Idenitity Building From the Home Spaces of Black Women

“The healing knowledge of ‘Our Ancestors’ is central to our survival. The veneration of our foremothers is essential to our self-respect”
- Luisah Teish, Women’s Spirituality: A Household Act

So maybe it’s just the place I’m in, a plea I’m wailing through words, but here I am, again, writing and thinking and writing and shouting about how critical being a black queer woman whom loves Black Queer women really is. Maybe I’m just at this point where I’m trying to pull a lot of different things together in my healing for self-respect/dignity/love and wholeness. Lets go on and say it’s that along with the fact that I NEED FAMILY and I’m really beginning to understand that my readings and virtual correspondence is just not enough. I need to see, touch, hear, and smell my family (and in family I mean Black Queer women who know writing is healing, who are mediums for our ancestors and foremothers, and who exert love and work towards the powers of freedom truth and justice). So shouting about whom I am and am not- what I stand for, help the process of gathering and building and knotting those family ties. However, this writing has more of a focus. I want to speak directly to the healing and structuring of identity between black queer women (and Black women in general, although I’ve queered all Black women/people in my mind and understanding already).

I am not a Black Goddess
I an not a Rock
I am not a Photograph
I am not a picture in your mind
I am myself struggling toward myself
- Donna Kate Rushin, The Black Goddess

This writing initially came out of my want to place on paper the feel and identity growth that comes from loving Black women. I wanted to articulate how I’ve been able to piece together my sensing of who I am and where I come from or how I’ve been able to transform the distorted and negative concepts of self through loving Black women. Well, we won’t stray too far from this. However, after consulting with my handy dandy, always trustworthy, spiritual reader, Home Girls, I realized that I needed to address the topic on a larger scale. I want to discuss the resistance and the healing that births from Black women’s writing and through sistering and mothering one another, altogether. Its been a little more than a year now since I discovered Cheryl Clarke’s essay, “Lesbianism As Resistance” and let me tell you, she’s been my hero every since! I was at Spelman, trying to figure out how I ended back in the middle of a world that’s feeding me disguised images and messages of self-hatred. A world I was running away from in Boston at Simmons. So I made it my duty to conspire a master plan to go against all the visuals and aesthetics I was confronted with by being the biggest Poor Black, Queer, Dyke, Writer Warrior Activist (in all that I understood those terms and identity labels to mean) as resistance. I shouted and screamed and dressed in my chucks and jeans, and cut my locks and laid them out in my room next to Sitting Bull. And in all this, I came up with what I thought to be an original thesis for a final paper, lesbianism as resistance. After typing this into Google/J-Stor/Clark Atlanta’s library search engine, all this info on Cheryl Clarke and Bridge came up and I was floored. It felt so good to be able to read and hear a voice that sounded so much like my own. A voice that articulated all that I was feeling and trying to draft up in all my running and big fusses made. It was a deep exhaling and release of so much tensed energy just in knowing you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, and that you’re struggle and want to survive is experienced by many others. This is the healing power of women’s writing. Through the writings of women like Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Alice walker, Audre Lorde, and others, I was able to grab hold of a community, language, and legacy of voices that reflected my narrative and struggle, and greatly impacted the way I shape and develop concepts of identity, resistance, and healing.

“Certainly, self-hatred, in one form or another, is what brings Black women to therapy. How many black women, in the course of our lives, could unequivocally withstand the assaults on our very existence? We could sue society for nonsupport except for its ‘support’ in teaching us the oppressive process of internalizing racism and sexism, i.e., self-hatred”
-Eleanor Johnson, Reflections on Black Feminist Therapy

After coming across this in Eleanor Johnson’s essay, “Reflections on Black Feminist Therapy”, the overall themes and material entailed in that essay pushed me to address the impact that Black women sistering one another has on identity. It enabled me to reflect on the spaces I call home and here is where I realized that they are mostly queer but always involving Black women. Taking the time to ponder the question, “How many black women, in the course of our lives, could unequivocally withstand the assaults on our very existence?” I could only imagine the answer amounting to little to none. My friend Miafere and I always talk about how if folks only knew how hard or how much it takes for a Black girl to embody some sort of self-confidence (or even the masking of such) the whole premise of the Black girl’s big and bad attitude persona would be diminished, as its only our survival skin. This skin is something that I’ve learned to turn on when standing along a threatening path. My protective skin, something taught from a very young age, equipping you with a poker defense face and tongue that can intimidate nearly anyone in any situation. However, what I wish I were taught is that it’s okay to cry and hurt and feel/be vulnerable. Yes, and I could never understand why white women are always crying! And I find myself being kind of angry at this tool they seemed to possess, the ability/affordability to show weakness and sensitivity. It weirds me out every time I encounter it, in the classroom, in an office, on television, at a restaurant or market, any and everywhere. It’s such a crazy visual for me as I can only recall seeing one Black woman elder cry along the twenty-one years of my journey, and that turned out to be a big mistake.

