No. 27 - Baby, what you say now?

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So, this is a short set of notes from a conversation led by Mama Shawnee Benton Gibson, founder of the Ariah Foundation and the Wake Up Everybody Movement and Mama Loretta Ross. Ross, a Reproductive Justice activist, organizer, mother, legend and professor at Smith college, spoke on Zoom in the lead up to the 10th Annual Mother Wit conference, a conference organized by Mama Shawnee and the Spirit of a Woman Leadership Institute. Some of this is still contemplation. Some of it is me just thinking and questioning.

One of the first things I remembered noting was Mama Loretta Ross sharing something that they’d learned from bell hooks, the late writer, feminist, thinker. So, Mama Loretta was responding  to Mama Shawnee's question about competence, and if being a scholar gets in the way of the work you are doing in the world. Mama Loretta responded that she had a conversation with bell hooks, and hooks had shared with Ross a reality she had come to after writing her second book, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center.

Ross was elated to read Ain't I a Woman? by bell hooks when it came out in 1981, because many of the black women Ross was in organization and community with did not, prior to reading hooks’ work have a sort of conceptual theory and conceptual framework to mirror and understand the work, and connect the dots between what they were doing and the lives they were living. 

So, she gets to see hooks at some point and shares that Ain't I a Woman?  was a wonderful book, but that she did not get to appreciate as much as hooks' second book,  the aforementioned, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center.  She had a chance to connect with hooks on that feeling, and hooks shared that she wrote her first book so that her grandmother could read, and understand it, and that she wrote the second book, to satisfy academic critics. hooks shared that she would never write another book in that register. 

That landed for me for different reasons. But one,  it made me think, a couple of things. Like on the one hand, initially it made me think about how am I writing? How am I communicating? Am I connecting, articulating in a way that is accessible to me, and to the folks that I am seeking to reach? Is it me, am I putting on? Is it, I don't want to say, exciting, but is it a joy, in some fashion, to read? 

And I think sometimes I do get a little caught up in the exactitude of language. This kind of brings me to the idea, which I may talk about at some other point, of whether my writing is not just accessible, but is it approachable? That was a notion that Mama Shawnee brought up in the conference, the Mother Wit conference. She was like, ‘you know, you gotta be approachable.’ You know, here we are in community, not necessarily knowing everyone that is present, but wanting to feel that I can say hello  to you, and I can ask you how you’re doing, and touchbase and connect. And, in order to do that sometimes, you have to put on some type of approachability, particularly if you may not always be approachable. And so, I wonder, in the same way, is my language, is my writing donning a jacket, a piece of clothing that has spikes on it, like uh ugh, ain’t getting too close to her. 

So, that made me think about that. Going further, I haven't gotten a chance to read hooks as recently but I've always gotten a sense that she does write a little compactly. But, for me, I find it okay because I sometimes, not so much like the density of the language but it helps me poet the language so I can see more imaginings, I sometimes like language that is a little more thick than it is thin.  

But I do want to be multilingual, but as Ross shared you do not need to “value being [multilingual] over the ability to communicate with your people, or the people you are seeking to reach. 

And then, Ross goes on, and as a reproductive justice activist, emphasized looking at the vagina in its fullness, and the way its health is affected by so many other parts of our body and health. We have to deal with the ‘full spectrum of the vagina, the full life cycle of it.”

There was another conversation about the ways in which being in the academy can can kind of draw you away from your  community at the end of the day. Ross, spoke of the feminists, early feminists, who in their desire to establish the legitimacy of women's studies wound up borrowing the techniques of academia. In trying to legitimize women's lives, Ross shared that they were really getting further and further away from organizing with women and for women. 

The conversation reminds me to continue to speak  in a language that I feel is reachable, to perhaps adjust the way I have been connecting and communicating, and to just communicate in  a fashion that is just myself…so, baby, that’s what I said. That’s what I said, baby.