2017

 This year has been one of such deep damage …. 

- Cherrie Moraga

 

Like Cherrie Moraga, “I was raised to rely on my sister, to believe sisters could be counted on to go the long hard way with you.’” I was raised to know this by my grandmother, my aunts, my mother, and my sisters bound by blood: my sister, 11 years elder, whose constant, warm touch was respite to a young girl, her support unwavering, genuine, and unadorned, the sweetest and simplest words of encouragement and affirmation; my sister, who grew with me, (bitterly) shared with me, bawled with me, tied to me in a subtle closeness bound up in the unspoken, with bridges we still have to walk together; and my baby sister, who, five-years-old called me home when I was 18, coming out gay, both lost and confused, defiant and exploring, her sweet hands on either side of my face, asking me “Shelly, when are you coming home? Are you sleeping on the road?”

 

I was also raised to know this by sisters found and chosen: childhood and adolescent mischievousness, carefree together, burdened together; taking each other’s burdens as our own, taking each other’s aunties, fathers, families as our own, giving each other love as our own, wrapped up together in the one sheet, one bed, one another, the friendships of girls finding themselves through each other, those girlhood friendships that can turn years apart into long night conversations. Girlhood friendships defiant of the ways we were supposed to see each other, too damaged, too different, or too much to be good; when we decided we needed something in each other more than we needed to make sense together. Girlhood friendships that brought us into womanhood, ride or die. When needs, desires, fantasies, wants, all the pleasures we weren’t supposed to indulge in were only responded to with questions of who, when, where, how do we live the lives we want to… not why. Which gyal yuh a look? Mi look ar wid yuh, Who yuh need fi fight? Mi fight dem wid yuh. Which bank yuh wha bruk? We a bruk it togedda. Always saying, my fren brighta dan ur fren. My fren prettier dan ur fren. My fren is everything. When we know what it means to celebrate each other everyday, when we know how to offer forgiveness, to shed shame, have no fear of judgement, when we find souls, mates, persons in boundaries, borders, unexpected, sometimes unallowed. Who are we to love each other so? We were told this love belonged to lovers, the terrain where true commitment belongs, the boundaries of who we can be wrought out of not only who we can love, but how we can love. I have loved my sisters how I have loved my lover and have known how to do justice to my love in this world because of how we girls have loved each other. Because of this girlhood love, I find the women in my life in each other.

​

But I also have found that I have sisters in other capacities. I have found sisters in groups of women where we may not have liked each other. WE had found ourselves together because of 1 the social violences that forced us to know ourselves in each other. WE had found each other because we each had a story and an experience that was debilitating. WE were black women brought together sometimes by black girlhood love, but also brought together by the violences that black womanhood has had to bear. WE knew, no matter our affection for each woman among us, that we had to be the ones to hold each other up, because we could not depend on the systems and institutions to be accountable to the violence we faced or to make accommodations to the ways we found to survive the violence we had experienced. In this expanded sisterhood, WE knew at least there was a ground to lay on and bawl, a woman to hold space when there were no words to make sense of hurt, someone who was aware of the impact and significance of the pain we felt. WE found ourselves building a movement. WE did not set out to be feminists. What WE felt was deeply personal and what was built came from realizing that each of us were not the only ones who had experienced these things, that our responses needed to accommodate all the different ways WE as women had experience violation, and do that work until our violation was no longer so. 

​

WE learnt what so many black women had learned before -- this is how WE find ourselves and each other. This is how WE become black feminists from the rawness of the violation and the realization that the singularity we felt was not ours alone to bear; the shame thrust upon us did not come from within; that we were not culpable for the violence brought upon us; that there were tools through which we could name these violences, mark the ways in which these violences marked each of us, and then agitate. Excerpts from my diary look like the “Combahee River Collective Statement” before I had ever read it: “if we come at it from the fringes as black lesbian women in Jamaica we will find the anomaly, and in creating a response to that anomaly, we will create a response that will include everyone.” 

​

WE found ourselves as feminists together, trying to find responses that could accommodate our needs, together, but different. In words similar to Audre Lorde, WE were black women together, but different, WE were black queer women together, but different, aware of these differences, but finding a way together. So WE had hoped, but there was denial in the fractures of our difference. 

