Breana Beaudreault

My favorite finds in the archives that have been related to my project have taken me in directions that I was not initially planning on exploring. Although I recognize that the undercurrent of my projects on forms of care and spirituality will tie in themes of familial relationships and motherhood specifically, I think Zake’s letters pushed me to explore this facet more. In one folder alone, I was able to find three separate letters from Ntozake to her mother that gave a really crucial insight to the way their relationship has grown and changed over time. In the same way, letters that her daughter has written to her grandmother and the way Zake engages her daughter in her letter illuminates that relationship, which shows the lineage and texture of these relationships in the way Ntozake does through her characters. In the first letter I read, which was the one that really drew me to my topic to begin with, was this really magnetic letter she wrote to her parents in October of ’86, discussing some time she spent in a mental hospital (or, the “crazy house” as she calls it) and reassuring her parents of her renewed stability. Here, the letter feels a bit distant as it’s s quite short, which felt to me like the equivalent of a phone call with your parents at home where you try to decide how much to tell them, how much you can let them into your life without worrying them or yourself. Her sense of humor about the whole situation is both introspective and eloquent, as she jokes with her parents “you see, wonders never cease—you get better & stay crazy…”. Almost five years later, you see that this distance has created tension, as she writes a letter to her mother about a time that Zake had stayed with her for a few days and evidently was causing some drama. She writes to apologize (again) for her behavior, which shows equally the strain on the relationship and the investment she has in making it work anyways. Even further down the line, Zake sends a letter to her mother begging her not to reveal Savannah’s true father to her when they visit, showing that she has allowed her mother in her life in some capacity and is trusting her with very sensitive information. A few years after that, there were some documents that suggested that her mother Eloise was trying to help support her financially after she seemed to have filed for bankruptcy and written some checks with insufficient funds. The documents were addressed to her mother and not Zake though they were about Zake’s finances, which suggested to me that her mother just decided to take over or Zake asked for her help. Perhaps this is a sign of progress, or just tracing the ups and downs of that relationship and Zake’s struggles in general, but the pieces that I got helped me to thread a timeline of their relationship a bit better. Savannah’s correspondence with her grandmother shows another relationship entirely, one simply of love in her youth, and her handwriting and style reminded me a bit of Zake. This female lineage traced through correspondence shows the ways that motherhood changes and adapts with both mother and child, and the way that both learn to show love in the ways they know how. It also emphasized this ancestral sisterhood, this hope to never forget that there were so many women who came before.

Scan 1: letter after stay in mental hospital.

Scan 2: letter from Zake to her mother apologizing for her behavior.

Scan 3. a card from Savannah to her grandmother. noted: emphasis on this one. reminded me of the title for colored girls.

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Feminist politics are most certainly a part of my worldview, but I don’t think I have ever called into question the fact that I never use modifiers when I discuss the type of feminism I practice. I think that when the term first came into my consciousness, I was in a very white environment, and because of that, I don’t think they put much thought into modifying the term to what they identify as or believe. These women, I believe, knew that If they were to have to put modifiers on their feminism, they would have to be honest with themselves and recognize their feminism as white. Because of its introduction to me as a more generic, all encompassing umbrella, the concept itself became really nebulous, and I struggled to understand why the women I was surrounded by were so outspoken about women-specific issues, but when students of color or queer students spoke up about microaggressions that made them uncomfortable, they were silent and therefore complicit. Even in spaces for women of color, discussing our solidarity and ways that we could care for and protect each other, these never took place in the framework of feminism or empowerment, but rather basic survival. This is a place where the concept of feminism could have been really driven home for the women who could have used that transformative power in empowerment to push past survival and towards active resistance.  In taking some space from that specific environment and being asked to seriously call into question my sense of morality in another academic setting, it has always felt like a more distant and sterile discussion, a theoretical discussion about very real problems. Although the emphasis on intersectionality has shown me that there are so many ways to identify and do radical work for those communities, I have always struggled in picking one term as I always have felt in-between. Being biracial is an identity I have known and loved since birth, something that my parents always told me to be proud of. Although the duality of identities has provided me with many perspectives and experiences, there is a sense of discomfort in both predominantly white and exclusively black spaces between my peers and I. Even within my black identity, I have always felt the need to choose between identifying as black, which is how society will visually code my mother and I, and being Latina, especially one that was not raised speaking Spanish.  The identifier of afro-latinx was one that I was completely unfamiliar with until I got to college, and the wide acceptance and use of the term showed me that there was a community of people that look like me, and might have some similar experiences.

