the world-builders write back
What does it mean to be a friend to, and defend, Black Feminist Space?
Did I tell you the one about the white man who suggested last year (2023) that I would do well to take a lesson from the 1967 film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Likely not since at the time, I gave it (and him) very little time. Aside from a few friends and collaborators who were in proximity at the time, it wasn’t a story that I could be bothered to tell. Which is to say that it is a surprise to me that I find myself returning to tell it. I tell, not because the man in question has become any more relevant but because I find that I am—again—in the position of having to decide how to respond to a white man invading a space. Also because I tend to believe, when a story comes around again, albeit in a different form, it might be in want of a telling. Or, to paraphrase Dr Ken Hardy; there are sometimes things that your ears need to hear your mouth say.
Though the story itself is not that interesting, (hence I will be brief) it arrives in this moment because it does, I think, have a particular relevance. It arrives (I am happy to say) in a moment of delight when Dr Gail Lewis, who has agreed to be my next Black Feminist Friend (BFF) guest, selects Morgan Parker’s ‘Magical Negro’ as her chosen text for our writing practice. While waiting for Gail to select specific poems from the collection, I browse the titles myself and one jumps out: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It is this title that becomes the portal through which the story returns—a rememory of an event that I would like to think is past but which, through its reappearance, I can now no longer claim to have forgotten. Hence, have I told you the one about the white man who…? No? Buckle up.
In October 2023 the BACP’s professional journal Therapy Today, published an interview with me. The interview had been conducted by Helen George—another Black woman therapist—and it was wonderful to be in conversation with her. Reflecting on this now I would say that the enjoyment was possible because expansion could happen —because Helen’s reading of my work, and her questions in response to it, enabled us to travel beyond certain basics and cliches of ‘race’ (questions like what’s it like being a Black therapist? How do you respond to/cope with racism? What would you say to white therapists out there?) and into more spacious discursive territory. Helen and I talked about Black feminisms, ancestral inheritance, and life’s ongoingness. We talked about spiralism, Black life and creative knowledge production. We talked about music. We wondered and wandered together. We laughed. It felt good.
A few days after publication I received an email from a therapist I had did not know and had never met. The opinion he offered was unsolicited but he offered it anyway. He said that in his view “…the obsession with blackness, whiteness, white privalege (sic), diversity etc etc reinforces the racial disharmony”. The interview made no mention of ‘reparations’, but he felt able to share that he was particularly angry about them. He thought it ‘perverse’ he said, that “people of today take on the guilt of yesterday as if it were theirs, and feel that they have to and are expected to pay for it”. He pointed me toward the film ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’, citing Sidney Poitier’s character who ‘had it right’ because he did not think of himself as a coloured man, but as a man. I was invited to ‘learn’ from this example. Of course, I could have (and could still) write an essay on why I do not agree with this read. I could do my own read of the emailer’s patronizing racist action and send it back to him in response. Then again, as Toni Morrison reminds us, one of the very serious functions of racism, is distraction—and I did not wish to be distracted more than I already had been. So, at least initially, I ignored him.
When I did mention the incident to a friend—who happened to be the wonderful Gail Lewis—something surprising was revealed. We come to realise that when Gail was interviewed in the SAME journal earlier in the year, the SAME white man wrote the SAME nonsense to her! The doubling of the experience raised the fury stakes, enough to spur a response—two sentences emailed back from me;
“I have read your attacks on other black women who appear in Therapy Today. Your attempts to annihilate our experiences will never work”
I add a quote from Dionne Brand’s Map to the Door of No Return,
"It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history, one isn't born into a void.”
And finally, I add a link to a recording of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner by Black Uhuru.
And finally finally—cos a Black feminist’s got work to do—I block him so that he cannot email me again.
Not quite finally, as it turns out, on account of my not realising the need to block him not just on one, but on each one of my devices. He slips through to email again and tell me that I am hostile, emotional, not making sense, and that he has looked up the lyrics to the Black Uhuru track and that it is meaningless and entirely irrelevant. I do the last block. Finally, finally, finally, he WILL NOT EMAIL ME AGAIN.
