by Emma Joy | Mar 20, 2023 | Uncategorized
Winter is fading and spring has arrived. Yet many of us are struggling with what it means to transition out of the wintering periods of our lives. During these periods, we have witnessed death and experienced loss. People and past situations in our lives have fallen away or continue to lie dormant. During seasons of wintering, we lament the present and the past and struggle with ideas of change. Whether these are small changes or monumental shifts, there is no going back to the way things were. Yet we are still stuck, unable to go back and uncertain of how to move forward.
Not everyone or everything survives or remains after our seasons of wintering. But we are here. As we slowly start to stretch after the stillness and dormant rhythm of winter let us take a breath. It is time to reawaken. As difficult as it has been, wintering positions all of us for new life and new being. As a time of rebirth and renewal, spring is calling us into a new rhythm of hope and aliveness.
Hope has arrived
It is faint and small
Waiting
Growing
Blooming
Inhale
Its perfume permeates us
It opens and expands
Releasing fear
Exhale
Hope is here
Awakening within us the courage
to dream
to feel
to be
New and whole
Once again
by Emma Joy | Mar 28, 2022 | From The Rocking Chair, Uncategorized
Some of what we are witnessing is the fallout from what it means to be expected and to expect oneself to operate at high levels of excellence and achievement, while at the same time contending with the constant public scrutiny of those who play out their lives through the public performance of actors, athletes and artists and the transactional demands of fans and entertainment industries. Public performers are-as much as we would like to ignore-human beings subject to the same heights of achievement, depths of feeling, experiences of trauma, failures and frailty that we all experience. The scrutiny and energy that is projected onto them must take a toll.
When public actors do not live up to our projected expectations some of us respond as if we are bystanders on a school yard playground egging on the fight for our own amusement and entertainment; others of us who are affected by histories of trauma are triggered and wish the same punishment on these public actors as we would like meted out to those who have caused us pain. Finding healthy resolutions to conflict amid the constant barrage and pummeling of public commentary, hero’s praise or death wishes, without adequate boundaries, constraint and sage wisdom to guide the process will be difficult if not unlikely. The arguments that ensue, the judgments unleashed, and sides taken eventually overtake social media actors’ and consumers and sweep us all into a swell of dis-ease and states of depletion of what is needed to remain grounded and in tune with who we are and who we are meant to be.
Acknowledgment and accountability are necessary for true healing and reconciliation. Healing and reconciliation are more likely to take place outside of the public gaze of those intent on keeping score, stoking the embers of conflict or not yet ready to forgive even when those primarily involved have acknowledged the injury, attempted to make amends and have moved on. To light the path to justice and healing, be prayerful and ponder the best way to use your energy in light of all of the energy that is being projected and unleashed in the current moment.
by Emma Joy | Oct 17, 2021 | From The Rocking Chair
My mother has frontal lobe dementia. Recently, I took her in to see her neurologist at her Elder Care Center to discuss changes in her behavior. Her neurologist, Dr. Lerner, introduced us to a young doctor who was assisting him. As he reviewed Mom’s case history with his young colleague, Dr. Lerner began to recount our journey together over the years. He described how he and I first met and what those early encounters with Mom were like. At one point, as he was watching me working to direct and re-direct my mother as she was moving around the examination room, Dr. Lerner smiled and summed up his observations of us by saying, “you see, this is really a love story.”
When family members and friends began to be concerned about her behavior, my mother was living by herself in our hometown in Indiana. All of her children—my two brothers and I—lived out of town. I started driving back and forth to check on her and to try find out what was wrong. We visited doctors and scheduled tests but no one could tell us what was causing these changes. Dr. Lerner was the first one to give us a name for her illness. After the diagnosis, we brought my Mom to live with me in Ohio. Dr. Lerner and the Center provided services for us and helped me to navigate those early years with Mom and the reality of caregiving.
Caring for my mom and providing the best quality of life that I could for her became the central concern of my day to day life. It was a real battle at first. Mom didn’t think that anything was wrong with her. She thought that she could still live on her own and take care of herself. While it was difficult and there were days when I felt like I had come up short as a caregiver, after a time, my mom reconciled with being cared for and generally moved through life with an air of sweetness and joyfulness that was core to who she is as a human being, as a woman, and as a mother.
