“Unexamined assumptions: First, that a “natural” mother is a person without further identity, one who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children, living at a pace tuned to theirs; that the isolation of mothers and children together in the home must be taken for granted; that maternal love is, and should be, quite literally selfless; that children and mothers are the ‘causes’ of each others’ suffering.”

This quote resonated with me because it highlights an idea that I know I have internalized: the expectation that to be a mother, a woman must give up her self, her personhood, to her child. For many years I committed against my mother the injustice of believing this. My mother loves me and has always wanted to give me everything I wanted and needed. As a result, her love and the pressure to be “the perfect mother” (whatever that even means) overwhelmed her. Read More

“There is much to suggest that the male mind has always been haunted by the force of the idea of dependence on a woman for life itself, the son’s constant effort to assimilate, compensate for, or deny that he is “of woman born.”

This quote stood out to me for many reasons. When watching the entire canon of literary work it seems that humanity is haunted by the woman. From the role of Eve in the Bible as an evil seductress who is punished through motherhood, to the entire genre of film noir, it is clear that men are scared. One of my favorite lines of a Kehlani song, a queer biracial singer, who with no doubt has been inspired by Shange is “And I know every man has a fear of a strong-minded woman, but I say she’s a keeper if she keeps it all runnin.” And although, I agree with this quote and I feel that men in many of my personal interactions have tried to make me smaller out of fear of the power I possess as a dark-skinned black lavender goddess. The complexity of trans men being able to, and having given birth is one we must remember. Not every “female” body is one that holds a woman. This entire article is overwhelmingly cis, and even within Ntozake’s work, I question how trans and nonbinary individuals feel about the portrayal of womanhood. I also understand that not every literary source needs to be relatable to every person.

“Terms like “barren” or “childless” have been used to negate any further identity. The term “nonfather” does not exist in any realm or social categories.

I remember as a child, my parents whoa re still married were separated at one point. My father told me frankly that he felt he lost a part of his life marrying my mother. My father, who at this point had left me at home for months, was absent and had a life of his own from my perspective. While my mother was tethered to me, and although I faced abandonment by both of my parents. My father has never been blamed for anything that has gone wrong in our lives from my extended family. Growing up, I expected nothing but the worst of men. When I was thirteen, I attended my friend Hilda’s birthday party and I could tell her father was a good man who loved her mother dearly. I immediately romanticized this man and in the future any man who did the bare minimum of what was expected of a woman. I have slowly learned that by watching women like my mother, like myself with PCOS and other conditions that make childbirth difficult how little respect we truly have for women. For men, they are not vessels of childbirth. That’s just a fact. But women? We are USELESS until we succumb to being baby makers. This speech by Tracee Ellis Ross was a moment where I realized I might not want to have children, I might not ACTUALLY want to get married, or base my value on these things. And it’s really hard and confusing to ask these questions. I am going to pull this back to Shange, from one of my favorite moments of “For Colored Girls”.

FOR COLORED GIRLS EXCERPT

“but bein alive & bein a woman & bein colored is a metaphysical

dilemma/ i havent conquered yet/ do you see the point

my spirit is too ancient to understand the separation of soul & gender/ my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face

my love is too delicate to have thrown back on my face

my love is too beautiful to have thrown back on my face

my love is too sanctified to have thrown back on my face

my love is too magic to have thrown back on my face

my love is too Saturday nite to have thrown back on my face

my love is too complicated to have thrown back on my face

my love is too music to have thrown back on my face”

The first time I heard this I cried. I thought about all the love I offer people and how so often I don’t feel there are people there who care for me. In connection to Tracee’s words (which are straight lineage from Shange, I mean cmon shes a trained actress from Brown), I think “My life is my own” and “My love is too/ to be thrown back in my face” all connect to the same thing. Loving ourselves, recognizing our worth and doing the demanding work of taking care of ourselves. I started in one place and I resulted in another. Please bear with me, its how my mind works and a sign of growth I think. This week has been a helpful reminder. Thank you so much. I am so excited to discuss all of this.

A movement/narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth

which does not ask

questions

and demands

answers about the lives of children, the priorities of the government:

a movement/ in which individual families

rely on consumerism and educational

privilege

to supply their own children with good

nutrition, health care can,

while perceiving itself a progressive or alternative

exist only as a minor contradiction within a society most of whose

children grow up in poverty

and which places its highest priority on the technology of

war.

My decision to turn this quote from Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution into a poem was based on the malignancy ingrained in the questions of capitalism and sexism. This excerpt spoke to me heavily because Rich actively acknowledges the power of capitalism when addressing issues of a woman’s body and its relation to society. By integrating conversations of “consumerism” and “government” with topics such as “pregnancy”, Rich is encouraging a holistic approach when addressing 21st century feminism. When constructing this poem I thought heavily about Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story.” Her talk discusses how individuals are composed of complex identities and connections and to reduce someone to a single narrative is to take away their humanity. I believe that capitalism is an all-consuming force and to deny its power would be unjust and ultimately fail to dismantle any systems of oppression. Rich echoes Adichie’s sentiments in her TED talk by refusing to strip away conversations of capitalism when discussing motherhood and feminism.

Furthermore, my stylistic choice in how I turned this quote into a poem was based on words that I deemed the most dynamic. I choose to give words such as “questions,” “privilege,” and “war” their own lines in order to emphasize them. When reading this poem out loud the reader is forced to give intentional breaks and breaths dedicated to these three words. I this because I I believe these breaks force both the reader and the listener to reconcile with these words and think deeper about the meaning behind them.

Passion and rage, nurtured

Discovering beyond

The present, the self-hatred, abdication and denial

An era capable of redemption

Discovering beyond the present because

There is little to marvel at

Little to fall in love with/ to come to terms with

Delving deeper instead

Discovering instead a past of glory

The above poem is my attempt at rewording and rereading Fanon in a Shange-like manner. The excerpt I chose to poeticize was from the chapter “On National Culture” in which Fanon dissects the process of conjuring from an idealized past a “national culture” that the colonized intellectual is tasked with. He describes the resentment towards the colonizer and their hegemonic control over every aspect of the colonized’s life. Consequentially, the colonized intellectual must struggle internally with everything they have been indoctrinated with about their history. The colonized intellectual is consumed by trying to prove to the colonizer but especially themself that they aren’t inferior, uncivilized, less than. So they turn to the past, trying to dig up proof of their humanity. They however only end up idealizing and overcompensating their past. It’s this desperate and incessant need to define the self outside of the box that the colonizer has so meticulously built. Shange asks us in Lost in Language and Sound “where are we to go?” if we rid ourselves of the white man. “Having delivered ourselves no way of naming the universe outside of the English language, where are we to go?” It’s the same dilemma of decolonization that Fanon expresses; the conscious colonized person struggles to conceptualize the black self outside of the oppression that has so greatly defined it.

Fanon’s passage immediately brought to mind a quote from Toni Morrison that resonates with me on a daily basis as I navigate white spaces as a black woman. Originally spoken in 1975 at a public lecture at Portland State University, Morrison sums up the toll racism plays on black people: it distracts us.

“The function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend 20 years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art so you dredge that up. Somebody says that you have no kingdoms and so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

All colonized people, whether or not they qualify as intellectuals, are faced with this existential plight of overcompensating to gain basic humanity. Being a student in a PWI and specifically an Ivy League university, it is very common for students of color to defend their communities and cultures from ignorant white students. They feel frustrated yet dignified in explaining how problematic a student or professor or text or policy is and they work themselves up about others’ ignorance. I made a personal vow some time ago to not waste any breath, sweat, or tears over proving my humanity to others. I refuse to be distracted by racism.

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