“In order for liberated reproductive choices to happen, we must stand in solidarity with people who live the conditions which make the idea of motherhood intolerable. We must challenge the discrimination around housing, around state-sanctioned terrorism of Indigenous, Latina, and Black mothers; the stigma of the work of motherhood not being work at all; the prejudice of reproductive health care providers; the criminalization of Black children; the narrative of the worthlessness of our lives; the unworthiness of Black mothers of care, of support, of love, and of respect. We must support the resistance that comes from the continued transmutation of the dominant narrative about Black and Latina motherhood.”- from Joy KMT featured on Black Girl Dangerous

This project rejects simplified proclamations about black maternal experiences, instead seeking to honor their complexities through an attempt to revise the traditional narrative of black motherhood found in our cultural landscapes. Black mothers find themselves entrapped between their realities and societal pressures to confine to patriarchal systems that leave their realities tormented by the socioeconomic, cultural and political disparities in America. In her book Reproducing Race: An Ethnography of Pregancy as a Site of Racialization, Khiara M. Bridges writes “That white women are largely exempt from discourses that censure and condemn their reproduction on the basis of their race increases the racial salience of the event of pregnancy. Moreover, pregnancy is a focused occasion to interrogate racial processes because it directly implicates the material bodies of women. This is important because, historically and presently, the material body has been understood as the primary sign of racial difference (Schiebinger 1993; Wiegman 1995)” (Bridges 11). With this in mind, this research celebrates black women’s resistance and survival strategies as revolutionary and unconventional from conception to birth and from birth to the child’s adulthood. Further, this ethnographic project works against stereotypes of black maternal experiences through examinations of black doula and midwifery birth work. This is an ethnographic research project in New York City that documents women of color creating communities of motherhood through their collaborative meetings, mentorship and organizing to create survival strategies and carve spaces for maternal reproductive health.

“Women were used to childbirth as a communal, social experience, a bonding bonding. To be present at her friend’s delivery was acceptable and expected, but “”as docotors took over, the rooms became literally and psychologically too crowded” (Wertz 5).” -from Valerie Lee’s “ Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers”

I sought to understand the following: What societal and economic factors prompt women of color to creatively reorganize their mothering in nontraditional ways that involve doula practices and doula collectives? How does the doula tradition create communal mothering? What African medicinal and healing traditions have been passed down to Black mothers, how are they shared, and how do they successfully impact black maternal experiences? How does the doula community and the rich tradition from which it extends disrupt the good/bad binary that dominates discourse about Black motherhood?

This research relies on interviews and participant-observation field notes. I conducted four interviews with doulas of diverse backgrounds: one doula who had 12 years of experience and done birth work in Panama; one doula who began her organization in 2008 after giving birth to her first child; an acupuncture doula who worked in labor and delivery at a hospital; and another doula who has been practicing post-partum work and lactation counseling for two years. One interview stands out in my research particularly due to the fact that I ended up receiving doula training from this woman, and have been able to continue fostering conversations with her and other doulas that she has introduced me to. Engage with the short excerpt below extracted from the interview:

Her office was purple and of the utmost comfort, complete with a floor rug and pillows all around to sit Indian style. They were deep purples and pinks. They looked slightly worn, used and indented with pregnancy. An exercise ball relaxed under the window opposite the rug full of pillows—ready to be used, or not. Her Mac desktop was sitting back under a forest of books that made a literary canopy above her workspace. Their spines echoed “Baby” something, “and “Midwife” something else. Others read “holistic” or “Birthing from Within,” of which there were two copies. She sat up—next to the canopy of her own handpicked books, or maybe gifts or materials from training. I sat down—making myself comfortable on the padded pregnancy pillows I had found in a stack under another shelf in the room. Under another window I’d find some of Chanel’s favorite stones, herbs, oils to burn and the dancing incense I could smell perfuming from before. I settled into the pillow with my tea and grabbed for my notebook and pen. I was ready to tell my story so she could tell hers.

Chanel’s Office

Mine began “In 2007, my sister lost a baby…” I spoke with her about my passion on infant mortality in communities of color. I told her my confusion around the medical mysteries that impacted mothers and women in my family. I shared a deep feeling for the need to work through this (and worshipped the doula goddesses for all of the answers.) I took her on my research journey very quickly and told her what I knew. I was open about the fact that there was so much that I did not know.

Chanel would tell me her doula story next. It was clear that she had told it a million times, that she enjoyed telling it and that she didn’t mind sharing it once more with me. Chanel’s story is fuller than mine for many reasons that will become apparent. Hers began “In 2008 I had a baby…” but she backtracked to tell me that in 2006 she was working in Union Square as a broker, a job she’d later find would bring her rich business skills as a doula and organizer a few years later. She was grocery shopping in Whole Foods when outside in the square there was a Natural Birth Expo. She was surprised to find it in the middle of everything. Little did she know it held undiscovered material and knowledge for her greater use. Surprised to find alternatives for childbirth—this part seemed most important her—she stumbled upon a table with black midwives and a doula. She took their information as well as the literature from all of the other tables in the expo. Chanel was not pregnant at this time, but she must’ve known that someday she would be. She walked away feeling pregnant and full with new enlightenment andwith a bag full of maternal material aimed toward women of color.

Two years later Chanel met her husband at another health food store—this setting was appropriate for love not only because her approach was holistic, herbal and natural, but because I’d later found out that Chanel is also a vegan chef! As the story goes they met and became pregnant a few months into their relationship. Chanel went to the OB/GYN that she’d always gone to and found it to be filled with impersonal, brief, medical meetings: “Let’s check your blood pressure. Heart rate sounds fine. How’s your baby feel today?” At one meeting the baby seemed to not want to be bothered at all, yet the OB/GYN was persistent and insensitive, pushing at her wombs and feeling around for her babies limbs with cold, uncaring hands. At her husband’s suggestion they decided to just leave and never go back there again. On the route home Chanel remembered that she had gathered all of that information at the Natural Birth Expo two years before—it was time to dig up all of that material and contact the black doula she met that afternoon.

The doula’s reassuring, inviting, personal energy stuck with Chanel upon her visit.. Her calm, relaxing birthing experience inspired her to pursue the work herself. “Every visit was beautiful…It made me think that every one, especially women of color, need to know this care is available,” she affirmed as she settled back into her chair. She spoke those words as if she lived them out everyday. Which I believe she does. There was a warmness that she could hardly describe.

So how did Chanel begin her journey to becoming a doula?

After Chanel had her baby in 2008, she was trained to be a doula through International Center for Traditional Childrearing, or ICTC. International Center for Traditional Childrearing, founded in 1991, is a group a black midwives who practice a holistic approach to natural births with a focus on traditional healing practices. These traditions pay tribute to the black ancestral practices that come from historical moments of black maternal health and women organizing around reproductive rights and natural healing.

Chanel firmly believes that these practices are passed down from mother to daughter, a generational sharing that speaks to the ways black women preserve their bodies and histories together. They could be passed down from an auntie or a grandmother as well. She talked to elders, went on herb walks and paid special attention to oral histories of the women of her family. She learned about Native American women’s practices from her grandmother and African practices through getting her degree in African American studies while concentrating in Cultural Tradition. She was proud to have been trained through ICTC where the focus is on traditional midwifery and international forms of care. What about DONA International? Hadn’t every doula I’d looked up, interviewed, read about or spoken to been certified through DONA? I held Chanel in such high esteem, I was sure she was certified by DONA, but now I was discovering this new avenue for doulas, one that was even closer to my interests and rooted in preserving African cultural traditions of maternity for survival. Chanel informed me that DONA, established in 1992, was not focused on women of color. It was predominantly middle-upper class white doulas who serviced white pregnancies. Their emphasis was on care but moreso on the business side of becoming a doula. ICTC was about healing. DONA was about economies of motherhood? I had some more discovering to do forsure. I’d come to find out the racial inequities that both groups were addressing in their approaches to birth work—one more than the other. I was constantly being reminded of the need for separate collectives of doulas to attend to the survival of certain communities. It was true, DONA, the predominately white school of doulas was unconcerned with the birth travesties and realities of black mothers taken up by International Center for Traditional Childrearing. Khiara Bridges words rang in my head through the course of the interview. Echoing many other scholars, she reinforces “At present in the United States, the infant mortality rate for black bodies is nearly two-and-a-half times higher than for white babies. This disparity has persisted despite the overall decline in infant mortality rates over the years. There has not been even a narrowing of the racial gap; although fewer infants died last year, the rate at which Black babies died remained twice that of white babies” (Bridges 107). In New York City, maternal mortality rates for Black women are five times more than that of white women. “There have been some great and not so great moments in birthing realm, but mostly great!” Chanel spoke confidently about her work. I looked at her folded hands and pronounced knees as she sat leaning forward in a deep squat breasts over thighs. Her hands we working, healing hands.

Chanel was still speaking to me. She was telling her doula story. “I had a baby, put myself on a listserve of doulas and 15 women showed up at my house. Ancient Song started in my living room with 15 women. We eventually moved to this space.” She looked around her office and opened her hands up to reach toward both opposing windows. Some of those women are still with her at the collective today. Ancient Song Doula Services has a collective of eight black women. They also work with two midwives, also women of color. Women looking for a doula go through a consult and based on their needs ASDS will match her up with whomever in the collective best suits the kind of birth she wants to have. Together as a collective they provide a variety of services for women in the community from advocacy to high risk women, addressing domestic violence and various sexual traumas as well as “sista circle.” Chanel describes sista circle as a safe space where women get together in a circle to share and create community. It takes place every other week and there’s a different topic each time. “You don’t have to be a doula or a mother to come, it’s just women,” she said matter-of-factly. This circle and community of women sparked my interest. Mother-mentoring and communal mothering seemed to be the solution for many of the issues facing black women and women of color. In addition, it is another reason for me to come back to ASDS for participant-observer fieldwork, as well as for my own personal betterment and empowerment. I would choose to do my fieldwork at the Ancient Song Doula Services Doula training course.

In terms of participant-observation work, I took the approach and methodology of a grounded theorist. According to Kathy Charmaz’s article “The Grounded Theory Method: An Explication and Interpretation,” found in Robert M. Emerson’s anthology Contemporary Field Research: A Collection of Readings, she writes: “…not only do grounded theorists study process, they assume that making theoretical sense of social life itself is itself a process” (Charmaz 111). Throughout the duration of this project, I considered the ways the process was unfolding as a part of my data. My ethnographic process and the process of enacting social relationships through my methodology became data for me. I allowed for the research to surprise me and unearth in a variety of ways depending on my observations as well as my role as an instrument to the project’s process.

Additionally, I follow Erving Goffman’s idea of participant observation. In “On Fieldwork” he notes:

“It’s one of getting data, it seems to me, by subjecting oneself, your own body and your own personality, and your own social situation, to the set of contingencies that play upon a set of individuals, so that you can physical and ecologically penetrate their circle of response to their social situation…So that you are close to them while they are responding to what life does to them. I feel that the way that this is done is to not, of course, jus listen to what they talk about, but to pick up on their minor grunts and groans as they respond to their situation” (Goffman 125).

The following excerpt from my own research demonstrates Goffman’s notions of the researcher’s subjectivity as well as the individual’s personal situation reflected in their articulation of their experience:

The first day was a few hours in the evening on a Friday night. I was back in the bright orange blossoming room that Chanel was painting on my last visit. Afro’ed women collected on the floor in haram pants, tattooed and scarved across breasts with hair wraps standing tall to look at the ceiling. Many of them carried their hearts right above their chests, not on their sleeves. Their breast bones were raised high to the ceiling touching what was left of the day’s sun—prideful and eager, poised and prepared. We were all different: different shapes, ages, sizes, complexions, auras, heights, roundness or thinness, vibrant or subdued. Each woman brought her own color, her own energy, but a motherly energy hung above the room—even radiating from those of us who have never been pregnant or birthed a child. We sat on pillows on the floor around a thin blanket that had bits of a mirror in it. For the rest of the weekend that tapestry would reflect our vibes and our frequencies, mirroring our characters, our motherly arms, our new doula-ness as we came into being. There were even moments that felt like we were all holding it up above our heads, sitting under a realm of love spread widely and gently but stready like laboring knees in the beginning phases of contractions.

Sokhna, a pre-natal yoga instructor and mother of two, circulated the pillows around the floor, sending them down from her hands like kisses for each goddess to sit on. A few of us waited in anticipation for the other doulas-to-be. One thing was certain—we all sat in expectation, pregnant with excitement, anxiety and eagerness, enthused to be a part of the birth work of doulas. At the door you could take your shoes off underneath a sign that says “Please remove your shoes when entering this Sacred Community Birthing Space. We love Doulas!” This caption captured Chanel’s personality—stern but playful, discipline with love. As the new doulas continued to filter into the room some arrived with snacks—vegan chips, organic popcorn, hummus, and other light munchies. Others came with food for thought—great books for us to pass around like “Mama Bamba,” a book about a South African doula in Johannesburg or a book called “What Mama Couldn’t Tell Us About Love: Healing the Emotional Legacy of Slavery, Celebrating Our Light” by Dr. Brenda Wade and Brenda Lane Richardson. The resources on the floor ranged from medical to emotional to spiritual. We shouted out book titles all weekend because although many of us were new to the work, we had been reading. One woman, Lyfe, brought her 3 year old son. His light foot steps pranced around us, easing our anxious breaths into cool, easy exhales.

Some of the trainees had been doing the work for 10-15 years, while others of us had just recently heard the word doula 8 months to a year ago. I personally learned of it in December 2012 when I was watching a YouTube video of Erykah Badu speaking about motherhood and music. As a Doula, Erykah has a lot of insight into the topic. She told a story about acting as her own doula and midwife for her second birth which she did at home. She spoke about preparing her bed and her herbal bath as she labored as well as focusing on a large tree outside of her window as a source of strength during her contractions. This was inspiring to me, illuminating a deeper perspective into the control and agency that women can have over their bodies in moments where doctors or scientists may say that they are most vulnerable. Contrarily, Doulas believe the woman is in full control, strong, and should exercise her agency during this time.

Chanel waited for everyone to arrive before getting things started. Time did not seem to be a worry or concern. Once everyone arrived you could feel the shifty antsy energy return in the room from all of our excitement. Chanel instructed us to get up and take a moment to close our eyes. She walked us through a meditation just before asking us to sit back down to introduce ourselves. The moment of relief and meditation shifted the atmosphere to a relaxed and breathtaking space. We all sat back into ourselves, more ready and better prepared this time.