When I discuss radical feminists in the 70s and 80s specifically, I aim to be as specific with my language as the women who I reference have asked me to. How these groups individually are called and what they call themselves is constantly evolving as our vocabulary and understanding around feminism expands and deepens. However, I think that at the heart of it, women within marginalized groups recognize the reality of the multiple oppressions they face, they recognize that their feminism must be intersectional to be feminism at all. Co-liberation is the kind of framework that intersectionality pushes us toward. I think the specificity of Third World or transnational feminisms can be, as I touched on in my presentation, tremendously empowering and clarifies specific membership and focuses. However, even though those two alone share many similarities, there were clear feelings of division on ideas like nationhood and borders. Therefore, I think intersectional feminism is the best catch-all phrase, but the narrower the identities that one can discern for themselves, the easier it is to find those with similar backgrounds, experiences, visions of liberation, and define oneself against generic feminisms like the second wave feminists of the 70s and the white feminists of present day.

Although I always say that these readings really resonate with me, I don’t even know how to emphasize the ways that this reading stuck with me. As a baby, my mom brought me up smelling the different spices we had around the house. Now, ironically enough, my mom isn’t usually the one doing the cooking in the family, it’s always been my dad (with me by his side as soon as I could safely and effectively use a knife). But both of my parents have always emphasized the importance of cooking, and of cooking well; it’s a staple of self-sufficiency, of health, and it cares for you, body, mind, and spirit. Sometimes when I was little and even to this day, my parents will cook something and jokingly ask me what they put in it, and I can almost always pick out every spice, every seasoning, and tell them to add a little more salt. Before I knew how to cook from those fancy recipes online, my father taught me vibration cooking. I remember, when I was no more than 14, making a soup; beef, carrots, the usual, and flinging open the spice drawer, smelling my favorites and throwing in what felt right. My parents remember that soup to this day it was so good. Yesterday, I made one of the few things that my mom cooks, because when she cooks, it’s always West Indian food because she knows how to cook her childhood meals best. She makes curried goat when I come home, and last year taught me how to make my favorite okra and rice. This break, I came home and made my mom’s classic okra and rice but with my spin on it, adding tomatoes and onions, chicken broth and thyme, among other things. There was something special about her face when I gave it to her. “You made it different. What did you put?” First skeptical, I was toying with a classic after all, her face beamed with pride as she reached for seconds. Watching her eat the second plate quietly was somehow one of the most profound moments of pride for me. She handed down something to me, something that she grew up with, something very small, and I honored it and made it my own. She didn’t have to say she liked it, or even smile (which is a rare occurrence for her and her family), just the quiet enjoyment of the second plate told me I did something right. When I sent her a picture of the curried goat recipe in Verta Mae’s book, she asked me if I had tried it out.  I joked with her that I didn’t have the money for goat or the big old crockpot, but knowing she trusted me with the more complex family favorite at all meant a lot. When I cook now, I cook everything, things I’ve learned from friends, online, maybe even late night stress baking. But when I cook my mom’s recipes, I remember all of the memories that came with her food, like Verta Mae does. It helps me disconnect and get into the flow of something, to feed and nourish myself, and in a much smaller way, I feel that I’m honoring my parents and the people who raised them, too. Recipes can feel like home. When I warm up my okra and rice I made last night writing this, I feel like my mom is there too, and she’d want me to do my best–only after I’ve had something to eat at mandatory family dinner.