Dr. Lerner’s recollections and proclamation reminded me of the first time I looked at my mother after a hard week of caregiving that included battles to bathe her and change her clothes and worries about how to deal with dental appointments and shots with her changing moods and short attention spans and, suddenly, I saw a light in her. In that moment, I felt awash in the fullness of her beauty. I identified with her vulnerability and laughed at her joy and her tenacity in the face of a life changing illness and I said to myself, “You are the love of my life!” I then recalled a picture of her as a young mother holding me—her first born child—and I realized that this is what she must have felt about this vulnerable, needing bundle of life she had brought into the world. I fell in love with my mother all over again amid the changing dynamics in our relationship in which I was now responsible for her health and wellbeing.
I now understood the heart ache that is a part of every love story when the one you love hurts. I accepted the disappointment that you can feel in yourself and in each other as par for the course. Even though I knew that Mom’s behaviors were a result of her disease, there were times when I was triggered by old wounds and unresolved issues. Sometimes I felt guilty for not doing enough, not being enough for her and for her life now. There were times when I became angry and impatient. I felt guilty for that too. But there were also those times when my mother looked at me and tears welled up in her eyes and even with the advanced aphasia she let me know that I am a good daughter, that she loves me for caring for her, for centering her in my world. And then the love that we feel toward each other would wash away all of the uncertainty and the pain. My mother still looks at me that way and often takes my hand to dance with me and laugh. For me, this is a celebration of the love we continue to share as a mother and a daughter.
My mother is indeed the love of my life. Through the love, the guilt, even the anger my mother is always teaching me, preparing me for the work that I need to do in the world. She taught me that no matter how hard things get, that I need to show up in the world energized not defeated. In caring for my Mom I learned that the anger and the guilt I felt were fundamentally about fear—fear of loss, fear of failure, fear that I wouldn’t make it through the low points of the journey. My mother taught me how to dance and be joyful daily even when the work of living becomes difficult. My mother is still teaching me how to love through it all and I am healed and redeemed by this opportunity to return the unconditional love my mother first gave to me.
What is Love teaching you today?
by Emma Joy | May 30, 2020 | From The Rocking Chair
My paternal grandfather’s family is from Grenada, Mississippi. My grandfather left the South in his late teens and never talked about his years growing up there. Years after my grandfather died, I reconnected with one of his cousins. When I visited her, she shared family stories with me. Over time, I discovered that my great-great grandmother, Emma, was a healer and a midwife. Emma and her mother, Priscilla, owned land in the segregated South. This land was in our family for at least five generations. They also owned a farm outside the city where they grew vegetables. They sold the produce to members of the community at a roadside stand. Emma was also a seamstress. She would make white dresses for the church mothers who couldn’t afford department store prices for their church uniforms. The family worshipped at Belle Flower Missionary Baptist Church which was one of the headquarters for mass rallies and civil rights meetings during the 1960s. The church was only a block away from their home. Emma and Priscilla cultivated herbal remedies and spiritual technologies to tend to the needs of blacks and poor whites who could not afford to go to a doctor or to the hospital. These remedies and technologies were influenced by indigenous practices used in African American and Mississippi Choctaw traditions. Thus, my grandmothers cultivated extra-institutional ways of caring for, and restoring individuals and the community to health.
My grandmothers didn’t waste anything. They used and repurposed material items to sustain the community and its ecological networks. To support her vocation, Emma’s husband, Pickens, hand carved a rocking chair that fit Emma’s six-foot frame. Emma rocked each baby that she delivered in this rocking chair as a part of their birthing ritual. While she worked in the community as a midwife and healer, Emma also took in and apprenticed young women whose parents had disowned them because they were pregnant and unmarried. She restored these women to their rightful place in community and gave them a purpose and an important role in communal life. In this and other ways, my great grandmothers were not only midwives who facilitated birthing rituals but they were also warrior-healers. Social justice activist and civil rights attorney Fania E. Davis describes warrior-healers as those who facilitate communal justice, restoration, and systemic transformation.[1]
From the Rocking Chair carries on the traditions of midwives, warriors, and healers like my great grandmothers who work in solidarity with those who are marginalized to generate and apply strategies, systems, analyses, prescriptions and practices that enable individuals to give birth to present and future possibilities; engender systemic change; and bring about healing and wholeness to the planet and its inhabitants. The work of community building, justice, and restoration begins with both personal and collective self-reflection and accountability. Knowing our family stories and histories helps to equip us to do this work more effectively.
Invitation: As a part of your own self-reflection, ask some of the elders in your family or community to share stories of your family’s migrations or ancestral memories. Oftentimes a particular family member keeps the family history so you may want to start with them. What do these stories reveal about certain strengths, gifts or tensions in your family? How do these stories call for celebration, healing, reconciliation, or restoration? How do these stories inspire you to act or spark your imagination? Please note that asking some elders about the past and uncovering ancestral memories may trigger issues of trauma or bring up unresolved anger or hostilities. Family members may more readily share memories during mutual experiences or creative tasks like looking at photo albums, cooking, dining, walking, barbecuing, or quilting. In this time of social honoring you may find letter writing, phone calls or “FaceTime” more appropriate. Respect the fact that some elders may not want to talk. Don’t push. Be patient and gentle. Seek support when you need it. Below are some resources you might want to use to support you as you reflect.
[1] Davis, Fania. The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice: Black Lives, Healing, and US Social Transformation. New York: Good Books, 2019. p 71.
Resources
Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017.
https://www.resmaa.com/about and https://www.resmaa.com/resources
by Emma Joy | May 24, 2020 | From The Rocking Chair
How do we address white body supremacy trauma? Resmaa Menakem argues that we can address the pain in “clean” and “dirty” ways.[1] “Clean” pain is pain from trauma that individuals and communities acknowledge and confront historical trauma honestly. Individuals and communities act out “dirty” pain by rejecting a clear-eyed view of the historical traumas and by detaching themselves from responsibility or accountability and the racialized violence and pain they have witnessed, enabled, and produced. When acting out dirty pain, white folks drawing upon white body supremacy try to “soothe” the pain of unmetabolized trauma and the dissonance with more powerful white bodies coursing through their bodies, by blowing it through “Other” bodies—black bodies, brown bodies and perceived “foreign” bodies. Examples of choosing “dirty pain” and unleashing the trauma of these terror-based systems include the erection of Confederate statues to assert white supremacist power, and brandishing assault rifles in coffee shops and state houses as a “right” or an entitlement under the protection of law enforcement. Whites who identify as liberal or even progressive are not immune from acts of white entitlement and racialized violence. Whites of all political spectrums may choose to weaponize law enforcement or self-deputize to intimidate, detain or annihilate by way of extrajudicial killings free, “self-managing”[2] black bodies. This need to annihilate the perceived threat of free black people who will not service or yield to white assertions of power or who will not soothe white guilt or absolve white responsibility for racialized trauma speaks to the nature of white body supremacy, and its relationship to both a perceived white privilege and the identification of racist ideology with “normative” culture. This need to annihilate the “Other” rather than confront one’s own racial history, complicity in racialized violence, and embodied trauma also speaks to the perceived necessity of white supremacists and their allies have to dispatch with empathy and to sacrifice others—by way of projecting blame, annihilating, harassing, terrorizing, incarcerating, deporting, dismissing and rendering invisible—to temporarily soothe the economic and social dissonances of their own lives and avoid confrontation with the poisonous nature of white privilege.