This is why I spent so much time trying to make my first sentence just right, concerned that my sistahs, fellow feminists, womanists, and activists would feel betrayed by my pen. I thought I needed to be critical, but not too critical, just critical enough for these women I know and have known to want to take a likkle half hour away from the fantastic programmes they are developing for us survivors, to just do some reflection. For a while I thought the way I was feeling had no basis, that I am just angry and bitter. Or maybe not. There are a myriad of ways in which my being, my presence, my body has been rendered into a poster child for these intersecting identities... of blackness, queerness, womanness; my body, one that has been historically primed for violation and marked as deserving of the same. I am angry my black womanness makes me unequal and my queerness sub-human. 

​

What can I say to make sense of this anger, this hurt not brought about only at the hands of men? I wanted to situate my violation in a system of power, patriarchy, colonization and I wanted to think about it in a framework that marks the ways in which justice is accessible based on proximity to white cis hetero-normativity, to men with power and position and to the women, mostly white, lucky enough to be in their gaze, to gain access to power through their white femininity. I wanted all of what I felt to be about men and their dominance. And it is about men, and it is about patriarchy, and it is about “interlocking systems of dominance,” but I have had to reconcile that it is also about women. It is also my sistahs, fellow feminists, womanists, black queer women activists who have made me feel the pains of violation that my black queer womanness has had to bear under these structures of patriarchy and colonization. 

​

I understand that it is very easy to not think about our complicity, because we are so used to being the ones who have been and are victimized by these structures of power, but we should think about how the fact that these are structures, habituations, naturalizations of power means that we too can violate, we too often reinforce narrow ideas of what violation does and doesn’t look like, we too may silence our sistahs — that some of us are rendered invisible in the very interventions that we conceptualize and implement while saying it is for us, and therefore it is for them, because they are us. 

​

I have been wanting to write but felt as though I did not have the vocabulary to do justice to the issues I wanted to raise, to make the call to action clear. And then I decided that while I don’t have the answers, the questions must still be asked so that we can begin to formulate a response that has ethics and accountability at its center, a response that prioritizes the survivor and appreciates the many ways he/she might show up; honestly, I am looking for a response that makes space for me. 

​

These questions emerge from the lived experiences of a queer woman in Jamaica, who had once been a black girl in Manchester, surviving then and surviving now sexual violence, navigating the terrain of advocacy needed and movement building demanded. She had no childhood to speak of. Instead, she had girlhood. A girlhood given to her by manhood, flavored with a grooming that disheveled her, a value configured only through his eyes’ desire, a soft touch that felt bad, a violation taken as the feel-good, left with no other reference point for intimacy or love than this sour fruit. How is she to know what goodness could be having only tasted this? Those years, that girlhood was … left in the ellipses… left unspeakable. 

​

Notwithstanding, she had gone to school -succeeded by any measure…lived uptown Kingston, changing students’ lives one coming out story at a time, living out loud and working for an organization with human rights at its core. She played hard, laughed loudly, lived boldly, loved fiercely, a life characterized by militancy. She had all the people and tools necessary to continue surviving. But telling her story became priority and with that came the puncturing of old wounds, ones she didn’t even realize she had. It came with contempt from the public, scorn from the church, guilt in her family, but it seemed to come with immense support from a community of women, sistahs, feminists, womanists, activists, partner, and friends. But they couldn’t see the way the violation had impacted her, had rewritten her before she had written herself. Some had known her for up to 10 years and had reckoned that her suspicion of everybody who was too nice, too friendly and always making offerings was just jealousy. And while there had been reason for her to be jealous, for her to perceive everything as a threat, for her to see her worth as being tied up in partnerships, nowhere in that was a consciousness that these were iterations in part of the ways she had been violated. 

