?
Many of my takeaways on Womanism as resistance, and my complete awe at our survival are explored in my first book, Sankofa Shadow Work: Diaries of a Diasporic Diviner. They’re also referenced in my essay, “The Womanist Blueprints of Reconstruction,” which is included in the book Ukweli: Searching for Healing Truth.
I’m going to share more from that piece and that research in the coming days. Modes of resistance during and after Reconstruction are particularly relevant right now.
The violence of the United States of America persists. Morphs Transforms.
(I love how frequently Dr. Jenn Jackson refers to American violence as macabre in their book Black Woman Taught Us. It is fuckin macabre. A bereft, death-loving cult.)
There’s more I can say about patriarchal violence pre-existing colonization - And I Will Say It.
This is important. Because if those we call “colonizers” and their descendants all ceased to exist tomorrow, world-peace we would NOT have. Many don’t want to eliminate the big bad. They wanna be the big bad themselves.
Patriarchy is seductive and soul-consuming. Disempowering, and fatal to the imagination. It has been weakening us for a long time.
There is no love in patriarchy. Patriarchy does not know love or abundance. Patriarchy is nothing more than wounds and perceived lack magnified, multiplied and reflected back endlessly.
Principalities if you will.
(Dayna Lynn Nuckolls, The People’s Oracle, says principalities are unaddressed traumas.)
Welp.
We are more than our wounds, though.
Way more.
And time ain’t linear. They lied.
THANKS FOR READING!
Curious Considerations or Invitations to Imagine:
What were my ancestors doing during the reconstruction era? (Dec 8, 1863 – Mar 31, 1877) Where’d they live? What was important to them? What did “freedom” mean to them?
In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman says “The decades between 1890 and 1935 were decisive in determining the course of Black futures.”
What can we glean from what our ancestors were doing during that time period that we can apply or remix in the present? (I was blessed to be raised by many folk born during that era. More on them soon, too)
In the absence of slavery (slavery has existed in many contexts all over the world. So I repeat: IN THE ABSENCE OF SLAVERY*) and European colonization of the planet Earth, what would your ancestors have been doing? What might you be doing?
*ownership or dominion/domination of another human being, sometimes particularly relating to labor.
Relevant Resources: