What Faith Teaches Us
by Rochelle, edited by Tara and Ahmad
If you want to write about the most personal of topics, women’s bodies, your body, begin with community.
That’s one thing Faith teaches us.
Our honest explorations of our bodies has the power to puncture a tight-knit system, a system that manipulates the psychological and emotional spaces of even those we love most.
That’s another thing Faith teaches us.
For our bodies tell us how gender, race, and class compound each other, how your particular placement in this hierarchical system affects whether your body receives privacy, whether your pain is deemed worthy of treatment.
Faith Adiele, the first Black Buddhist nun, writes the body, and her writing glides into bright, blue fields. Because on our social media feeds, we’ve heard conversations about self-care, preserving #BlackGirlMagic and #BlackBoyJoy. We start to wonder if our meditations, our naps, our solitary walks, are indulgences. But then we recall postcolonial scholar LaRose T. Parris’ arguments about scientific racism, and we remember that pseudoscience has lodged some painful, specific, and very racist ideas into consciousness. (Black people feel less pain, have smaller heads, and are sexually promiscuous.) Our discussions about mental and physical health seem less of a luxury and more of a necessity when we consider that underlying history… Faith’s work reminds us of the framework for recent conversations that question and analyze–as well as reference and resist–western medicine. Your vegetarian or vegan friend with the Chloe x Halle locks, the herbal tea, and the Calm meditation app, didn’t become chill overnight. That chill was a process. That chill was also resistance against what the trailblazing Black relaxation community — including Tricia Hersey’s Sleep Ministry, niv Acosta and Fannie Sosa’s Black Power Naps, and Ashara Ekundayo, Amara Tabor Smith, Ellen Sebastian Chang’s Black Women Dreaming–has termed “grind culture.” Rest challenges the idea that our bodies exist to produce, produce, produce.
Don’t believe me? That’s something Faith has taught us.
But there are other things too: Should we question some of the terminology that surrounds medicine and health? Why does the medical community describe (sometimes painful) tumors that can grow to 140-pounds as “benign”? What does this mean when, as Faith tells us, Black women are “five times as likely to have fibroids”? What becomes buried in the detritus of our day-to-day lives and general business? How can we remove some of that and focus on what’s important? Faith offers a path. And her book The Nigerian Nordic Girl’s Guide to Lady Problems grows tentacles.
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I’ve been reading manuscripts by women writers who allow the body to pervade their texts.
Daisy Hernández’s The Kissing Bug. Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s Big Girl…Hernández describes how her aunt, a Latina school teacher, was diagnosed with a rare disease. Hernández’s aunt’s delayed diagnosis and treatment seem to result from inequalities in health care. Hernández’s work, like Faith’s, helps us to understand a big, complex problem–health care–through specific, loving details about specific, vulnerable (yet strong) bodies. Sullivan, too, brings us to truth. Sullivan’s novel describes how her teenaged protagonist is misunderstood because she’s large and big-boned. We see Sullivan’s protagonist as sensitive, sensual, and giving–qualities that it takes some a while to notice. Sullivan holds a lens close to her protagonist. She writes about the body and trust, and it’s personal and real. Through Sullivan’s examination of her protagonist, we learn about her community, their values and fears…I don’t think it’s easy to write about the body, when the body–our outward presentation, everything the world sees–can be a repository of so much inward shame and anxiety. Faith’s frank discussion of sexual assault and harassment in her memoir Meeting Faith helps us understand communities better, and all the conflicting and ambivalent attitudes society holds towards women.
Our bodies, sometimes fragile, help us maneuver. But the irony is that preserving them and understanding their particularities is the only way to transcend them.
Faith Adiele writes about the particularities of her own experiences even as one of her books’ titles reminds us that she belongs to multiple communities. She is Nigerian. She is Nordic. She is a woman. She knows Nigeria and Iowa and Harvard and the Bay Area arts and literary community. She’s your sister-friend. She’s also mine.
That’s what Faith teaches us.