As the year continues, I continue to find the places where my classes speak to each other and introduce many layers and dimensions to the same topics without realizing their intersections. My human rights seminar is one that came to mind when I was thinking about Third World and Transnational feminisms after my presentation. The class, called Human Rights, Religion, and Social Justice begins to tease out the ways that two of the biggest organizational forces help or hurt the other’s cause. In one of my readings, and in-class discussion, the usefulness and drawbacks of global pluralism (in this case as pertains to religion) came up. Here, I found that pluralism ran into many of the same tensions as transnational feminists have with Third World feminists. From an article by Rosemary Hicks titled “Saving Darfur”, she notes in her final remarks, “pluralism is often articulated as an ethic essential to democratic practice and an appropriate framework for resolving national and international conflicts. Though good in many respects, pluralism is a technique for making supposedly irreducible differences coexist, and therein lays its naturalizing power…resonant appeals to static animosities elided the fluidity of religious and racial identities and the political circumstances under which differences become salient.” Just as the writers of This Bridge Called My Back had to reckon with the democratizing of the text at the expense of black women and their labor, and transnational and Third World women have to reckon with the need to destroy larger systems of power in conjunction with location/nation-specific problems, religions have run into the same tension. As the clash of civilizations theory I studied a while back posits there will always be an innate struggle of one nation and culture over the other that it comes in contact with in postcolonial society, it becomes increasingly clear that this tension has been made explicitly clear for quite some time. The authors of This Bridge were able to reckon with it in the end because it achieved its goal despite its non-linear path, but I continue to question how we reckon with these tensions when the outcomes are negative, or neutral? How do we respect particularities while also finding common ground? Even in the ad that we watched in class claiming “freedom is basic” brought to the foreground questions of how individuals define freedom and what it even means for that freedom to be basic. I doubt this is a question that is easily resolved as it has been grappled with for years, but I am interested to see how this generation creates a different world from the victories and progression of smaller communities they are a part of.

Adrienne Rich’s introduction to her book Of Woman Born showed her growth and elaborated on her reflections in the ten years since first publishing the book. Throughout the introduction, Rich points to the many nuanced facets of motherhood that complicate the relationship, mainly the way systemic pressures and oppressions shape the way these relationships come do be (or don’t) and how they grow and progress in reaction to the child’s specific environment. When Rich spoke about black motherhood and referenced literature by afro- and carribean-american women and the ways they tackle the “specific cultural differences in mother-daughter interactions”, I couldn’t help but think of the multitudes of stories of ways these cultural differences have played out between my own mother and myself. This particular topic had been on my mind today, and after reading the section on black motherhood, I was naturally prompted to go back to an article my mother sent me just this morning. Having been born and raised in Panama, my mother and I have often struggled to find common ground or to understand where the other is coming from, not due to lack of trying, but due to the environments that we were raised in. We have worked hard to understand each other’s love languages, to communicate effectively, and to really listen when the other is speaking. To this point, she had forwarded a Roxane Gay article about growing up with Haitian-American parents, an article that was full of quotes that I can remember from my childhood almost exactly the same. Some of the most striking to me were “a closed door meant we were probably up to no good. A closed door meant we were trying to shut our parents out of our lives when they wanted nothing more than to have their lives fully entwined with theirs.” The idea of boundaries and privacy are key concepts in healthy American families, but one that was utterly unheard of to my mother. I was able to see this tension even between my American-born father, who accepted my requests for space and boundaries immediately, and my mother, who seemed truly shocked at his reaction and hurt by what she perceived as my not needing her. However, when she sent the article, as you can see in the copy I’ve attached, she wrote  “Hi Bre—this article will help you understand the “me”, my love + my belie[fs]”. Although it has been hard at times, particularly when I was young and saw relationships functioning differently than my own, I am reminded and truly overwhelmed by the uniqueness and, as Gay puts it, the limitlessness of love that I have been given and taught to give back.

roxane gay article pdf