black femmes in digital Hush Harbors; a prologue.
This project is concerned with intergenerational healing.
When I say healing, I mean encountering and responding to the past, a process that is not necessarily a means to an end. To heal, something must change or shed. When shedding, there is an opportunity to replenish.
When I say healing, I mean the process of growing new skin.
In encounters with the past, a storm of experiences, memories, and epistemologies are uprooted and then thrown into new formation. These new formations bump and disrupt our stable conceptions of self. When we have physical wounds, our skin is renewed. New cells are materialized. What was torn will never be the same as before.
In my experience, visiting the past and enacting intergenerational care through storytelling and other technologies, has led to nuanced and empathetic understandings of black femmes in my family (including history around mental health, illnesses, sexuality, and abuse), a new and emerging bond with my mother, and more risks in my becomings. My mother and I now have new forms of relationality within boundaries.
When I say femme, I am speaking to trans, cis-, queer, het-, non-binary energies, practices, materialities. The Combahee River Collective clarifies that “any type of biological determinism is a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.” In my desire to contribute to dismantling social structures that are unforgiving in their limited aesthetic and other capacity for imagining new worlds, femme has become a comfortable space to be my black, queer, non-binary, polyamorous self and be legible within my communities.
Curating this thesis as a website, invites engagement with the material, to listen, hear, practice freedom-making in the spirit of a digital hush harbor. According to Melva Sampson, “digital hush harbors” are spaces created by black women, often including femme, ministers to assemble and affirm as communal congregation online. The online platform serves as a means “to preach in multifaceted ways and bypass traditional systems of legitimization and historically recognized gatekeepers,” in the way that hush harbors were spaces of disrupting established systems of legitimization and belonging. As a website, this thesis has the capacity to reach communities in and beyond academia, in hopes of inspiring further conversations within families and communities toward collective healing. As people stand witness to what I have created, they may collaborate in building (though, not reproducing) practices of their own toward what they need. This digital hush harbor welcomes you. As Monèt Noelle Marshall declares in her meditation Full of Yourself, “the portal is you.”
The collage at the top of this page documents a ritual I did in January 2021, during a time of immense grieving. I started and will end this project with ritual because black femme hands, are hands that can extend widely, soft supple hands.
Freedom-making as Praxis.
My creative practice considers intergenerational healing and flourishing of black femmes with a turn to intuitive, communal, informal, and speculative methods. I engage these strategies as tools towards building a present and embodied archive of black femme futures. Intuition affirms the possibility that healing resides within us--utilizing our dreams, memories, and familial stories as resources. Communal and informal epistemologies develop when black femmes spend time together--gossiping, loving, advising, and sharing stories. A black femme life is also one of great speculative nature: we must live dangerously outside of standardized and structured ways of being within the realm of imagination, seeking visions and strategies of liberation.
It is this ingenuity that so many black femmes before me have armed themselves with for their survival. The black femme canon retells these (hi)stories through photographs, music, performance, novels and films. Though these archives are scattered, social media platforms and digitized library and university resources have made them more accessible. Some resurface in beautifully organic waves and are used as blueprints for navigating black life and livelihood while living in a state of perpetual and persistent danger, yet coping, healing, surviving and thriving. More obscure archives are discovered in journals, dream diaries, the corners of social worker’s pictures, news clippings, scandals and hearsay. Scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Jayna Brown, Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Tavia Nyong’o, use critical fabulation to sift through these sands of time, finding grains of fruitful life in the hidden histories of black femmes. I turn towards Saidiya Hartman, who articulates something else as a liminal space occupied by black femmes in exploration of liberative spaces in the early 19th century. We are still in transit toward this pursuit. By accessing and creating from the remnants, the archives function as a source of inspiration.
