"I cried out with my mother's grief"

What has struck me the most in the course of this week’s readings and lectures is the manner in which motherhood has been described in the texts discussed. Particularly, in Sojourner Truth’s speech “Ain’t I A woman” and in an excerpt from Sadiya Hartman’s “The Belly of the World: A note on black woman’s labours”.

In Hartman’s article, she describes how enslaved women would abort pregnancies in an effort to resist producing more slaves, how some women would practice “infanticide rather than sentence their children to social death, the auction block and the master’s bed” and how some chose to give birth to children as a “testament to an abiding knowledge of freedom contrary to every empirical index of the plantation”.

The choice of whether to resist and how to resist through the process of childbirth is a uniquely feminine choice. What struck me was not only the diversity of forms of protest that Hartman described but also the undeniable validity of each form. Furthermore, there can be no denying the undeniable strength as well as pain behind each of the responses mentioned by Hartman; from practicing infanticide to giving birth while not being resigned to an idea of slavery but rather as Hartman states to an idea of freedom that went against “every empirical index of the plantation”.

This passage also struck me because, I think, it tied into the process and state of cognitive destruction that we have discussed in class. Simply put, to have the reality present that one’s children would be separated from oneself and then sold as units of labour would be, to understate it, devastating.

Similarly, in “Aint I A Woman”, Sojourner Truth exclaims, “…I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me!...”. This excerpt once again illustrates the extent of the emotional mental pain and trauma caused by the usage of black women’s capacity to reproduce as a means of propagating relations of slavery and maintaining as well as expanding the slave market. Moreover, this excerpt in the context of the rest of the speech also conveys the extent of the oppression that black women faced, especially gender based – as Sojourner points out, “Then that little man in black there, he says women can't have as much rights as men…” – on top of the brutality that they had to endure under institutions of slavery.

These two excerpts seemed to convey tremendous strength, pain as well as dignity and consequently, I thought they merited special mention.