Not finally, as it turns out, because in 2024, the story spirals and returns. It happens shortly after the first session of the Black Feminist Friends (BFF)—a series of reflective writing sessions that centre Black women’s experience, creative and intellectual production AND which I chose to make open to all. In Unruly Therapeutic, I speak of embracing an expansive conception of Black feminism as proposed by Jennifer Nash—one that foregrounds Black women while not being limited to embodied performances of Black womanhood. I would hope that not being a Black woman would not stop you from being a friend to Black feminism. This makes sense to me. Or rather it did, and now I have cause to wonder—is this too generous, or worse, dangerous? The question of generosity and its dangers has arisen because of the unsolicited intrusion of another white man—this time who was present at our BFF gathering—who emails me after the event. In this email he tells me, explicitly, what he would like to do to me which is not, in this iteration of invasion, to educate me but to “fuck” me. I am dazed, distraught, devastated. I am—of course—totally distracted. Is the labour of making Black feminist space not enough? Do you ever get tired of giving a Black woman more work to do?
Let me spare you an account of the intrapsychic work that this situation demanded. Sufficient to say it was a lot; that it was occupying. Instead, I begin with the material work, which is to say that, against a mass of gendered and racialised conditioning, I decided to share the email with people I trust. These are people I know as friends of Black Feminism. As a group, they include but are not exclusively Black women. From this, a collective space emerged in which multiple responses got to be shared and witnessed; shock, hurt, outrage, and more. The responses became a gathering; became a description of the multiple violations (not only of me and my psychic space but of US); became a space of tending to the historical scenes of violence evoked; became a space for the speaking of unspeakable violations; became a space of care; became a collective response formed in writing; became action; became message returned to sender and beyond the sender; became refusal of the incursion and the impunity that the invader believes he has as he commands the evacuation of a body, or a home, or of a land, or of Black feminist space, so that he can take them—use them—for himself. The message, in short; WE REFUSE.
Another invasion and this time around, I know how to block. Blockety block block. And this time I do not say finally. To say finally would be to think it is over; would be to make myself exceptional; would be to believe I could draw a line between myself and all the Others. How many of us, in this everywhen, have experienced, and are experiencing, and will experience some or other form of this invasion and violation? How many of us have been, and are being, and will be told that what we know is meaningless and makes no sense because it is not what the invader knows and/or takes a form that he cannot read or understand? To me, this line of separation makes no sense. Any sense of safety for me is unmade by the unsafety that others are living in. The separation is not possible. The line is not real. Still, if this line is one that you believe in and choose to champion, I am not about to email you. I will not email you to tell you that you are wrong. I will not point you toward a film that I will assume you haven’t watched already and/or don’t understand. But, for any would-be invaders reading, I say this;
IF you were—in your seeing of me and of us—to really become aware of all that you do not/cannot or refuse to see and make sense of, you would see something beautiful and precious and deserving of care; The beginnings of a whole other world. Since we cannot wait for this, we build anyway. We are world-builders. We build in places you cannot see, or which you think you see but really don’t. We build in ways that one day you may come to understand. We build on land you think that you own. We build from devastation, from landscapes into which you send your missiles and explode and turn to rubble in the mistaken belief that you will be rid of us. We live. We build.
I am deeply grateful for the love that surrounds me and supports my own building processes. To the specific individuals who have shown themselves to be this love—and a part of the hold—thank you all. I take this as an important reminder about love and fury and what they make when we open to their presence and understand their deep kinship. If my writing this is in part a cleansing ritual—or exorcism—it is also driven by the need that my ears have to hear my mouth say; this is what fierce love looks like. This is what is possible when we come together.
The BFF series was an idea born a while back. It was born of love and yet remained in ethereal suspension—an imagined possibility—until the grief and fury I felt in relation to the bombing of Palestine fired it up, gave it a body, and brought it to earth. It was fury that made love real. I knew that it would be a space for writing-with and writing together but only now am I seeing that I did not (yet) know how much we—and I—might need that togetherness at this time. In the words of Prentis Hemphill,
“The reason why some things feel too big to be felt alone is that they are. A lot of our distress is bigger than one body, or one generation. We need the alchemy of witness, ceremony, ancestors to feel.”
The alchemy of witness. Yes. I’m including a link to Tenor Saw singing a road with lots of sign. This was a teenage jam for me while I was still coming to understand life as an unruly path for the t/making. If you can’t make sense of this, don’t @ me
The next Black Feminist Friends session takes place on Thursday 29th February 2024 at 7pm with special BFF Dr Gail Lewis. Gail’s chosen text is Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro and she has nominated two causes, Medical Aid for Palestine and Connecting Gaza (esims) to receive all proceeds from the event. Link to register here.
I was NOT expecting this to go where it went! The second incursion is lucky you only blocked them - they could have been reported to the authorities. The constant violations on black women’s psyche and bodies - So disarming. So violent. So deeply unacceptable. So glad you were held and witnessed and not alone in the f*ckery. A gift to be held in community. Glad BFF will be returning so we can write back. Thank you for sharing with us 🖤