I used to think
I can’t be a poet
because a poem is being everything you can be
in one moment,
speaking with lightning protest
unveiling a firey intellect
or letting the words drift feather-soft
into the ears of strangers
who will suddenly understand
my beautiful and tortured soul.
But, I’ve spent my life as a Black girl
A nappy-headed, no-haired,
Fat-lipped,
Big-bottomed Black girl
And the poem will surely come out wrong
Like me.
-Chirlane Mccray, I Used To Think


Nevertheless, there is an unveiling that comes out of home spaces between Black women. An unveiling of self, the masks, and protective skins. I am able to confront myself in a way that forces me to learn and evolve. Through the writings and communities, I am able to discover the truths about my ancestry and sisters that walk with me now. I am able to face/meet/see real Black bodies and minds and hear the voices in separation from the bullshit that clouds our daily societal existence. The realities of my being, the beauty, strength, magic, warmth- all things that aren’t accessible in my everyday are found within the circles of Black women. There are simple things one can pull and take from these spaces, like a love for my hair. I love being able to see a Black woman with a head full of tight coils (as mine) as she has it all twisted and wound up in some funky style- not in the light of taming or controlling her hair. But in loving its uniqueness. Hair, is always a topic amongst Black women. It can’t seem to escape confrontation as it so tangled in with our struggle around womanhood and humanity. Yes, something as small as hair is an item that Black girls learn to align as enemy from an early age. It’s learned to be the one extension of yourself that may set you apart from obtaining beauty, safety, love, acceptance and its through convening with like minds and spirits that I re-learn to love and see the beauty in every puffy coil. The pulling of the love I have for my widened hips, rounded saggy breast, belly that wraps all around the back and sides, cellulite thighs, and the stretch markings resting on my waist. There’s also the taking of hearing the drawls, snaps, slurs, and sounds that comes off a Black tongue. Those little Black woman grunts and noises that seem to be oh so universal and innate. In loving a Black woman, I’m enclosed in this sharing of aesthetics, respect, and tools for survival. In loving a Black woman, I extend myself- my energies my survival my healing onto her and between ourselves.

There’s an underlining truth and understanding of each other’s walk that Black women meet on and having such a foundation is quite powerful. It calls for discovery in one another. Eleanor Johnson posed the question why Black feminist therapy? Her answer, “Why Black women? Why Black people? We seek our grandmothers’ strengths, our great-grandmothers’ strategies-we find our sources. We discover/recover ourselves” (Smith, 324). And this is truth as our stories histories fear struggles strengths hurts are all intertwined, creating a sense of free when we come together. One unlike any other I experience in other spaces or circles. And there is a struggle and strength in carrying on such relations as it’s like you’re confronting you. You’re confronting all that you are and struggle with. All that you struggle with loving, you’re taking those energies of fear and anger strength and heaviness and you love it. You love her with all that’s in you and you heal and you survive and you get through and you love you. You love you and you feel lighter. She makes me feel lighter just as all the black women whom I love and loved have healed me in some way. I see myself in her as sister as lover as friend as comrade as my support and I reflect the same.

I am not a Black Goddess
I am a Black woman

Remember
There is the residue of fear in me
Remember
There is Healing in my hands
If you can hold these contra dictions in your head
/in your heart

You can hold me in your arms
-Donna Kate Rushin, The Black Goddess

A lover (my love(r)) told me today, in midst of our session of loving supporting sistering mothering and just knowing how to be there (in knowing what that means) for one another, something that spoke great volumes to how I was feeling at the time. It was a very small token of good listening and understanding that allowed me, for a moment, to settle in and exhale from all the hootin’ and hollerin’ I was doing. In discussing my anger for the white gentrified presence in Harlem and how I would love to find a way to simply not carry so much with me day by day, she interrupts my tirade by saying, ‘I know, you just want to be lighter’! And in her uttering of those words, I sunk into the mattress and took a deep breath. She said this and yet again, (as this usually is the case), those words (her words) were my own. Taking a breath and weight from me at the immediate connection understanding and alliance made after my first listen. It felt as if through my whole rant sighs and exhales/wavering/grunts/ shouts she knew what I was feeling (where my frustration laid) and sweetly said, “I know, you just want to be lighter”, and that made sense to me. It made sense because that’s what I felt and that’s what I was trying to convey to her through all my fussing. And just as it made sense to me, those words were hers in her knowing of what such emotion/yearn feels like. Its moments like these that I feel something greater/deeper transpire in my loving Black women. There is a presence of knowing and understanding that is beyond….just beyond. I am able to build, mold, transform my sensing of self through the correspondence, meetings, gatherings, love making, consoling and it helps me to be a better, stronger, wiser, more honest me. I’m able to love myself throughout it all, as that’s what it take for me to love her….and at the end of the day, I’m being healed and loved for being me, the biggest Poor Black, Queer, Dyke, Writer Warrior Activist of em’all!