For Black Women Navigating Illness, Existence and Academia.
Black women of both historic and contemporary note have fought for access and inclusion in academia, other institutional and non-institutional spaces. This work to confer humanity upon themselves despite furious attempts to deny it makes these women’s work both necessary and extraordinary. The work they engaged in has opened doors for themselves, other black women and a vast array of members of society. Creating these spaces in a Black Feminist tradition has meant working towards everyone’s freedom because, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free.”(Combahee River Collective 4).
In an article entitled, “How Not to Die: Some Survival Tips for Black Women Who Are Asked to Do Too Much, the Crunk Feminist Collective evokes the names of “Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Claudia Da Silva, Gwendolyn Brooks, Aaronette White, Barbara Christian, Claudia Tate, Nellie Y. McKay, Ava Scott, Lelia Gonzalez, Claudia Jones, Toni Cade (Bambara), VèVè Clark, Octavia Butler, Toni Yancey, Gloria E. Anzaldúa…and others.” (Crunk Feminist Collective, Web source). Black feminist scholars who all died too young and/or from illnesses are called into the space and the impact of this exposes a troubling trend. The process of demanding recognition within systems that attempt to exclude black women whilst a potentially restorative act also correlates with illness and early death in many Black scholars and activists. Black women in academia make their work legible by being held accountable to ordinary Black women as well as other Black feminists in the academy. However Black women are also only allowed entrance into academia if they also are accountable to, “masculinist, white eurocentric systems of knowledge validation”. (Collins, 751)
The impacts of having years of work formally credited or discredited by a system created to privilege white knowledge formation and ensure either the invisibility or hypervisibility of Black women is an act of violence with serious consequences. Black Feminist Thought in particular has seen such manipulation as it has been valued when taught by white professors and black bodies made hypervisible and seen as too close to black professors and not objective enough when taught by academics who are Black women. These women have had their importance and that of their foremothers rendered invisible. In her novel Citizen, author and professor at Pomona College, Claudia Rankine describes some of the physical effects of being conscious, educate and still marginalized by every day existence as well as the history of memory. Rankine says,“Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue and clog the lungs[…]The wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse[…] your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel does not bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing it own argument.” (Rankine 7-8). Just the act of existing becomes a weight that she sometimes cannot stand up to but Rankine acknowledges that her life is one that does not have a, “turn-off, no alternative routes: [she] pull[s] [her]self to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed, it’s another week, the blouse is beneath [her] sweater, against [her] skin and [she] smells good. Rankine in many ways uses this moment, both practical and metaphorical to do the reparative work to make herself whole again and this is in fact an example of the ways in which many Black feminists fight illness through recreating, washing and making themselves fresh again.
There is however hope for healing that Black women have and continue to tap into and it usually emerges from the erotic. Audre Lorde suggests that there are uses of the erotic, or places in which the pleasure one wants and deserves is articulated and enjoyed. Lorde lets it be known that these pleasures are not always sexual and they are often found in art. Many other women who are Black academics engage in this process as well, Alice Walker wrote for her survival and paints for her current pleasure, Toni Morrison revels in the creation of her fictional characters and even Mary Church Terrell distinctly enjoyed being able to dance. It is therefore possible to find hope in the idea that even under systems of oppression Black women and Black academics who battle illness born of oppression still find spaces to center themselves and their pleasure through creating and through art.
In honor of the creation of art as healing. The following art project emerged
