This book, Sisters of the Yam, by bell hooks has been ushering me into the year. I figured it was the perfect book to start the year off with. The book's layout is reminiscent of a dissertation, almost needing footnotes for the sources instead of full on paragraphs, but I liked the sources she added so much that I began marking down the names of the authors she quoted, most of whom I had already read-Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall and more. It's got heavy content but I nodded my head so often that I was left with a crook in my neck after the first 50 pages. bell hooks, in this book, has really captured a lot of the things that I have been both witnessing and experiencing, only to eloquently critique the way black women and black families live and love. The name, Sisters of the Yam, comes from a black woman support group that she began for her students in college, where instead of normal office hours, she would host a kind of therapy group, assigning books and allowing her students to share their personal experiences through their reading of certain novels like Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo by Ntozake Shange, and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. From there, she realized that her black students were experiencing shame, low self-esteem, suicidal thoughts, familial/financial pressure, stress, grief, and a whole host of other things that encouraged her to not only start this support group for these women but to write a book about it.
When reading this book, I thought about the conversations and moments that I had in Brazil with a certain group of women that I never actually wrote about on this blog. I had always wanted to, but I spent so much time digesting everything that we talked about and everything that I had felt and learned, that I could never bring myself to actually write about it. We dubbed these meetings, "The Black Girl Summit." It was a small group of black American academics, studying/researching in Salvador da Bahia, all for different reasons, all in different levels, coming together to have drinks and discuss issues of love, race, sexuality and class. And it was quite possibly the most powerful thing that I have ever experienced in my life. Never had I been surrounded by black women who were willing to put themselves out there, talking about their lives, their experiences, their joys, their disappointments, their struggles AND their achievements. And with a little help of a caipirinha, the laughs we had kept us from having the tears, but everything was open, fluid and honest. I never thought about how powerful all of that really was until now. And each night, there was someone new in the group who shared her story and her experiences. When I really think about it, we were healing each other without even really knowing it.
We were our own Sisters of the Yam, collectively tackling the issues which troubled us most and uplifting each other along the way.
I could cry just thinking about the power behind those get togethers. And how after each one, I almost didn't want to leave. I felt like something was lifted off my shoulders just listening to other women's experiences, learning lessons about life that I hadn't even planned on learning yet.
What if more black women felt comfortable about sharing their stories with others? Taking off that "strong black woman" quilt and crying for their pain, laughing about their joys, getting angry at the injustices against them. What if more black women felt comfortable being vulnerable with one another, trusting one another enough to reveal their secrets and breaking the pattern of "strong black woman" silence?
This quote, cited by hooks in the book, was really powerful for me:
“Did you ever wonder why so many sisters look so angry? Why we walk like we’ve got bricks in our bags and will slash and curse you at the drop of a hat? It’s because stressed is hemmed into our dresses, pressed into our hair, mixed into our perfume and painted on our fingers. Stress from the deferred dreams, the dreams not voiced; stress from the broken promises, the blatant lies; stress from always being at the bottom, from never being thought beautiful, from always being taken for granted, taken advantage of;stress from being a black woman in white America. Much of this stress is caused by how the world outside us relates to us. We cannot control that world, at times we can change it but we can assert agency in our own lives so that the outside world cannot over-determine our responses, cannot make our lives a dumping ground for stress.”
-Opal Palmer Adisa, “Rocking in the Sunlight: Stress and Black Women”
Could all this stress come from holding everything in all the time? Being afraid to show any emotion for fear of being hurt or taken advantage of? What have we been socialized to think and do as black women? I remember my mother and other figures in my life saying, "What do you need therapy for?", "Suck it up", "Don't be no punk," and my personal favorite, "Don't let these white people see your tears." And holding it all in really just gives way to a later breakdown and damn near mental explosion. This blog? Condemned by my family members who know about it. "Girl, what you putting your business all out there for, huh? You want somebody to use it against you?" And I always think to myself, "How is someone going use me against me?" My experiences are what they are. They happened to me, I'm living through them, I'm learning everyday. How can that be fuel for someone else's hellfire? Why is it such a taboo for me or any other black woman in my family to seek out therapy? Why is it such a taboo for me to talk about needing help or wanting to improve my mental health? Why is there silence around the things that we really need the most? Why are we afraid to be vulnerable when we should be?
The experiences I had with the Black Girl Summits shocked me then and even still leave me unable to truly articulate their effect on me now. I wanted to know earlier how I was going to translate my experiences in Brazil over a cultural line, and I'm still trying to figure that out. Things were really so much more different than I had realized. I haven't exactly felt comfortable speaking my mind, saying what I feel, openly sharing my experiences, my thoughts, or my feelings in the most recent personal interactions I've had. I wonder where that culture of silence is coming from?
What if black women really learned to speak?
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