World-Making like no other

It is both fascinating and concerning that among the various nuances presented by each of the black female authors we have, there is one common thread that holds them together. One of struggle, and of being silenced. Fascinating because it is rare to find such a consensus among various peoples, but concerning also because of this very fact. It is concerning because it points to a wrong that has been done. A wrong that has not been not corrected and comes back to haunt us each time. 

It is the wrong done to black women decades ago, and one that persists even today. Black women of every generation, of every sexuality, of every class. It is a wrong that had been committed during slavery, and one that outlived even that only to manifest in their exclusion and near-erasure during the Civil Rights movement. Every piece written by these black women is a reiteration of the ways in which these i have injustices have shaped over time, and how they have shaped the lives of the very women they concern.

Angela Davis speaks of slave women, ones claimed to have aided the endeavour because of the work they did for the master and his family. They refuse to acknowledge that these are women who performed “the only labour of the slave community which could not directly and immediately be claimed by the oppressor”. These are women responsible for the very sustenance of the black men and families that later on went to call them co-conspirators. These are women that resisted through violence, and in whatever way they could. Davis tells us of these women because if she does not it is highly likely that no one will. 

The statement by the Combahee River Collective sheds light on the burden that comes with just being. They “had no way of conceptualising what was so apparent to us, what we knew was really happening” because no one other than them dare mention the injustices done to them. How if and when these women do choose to speak of these injustices, they are called “smart-ugly”, never taken seriously.

Lorde speaks of being unseen and unheard. She speaks of the difficulty in being acknowledged as herself, instead always as an adjunct to someone or something else. She says; “my poetry, my life, my work, my energies for struggle were not acceptable unless I pretended to match somebody else’s norm”. 

The lives of all these black women and of those before them have been spent in struggle. They have been spent in struggle, and then they have been spent in proving that struggle. In proving their very existence. Each time, however, these existences have been said to clash with supposedly more important things, and that their struggle must not bear fruit because someone elses' is coming to. These erasures are concerning in every way, yet they seem to be a means to an end. Unjustifiable as they are, the way these women speak of them is not descriptive. By speaking to these erasures with truth, each of these women are in the process of creating a new world. A world, where, as Lorde puts it, “difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic”. Their labour has now become a labour of truth, and by embodying their truth, they have started the creation of a new world. One where the freedom of one is not contingent upon that of another. One where freedom comes for everyone at the same time. One where freedom for one must mean freedom for all. It is a world that must be different than the one we live in now, and have  lived in for so long. For this world has already proven it is not good enough for these women, and all those denied humanity as them. 

These women are engaging with the past to make sense of their present, all the while looking for and seeking a better future. One that is for them, since they have been deprived of its possibility for so long. A future where "to be recognised as human, levelly human, is enough".