While reading Terry Tempest Williams I came across this line: “Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them.” Young girls are too often socialized to think of their highest calling in life is to give freely of themselves to others. While there is nothing inherently wrong with living a life of service, there is something unhealthy when that life of service is socialized as living your one life for everyone else but yourself. Last fall I read the book Too Heavy a Yoke: Black Women and the Burden of Strength. It was one of those experiences where you feel as though a book has read you instead of you reading the book. The book focused on the burden of living the life of the trope of the StrongBlackWoman. Again, strength itself is not unhealthy, but when it is a hegemonic image of black women that leaves us without room to ask for help and to rest, it becomes the type of negativity that kills both spirit and body. And our education, our continued socialization does not teach us how to not be complicit in our own oppression. It is passed on from generation to generation – grandmother to mother to self. We learn to walk on broken legs without ever recognizing that pain is not a natural state of being.
We convince ourselves that we would rather be the StrongBlackWoman than the other identities – the Jezebel, the Sapphire, the Mammy, etc. But we have to begin the process of unlearning those monolithic identities. We belong deeply to ourselves, and have been deliberately created by God, and therefore, must deliberately walk through life on paths that we have crafted. We know because have lived, and most listen to the deep, low whispers of intuition in our bones. The intuition that tells us how to discover our true identities – far from the chains of this world.
Audre Lorde said, in a passage quoted in Too Heavy a Yoke:
“We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other. But we can practice being gentle with ourselves by being gentle with each other. We can practice being gentle with each other by being gentle with that piece of ourselves that is hardest to hold, by giving more to the brave bruised girlchild within each of us, by expecting a little less from her gargantuan efforts to excel. We can love her in the light as well as in the darkness, quiet her frenzy toward perfection and encourage her attentions toward fulfillment.”
Therein lies our servant heart – that to love those who have lived similar experiences to us, to learn how to be gentle with that spirit, is to learn how to love our own. It is an overwhelming task to live with the expectations and oppressions of the world as a black woman. It becomes effortless, however, to love both failures and triumphs when we practice the deliberate act of making space for the full magnitude of being.
I am deliberately finding those spaces and being someone who creates them herself. Last summer I got my first waist beads in a ceremony with other women of color who I had just come to know in my first few months in the Bay. It was a powerful moment of sisterhood and quieting the frenzy of life. In that moment, we were suspended in time as we focused on that love for ourselves and love for one another. Ayodele, the woman who led the ceremony, talked about caring for ourselves as women, and how if we took the top layer of whatever we made, we would sustain ourselves and have plenty left to support others. She reminded us about the precious nature of womanhood, and the life or death of the earth that we bear inside our bodies. The beads connect us to our past and help us deliberately plan for the future we want. They tell the story of that journey in the intimate spaces of our bodies where the scars of life are written. During the frantic paces of life, I often find myself reaching to feel my beads through my clothing to find tranquility in knowing that they are there, and that I have deliberately committed their meaning to my life. New life creations come one day at a time.
Odelia Younge 