This work of archeology intrigues me as I traverse through the muddied waters of my own family history, as I excavate the voices of generations of black femmes who have gone unheard. My grandmother has become the matriarch and keeper of these stories. She began to retell some in her first book, Two Worlds, The Captives and The Enslaved: A Family’s Search for Its History, Identity and Legacy of Ancestors on Whose Shoulders They Stand (2016), but admitted that she censored herself out of guilt, fear and shame regarding what needed to be revealed. Black middle-class sensibilities in Washington D.C. during the 1930s socialized a very particular type of black girl. A post-Depression era wave of conservatism in the U.S. alongside the black pursuit of behaviors that would assure safety in the Jim Crow Era also contributed to her respectability aesthetic of social, political and communal upward mobility. I encouraged her to share these stories with me, as I believed my ancestors’ unspoken lives were appearing in my dreams. Empathically, I have a long history of stimulating, detailed and vivid dreaming. My mother advised me to transcribe these as soon as I woke, suggesting that they may transmit information. She was right, and years later in a conversation with my grandmother, we revealed secrets to each other and discovered patterns. I believe this exchange was healing for us both, especially learning that queerness was not unique to me in the family. Some of these queer elders I knew in their earthly years and though we share our queerness, we were not close. In fact, most of them were anxious about the liberative spirit they saw in me when I shaved my hair or dated someone who was not black or brown. I respect these elders and honor their lives, but these are not the ancestors I call on when in ritual. Ancestry is not limited by heritage or humanity, neither is family.
In my excavation, I sat with the term mothering. “Mama” is a loaded word. Mama Earth has been feminized, bridging an alliance with femmes, especially black and brown femmes who are likewise surviving abuse and mistreatment. I conceive of mothering as an ungendered term. My use of Mama displays my respect and love towards that position. I have had many mothers in my life and as well as many fathers (also ungendered). My family is expansive and chosen and non-binary. This is cultural and ancestral. For example, Ballroom Culture has stood as testimony to the radical nature of chosen family and mothering that transcends gender. I am interested in the relation between mothering and culture care. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha emphasizes in her book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018), “Caring denotes a positive, affective bond and investment in another’s well-being. The labor can be done without the appropriate attitude. Yet without the attitude of care, the open responsiveness to another that is so essential to understanding what another requires is not possible. That is, the labor unaccompanied by the attitude of care will not be good care.” Care must be embodied. It’s a performance of empathy, care, and willingness and mothering holds to this protocol.
My art is in conversation with black feminist philosophers, femme poets of the Black Arts Movement, black femme activists, black femme folk and futurist writers and artists like Zora Neale Hurston, Eloise Greenfield, Lucille Clifton, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovani, bell hooks, Julie Dash, Octavia Butler, Alexis DeVeaux, Carrie Mae Weems, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Toshi Reagon. Each of these femmes inhabit a lineage of storytelling which contributes to my aesthetic, poetics, and artistic practice. Their poetics as languaging, ritualistic embodiment, and femme-centered narratives ignite a fire in me to recognize my art as healing for myself and the communities with which I stand. For these reasons, I have chosen Ntozake Shange and Alexis Pauline Gumbs as interlocutors on my journey as I reach toward the concept of something else. These artists remind me that I am not cultivating my liberation from scratch, it is a remixed hybridity of past-present-future lives--what I envision as a practice in black femme freedom-making.
This artist statement is an experiment in putting language to the things that are im-/possible to say. By analyzing these artists’ works and placing my art-making in conversation with theirs, I will provide an archive of black femme aliveness. We aren’t here to survive, we are called to live and live abundantly. Within each section, I will provide resources--ritual work as scores--to invite a sensorial and practical learning experience. These sensory embodiments point to an area of specificity in my own artistic practice, as I understand through feeling, and feeling is a valid epistemology. As Audre Lorde asserts, “The Black mother within each of us--the poet--whispers in our dreams: I feel therefore I can be free.” This sacred act of feeling is vital to my process and is evidenced in the works presented here. Embracing these modes allows us to tap into something else: otherworldly, revolutionary and expansive.