Gaining a better understanding of how white body supremacy can infect the body helped me to see how our family and other black folks in my community have been able to survive and even thrive despite white supremacist efforts at annihilation. My grandmother and the other elders in our family chose to largely engage in “clean” practices that confronted and metabolized much or at least some of the pain of white body supremacy trauma and passed on ethical traditions, tools and techniques for resiliency. They told us stories and passed on words of wisdom that grounded us in our own bodies and the realities of racism. We were taught to demand justice and dignity. We participated in the music, the hymns and congregational singing of the black church, the moans of the blues and the joy of soul music, jazz, funk and R & B. The running of sound through our bodies[3] by way of speech and song grounded us in a humanity that demanded mutual respect and dignity. My family emphasized education and hard work. My grandmother was an example and she gave us the blue print. She became a hair dresser and built a cosmetology business that serviced blacks and whites in her southern town and later in the North. She was a musician and choir director for local churches. My Sunday School education in our family church emphasized close reading of texts. We were taught how to ask questions, listen to others and develop rhetorical strategies for respectful debate. I had opportunities to give speeches and formulate arguments and listen to the reasoning of others. This taught us to debate with compassion and courage. We were given avenues to develop and play with our individuality and were deeply affirmed in our identities as we came in to our own. There were, of course, limits to this affirmation. Our community institutions and elders often reinforced patriarchy and heteronormativity. But we were also taught that we are a part of a collective and mutual respect and dignity are the foundations of a God-given life. We were learning and drawing from traditions that black folks carried with them across the generations. These Sankofa practices are what enabled us as a family and the communal circles to which we belong to metabolize the trauma of white body supremacy, in clean ways in order to find healing and create our own spaces to thrive. But this doesn’t mean that racialized trauma has not and still doesn’t take its toll.
Sankofa is an Adinkra symbol and concept. [4] In the Twi language of the Akan, Sankofa literally means “go back for what you have forgotten.” Sankofa practices are based on a worldview in which all of life is interrelated. The elders—those who have demonstrated an ethical commitment to the earth and the community—pass on tools and wisdom traditions that support mutual respect and dignity for individuals and the community. To be sure there are black people who are among those who have adapted “dirty” ways of dealing with unmetabolized pain and trauma such as internalized racism, colorism, forms of corporal punishment that echo slaver narratives of punishment, and the need to soothe white peoples’ fears by aligning themselves with white power.[5] Alternatively, Sankofa practices are meant to break the power of historical trauma, address the clean flow of pain through the body and facilitate healing. These tools and traditions provide ways to confront trauma and death-dealing historical events and avenues for personal and social transformation.
As a country, we have failed to effectively acknowledge and confront the historical trauma of indigenous genocide, the enslavement of African people, and the demonization of darker skinned immigrants. While a few exceptions exist such as the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama we have largely dealt with these oppressions by building monuments to individual exceptionalism and speaking platitudes of inclusion. In order to effectively address the historical and racialized trauma that impacts their and our lives, white folks need to reject dirty pain responses and choose the “clean” and hard work of metabolizing this trauma by honestly confronting historical racism and acknowledging the role that they, their families and the institutions and people with which they have been aligned have played and continue to play in the oppression and brutalization of others. It also means to work in solidarity with the primary victims of white body supremacy and being able to imagine themselves in the shoes of others. Being in solidarity means acknowledging the evil that is white supremacy and their own role in its perpetuation. It means to understand the ways in which the trauma of white body supremacy has impacted their own lives and the lives of their family and friends. It also means acknowledging and rectifying the white body supremacy trauma they have caused by direct action, passively witnessing or remaining silent. This includes recognizing the ways in which white body supremacy has become the equivalent of identity and culture and the toll that has taken on their own lives and the lives of their own family members and the institutions to which they belong. Additionally, it means to deal honestly with the dissonance between working class white people’s lives and white elites by confronting the power wealthy whites exact over their lives and holding them accountable rather than projecting this dissonance onto the lives and bodies of black people or those deemed vulnerable or expendable. Finally, it means to develop culture in which whites are accountable to repair the damage of the trauma white body supremacy has caused to black and other dark skinned people.
Invitation: I would like to invite you to continue to work through Cultural Somatics Institute’s Free Racialized Trauma 5-day eCourse at the bottom of the web page https://www.resmaa.com/. Try to move through those sessions directly related to groups of which you are not a part. Again, try to get plenty of rest and drink plenty of water as you engage in this course and find support when you need it. Feel free to pause and rest.
[1] Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017. pp 165-167.
[2] Ibid., p 28.
[3] Bernie Johnson Reagon. Bill Moyers Journal. http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11232007/profile3.html. November 23, 2007.
[4] Adinkra symbols are symbols that represent proverbs of the Akan people of the southern part of Ghana in West Africa.
[5] Menakem. p 167.
Resources and Further Reading
Robin Diangelo. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism. Boston: Beacon Press, 2018.
Kelly Brown Douglass. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books.
Resmaa Menakem. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas: Central Recovery Press, 2017.
Jonathan Metzl. Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland. New York: Basic Books, 2019.