 

Her violation was illegible. Her questioning of the authenticity of everybody and their investment in her was paranoia; her lashing out and feelings that “support” spaces were not safe were an indication that she had a mental health problem; her relationship with sex was problematic; her addictions were nasty; her talk of wanting to die was attention seeking; her resistance to sharing in a support group being led by a woman she did not trust was insecurity; her refusal to work with women who had betrayed her was unprofessional; her expectation that women in her life would give a fuck about the ways their conduct destabilized her was audacious; her anger about how women in her life engaged each other particularly on social media was misplaced; her refusal to be in ritual with a community who violated her and [refused] to honour her and her experiences was toxicity; and the price of her discontent and questioning of the authenticity of the movement was malice. She was the start of a movement but found little safety in it. The start of her journey was marred by endings. The start of justice was the ending of love-ships, friendships, sisterhood… how do we name these fractures through our intersectional analysis? 

So here she stands. She was already supposed to take on a justice system underwhelmingly committed to ameliorating the depths of this violation, a justice system she knew would truly be equally violent to her; a justice system that would use the fact that she had thrived despite the odds as proof that there was no violation; a justice system that understands the authentic survivor only as obviously broken, obviously scarred and unable to prosper; any tool for healing, for growth despite the violation was to be used as evidence that she had not been violated. A justice system that only knows how to prosecute. Under the weight of this framework, how could she be seen as violated in all the ways she felt? How could she be anything other than illegible. 

​

Illegible. She is a queer woman living in Jamaica, an out queer woman, a queer woman who waited 14 years to tell her story, a queer woman taking on the church, but a queer woman who despite the odds had “made it”. And before this jury, this courtroom, her body would be further shrouded by a queer illegibility; because how can bodies that violate the laws of nature be violated? How can bodies that demand violence to correct them be damaged? They warned her, the lawyers told her: once they know you, about your “sexual orientation,” you have already lost them, you have already lost their sympathy. Queer cannot be violated, because any violence to queer bodies is deserved. 

​

These illegible violations, on top of illegible violations, at the intersections of black, woman, queer, and Jamaican. The violations of law, state, patriarchy, apathy, church, normativity… (to some extent) we know these. We have analyzed these. We have questioned these. As a community of women, as a movement we recognize the limitations of the law, we problematize the epistemology of justice in Jamaica, we know the statistics. Even when we utilize the limitations of the law we do so knowing that our justice will not be found in the courts. So we plan and we strategize and we find other ways for our sistahs to heal. We have not asked every question, or found every answer that can account for these violations, but these violations we have strategies for, awareness of, have established accountability within ourselves to which we must respond, no matter how much they are shrouded by illegibility before the court, the church, or the social narrative. 

 

But somehow too, she is illegible to her community of black queer feminists, womanists, and activists? She can be cut off by the women in whom she had confided? When her decade long relationship ended she can be mocked by colleagues and “friends”? Social media can become a platform for “shading” and grand declarations of new love-ships or friendships, some kind of situation-ships? She can be taunted by what the entire community would have deemed her fall from grace? 

​

And yet, she knew she had neither the age, the experience, the social capital or the power to caution them. They were the same women who had encouraged her to talk about her violation, the same ones who wept with her, the same ones who held her, the ones who touched her face. Their reproduction of her victimization and traumatization was painful. The separation from them deeply hurt her: it has been “a year of such deep damage.” But black women found her and there were those who never left. She found black women in the ways black women always find each other over and over, even when wandering from the lost love of her sisters. There were conversations, new love, new connections, mentorship, poetry, a new vulnerability. And from all of this she has culled these important questions: 

​

1. How do we, as black queer feminists build accountability at the level of our community and our intimate and political communion with each other? 

2. What does it mean to act, live, and relate as a feminist in relation to other women? More specifically, what is a black queer feminist praxis of relating to other women, particularly black queer women, when the political, social, and personal stakes of our work and relationships are so high? 

3. Are we fully examining our positionality in relation to the issues we are organized around? Are we constantly interrogating if and how we are reproducing some of the same violation and bullshit with the very women with whom we interact daily? 

4. What is the feminist revolution about if it doesn't interrogate the way we treat women in our immediate circles? 

5. How do we make deliberate decisions about how we construct our feminist organizations, and prioritize our feminist commitments to each other as black queer women, as survivors of sexual violence, particularly when we may not relate to each other as confidants, friends, or loved ones? How do we act in ways that don’t violate those commitments even in the face of personal differences? What insights, commitments and guidelines are we developing to be able to respond when our space of community becomes toxic; when our black queer sisters feel isolated, ostracized, and violated? 

