Joyous Resilience
In 2023, 11 women of African descent came together, connected by their keen interest to imagine a reality, where we shared more than just collective trauma, but collective joy as well. Over three months, we looked at and used various imagination tools to help us understand the core of our wounds and transmute them into joy born out of our resilience. We started each session with breathing exercises that grounded us and supported us in being able to hold space for one another. These were led by Sandra Achieng, whose expertise was a great gift.
Understanding Trauma
With the awareness that our joy could not come from a superficial place that denied the existence of our trauma, we needed first to understand what this trauma was and how it showed up in our lives in ways that kept us bound to it and with limited access to joy. As in many African cultures, we leaned into the wisdom of a tree and used its ‘makeup’ to deepen this understanding.
The above image illustrates how we were able to use the prompts to develop an understanding of our challenges and resistance to joy. That way, when triggers came up, we were able to view them as just that, triggers, and not necessarily the truth of our reality. It was interesting to discover how most of the time when it comes to trauma, we find ourselves treating the symptoms and rarely ever the root cause of it, and that is why we find ourselves struggling to heal.
Resilience
This understanding of our trauma led us to question the resilience that we have long been taught to be proud of. Resilience for black women is a double-edged sword. It is the very thing that allows us to continue striving despite the challenges we face yet it is also the thing that limits our ability to crumble and lean into the community for support. We are conditioned into being ‘unbreakable’ beings that do not succumb to the world’s cruelties so much so that even when we need to throw in the towel and give up the fight for our own sake, we do not do that.
Through this exercise, we were able to question what resilience was and what it looked like for each of us. We sought objects, pictures and even poems that best presented our ideas of resilience and inquired about them. We explored ways we could build a healthier understanding of resilience and our relationship to it.
The Collective
“if ever, are any of us healed in isolation? Healing is an act of communion.” — bell hooks
In our understanding of this shared trauma, our deep desire was to weave a connection of joy that we could all share. We tapped within ourselves to connect with our own definitions of collective joy and what we imagined it to be. We realised that for most of us, collective joy demanded our intentionality and commitment, more than anything. It wasn’t enough to just want it, it was something we had to get into the practice of doing until it became second nature.
With the collective in mind, we explored ways we could protect our joy in the case that we felt it was compromised. Did our desires mean that we were responsible for each other’s joy even at the expense of our own? This led to us exploring boundaries and the limitations of our capacity to be bearers of each other’s joy. We questioned whether the community was the place where endless sources of joy would be cultivated.
Future Realities
In the same way that we have inherited some of the trauma that we carry, we believe this responsibility extended to the joy that we could share with generations to come. We exercised creating a compass that would lead them to joy by writing letters. We used prompts to guide us through the exercise. What helped us ease into this exercise was sitting in the memory of our moments of joy. We tried to remember as much as we could about what it felt like, the scents associated with it and what had led us to those experiences. It helped us think of how we would guide those to come after us, to those places of shared intentionality.
Ending with Joy!
One of our practices along with the breathing exercises we did at the beginning of each session was the practice of ending with joy after every session. This was mostly important to us when we were still uncovering trauma and would explore quite triggering experiences. This exercise helped us return back to our desire for joy and grounded us in the knowing that what we were in search of wasn’t foreign to us. This beautiful exercise was led by Veronica Awuzudike.
Gratitude
This was a healing and fulfilling journey for us. For some, we walked away with more questions than when we came in and for some we left with answers to questions we did not know we had. Having led this space, I feel honoured to have been trusted with such a beautiful experience and the pleasure of having journeyed with incredible women whose wisdom left me at all times. The answer is always within.