6. What are our black feminist strategies for managing our ego, individuality, and the messiness of simply being human when dealing with sexual violence survivors? 7. What tools of communication and ethical standards do we have to respond when leaders within our communities make survivors of sexual violence feel violated? 

8. What are the ways we are de-legitimizing and silencing women’s voices because they do not reflect who we understand to be the “authentic” survivor? 

9. And at the most fundamental level, how does power and powerlessness play out in our community in ways that reflect the very structures of power against which we agitate— particularly when leaders within our communities make survivors of sexual violence feel violated? 

​

If we as feminists and activists are not vigilantly committed to reflecting on and interrogating our own bullshit, women will suffer, survivors will be re-victimized and re-traumatized, and we will not do justice to our work. I am writing this because women are suffering, survivors are being re-victimized and re-traumatized, and I want more from our work. Our analysis of the interlocking structures of oppression will always need to be rigorous. We will continue to plan, strategize, and agitate against the state, the church, the media, and the social stigma that naturalizes these violations against us. But while doing that we need to reflect on how we use our own power with, against, and on each other; we need to account for how we compete for positions, but also for people, through our actions reducing other women into possessions; we need to interrogate how we take sides in the interest of our egos over the imperatives of the feminist future we claim to be working towards; and we must hold ourselves accountable when someone challenges us to consider the ethics of the movement we are building. Distance, malice, and ostracization should not be the price of critique, dissent, or objection that challenges us to interrogate the effect or integrity of our work. 

​

In the modern history of black feminist, Caribbean feminist, third world feminist, and women of color feminist work, our foremothers, sisters, and we ourselves have centered the hard work, challenges, and conflicts that emerge within feminist movement building, around the conflicts wrought by structural positionality and the violences of the decentering of race, class, and sexuality. We, as Jamaican women, are not homogenous by virtue of class, sexuality, or race. Even in our circle of black queer women, we are not homogenous on these terms; but let us not forget the significance of a politics that can contend with the unacknowledged politics of conflict at the most intimate of levels, that can hold itself accountable to the various ways in which our own work can render violations illegible, not only because of failures to attend to structural difference, but because of our clumsiness dealing with our most intimate differences. Let us find ways to hold ourselves rigorously committed to the ethics of our black feminist praxis from our structural analysis, to our strategies of mobilization, to the ways we speak to each other, to our willingness to feel when we have pained each other. In so many ways, we are women who are committed to and even love each other, not as girlhood friends, passionate lovers, or even the tender appreciation of our quirks and unique personalities, but simply because we are black women who know something about living as black women. Our black feminist praxis informs our analysis, but it too forms our relationships to intimacy, integrity, accountability, and ethics. These things we take to be about individual and personal character, are also the terrain of structures of violence and domination, patriarchy, and colonialism that we need to be attentive to in our movement building; precisely because the structures of violence against which we agitate can reproduce themselves in this most intimate of ways. 

 

Like Cherrie Moraga, I want to be in a movement willing to ask the right questions even as we admit to not having all the answers. I want to be in a movement in which we constantly ask if we are asking the right questions. To change, we must not only respond to what exists but make concerted attempts to shift our own understanding of who she, as a survivor of sexual violence, is; to adjust our lens, to see her as part of the collective of women who have experienced violence but also to see her in the glory of her difference and separation too; to give her permission to be in her own humanity, to not delegitimize her -- unique or brazen, flawed or rough, suspicious or open -- in our passion. Because while we are outraged, our thinking and our vision is sometimes limited by the framework that has been handed to us in ways we cannot even 

see. It will not be easy because it requires a painful process of holding ourselves accountable; of having to grapple further with the intimate ways in which this violence has touched us and the black women who we love, the black women we see in each other. How deeply we have been marked, how deeply we have been violated, that we find ourselves sometimes at odds with our most intense and most true love: ourselves as each other. We, once girls, made sisters by choice and violence, will be loving each other as black women, going the long hard way together. Let us do so tenderly. 

​

1WE” is intentionally capitalized in homage to the organization several of us founded in 2015, WE-Change (Women’s Empowerment for Change).