A Place for Theory: Finding Ceremony at the Black Feminisms Forum
Participants in an open and self-organized session for Caribbean feminists at the 2024 Black Feminisms Forum in Barbados
by Sarah-Anne Gresham
On the opening night of the 2024 “Global Black Feminisms Forum: Building Black Feminist Worlds,” the first of its kind in Barbados, Amina Doherty offered a politics of gathering punctuated by rituals of speaking and movement. “[G]athering in this way,” Doherty intoned, “represents what one of our foremost Caribbean artists, Sylvia Wynter calls ‘a revolutionary assault.’” She shared an abridged version of Wynter’s reflections, published in We Must Learn to Sit Down Together to Talk About a Little Culture, and written here in full:
“…in traumatic times like ours, when reality itself is so distorted as to have become impossible and abnormal, it is the function of all culture, partaking of this abnormality, to be aware of its own sickness. To be aware of the unreality of the inauthenticity of the so called real is to reinterpret this reality. To reinterpret this reality is to commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it.” (90)
As the co-founder of The Black Feminist Fund, Doherty’s choice to set the tone of the forum’s three-day gathering with the prescience of Sylvia Wynter was a symbolic and sobering reminder of the ongoing perils within and beyond the Caribbean region. From Haiti to Sudan, and from the DRC to Palestine, Black feminist gatherings, now more than ever, are orienting themselves around building worlds that attend varied harms that touch each of us across borders and across difference.
““I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.””
Doherty’s turn to Wynter in our contemporary moment is reflective of bell hooks’ turn to theory. In Teaching to Transgress, she writes that she came to theory because she was hurting: “I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” Doherty’s turn to Wynter, a Caribbean theorist known for her anti- and de-colonial scholarship, was to ask 450 participating Black feminists, in their resplendent polyvocality, to gather around this pain. It was a turn that pulsated throughout forum, where elders as old as eighty-nine and youth as young as two, continued to raise up a cry, a “revolutionary assault,” against the harms that Black feminists have long organized against.
The irony of launching this revolutionary assault at the Wyndham Grand Barbados Sam Lord’s Castle, a recently opened luxury resort, was not lost among participants. The hotel is named after Samuel Hall Lord, a “notorious buccaneer” by many accounts, who was born to slave-owning parents in the late 18th century. Sam Lord’s Castle, a sprawling 72-acre Georgian mansion, included a basement where he allegedly imprisoned his English wife, Lucy Wightwick. He is also reported to have fathered children with a Black woman several online sources ahistorically describe as a “maid,” and a “black concubine” who “worked” at the estate. The mansion was later converted into a hotel which, as The Barbados Advocate claims, has hosted the late Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Phillip.
The grand new Wyndham hotel abuts a smaller Sam Lord’s castle today. The hotel’s website notes that “Sam Lord’s Castle has everything you could want in a vacation—” and that you can escape there for “an unforgettable romantic retreat” overlooking idyllic ocean vistas and “historic grounds with stories of a bygone era.” But what does it mean to have an unforgettable romantic retreat at the scene of an unnamed Black woman’s subjection? How can we attune ourselves to listen, not only to our own forceful cries against imperial violence, but to the stories of the women in Sam Lord’s life – both of whom were subjected to vastly different scales and kinds of colonial violence? Our stay at the Wyndham created apertures to turn toward this violence: to gather around this pain, to turn toward the unnamed Venus who bore Sam Lord’s children, and to reflect upon the politics of space.
That the participants of the forum held these tensions by openly reflecting upon the Wyndham’s spatial politics, with a demanding relationship to history, is an indicator that their Black feminist politics is not “sometimeish—” as Caribbean folks are wont to say. It readily confronts and gathers the pain from a past that bleeds into our contemporary moment. It is a political orientation that invites us and those who come after us to shore up dissent against a romanticized history in which Black women did not “work” as employees, they were enslaved. For what does it mean for the Wyndham to invoke itself as a luxurious place to escape to when our ancestral relations, for many centuries, were spatially and existentially oriented around an escaping from?
Participants at this year’s forum did not kowtow to luxury. Rather, the romanticized “historic grounds” of tourism discourse were trodden upon and momentarily terraformed by the “demonic grounds” of Black feminist placemaking and sensorial ways of knowing. This isn’t to suggest that we should not have sojourned at the Wyndham. Rather, every space we inhabit to find ceremony should be greeted with a strong politics of place.
In Dub: Finding Ceremony, Alexis Pauline Gumbs invokes a “poetics of the possible” by stating, “if the ways of thinking, being, and understanding that made colonialism and slavery imaginable were constructed over time, and heretical to the ways of thinking, being, and understanding that came before them, it must be possible to understand life, being, and place differently by now.” Like Doherty, Gumbs converses with Wynter, and issues a call to betray our founding mythologies as a pathway to turning against our social reality, so that we can understand and orient ourselves differently. It means reinterpreting sanitized and rebranded histories as well as confronting Western ontologies that continue to imperil us – that Black women are not human, that trans women are not real women, that “Global South” people’s lives are expendable and unfit for life; that we are all unfit for freedom.
Tonya Haynes, a scholar of Sylvia Wynter in her own right, cautioned participants against conflating emancipation with liberation. Rather, liberation must be perpetually confronted and pursued. Today’s Wyndham is not a monument to abolition’s success – a place that even Black women can escape to today - but a reminder of the necessity of a constant revolutionary assault against the enclosures of neocolonial and imperial violence in our contemporary political moment. The Wyndham, like the categories designating humanness from which Blackness was banished, cannot contain our fullness as Black people.
This powerful sentiment, expressed by Haynes at the forum, exists in dialogic relation with Tiffany Lethabo King who, writing in The Black Shoals, critiques the assumption that Western categories of gender and sexuality “can be mapped onto the corporeality of Blackness.”
“ They cannot contain our erotic power: the erotic as felt knowledge, the erotic as vitality, the erotic as opacité. ”
These categories cannot contain our movement – from the verve of spontaneous vogueing at the forum’s opening dinner, to the sensuous curves of Black feminists’ hips undulating with the sweetest wine, to our mobilizing against imperial violence. They cannot contain our erotic power: the erotic as felt knowledge, the erotic as vitality, the erotic as opacité. Not only can Black women’s sensorial and geographic knowledge not be contained, they also cannot easily be mapped onto prescriptive, political grids of intelligibility.
And so, the specific contours of our revolutionary assault against oppressive systems and the “where do we go from here” refrains from participants are not immediately knowable. This is what it means to be grounded in Black feminisms. It does not mean that strategizing or organizing is anathema to its rallying cry. To the contrary, nothing is ever settled or known fully in advance. As Haynes reminds us, things can only ever be perpetually pursued. Black feminist thought, then, is not transparent in a reductive sense. It is an eclectic and complex body of knowledge that often demands struggle – of grappling with difficult conceptual terrains informed by and reflective of grassroots struggles against anti-black violence and misogynoir.
In spite of Black feminisms’ resistance to transparency, a transparency that Édouard Glissant critiques as a demand of Western thought to be reduced,[i] “why are we gathering” and “where do we go from here” can still form the basis of constructive dialogue. Participants were presented with an exciting and thoughtfully curated programme, including journaling, creative writing, swimming, nature walks, art walks, quiet spaces, and mixed ability dance to start the day, to politically invigorating plenaries and break-out sessions on climate justice, fighting fascisms, building Black feminist worlds, and transnational, Black feminist solidarities. We heard from Rafaela, an Afro-Guyanese Orisha who facilitated a discussion on “Lands and Territories” with Thiffany Odara from Bahia, Brazil, and Samah Fidil, an Afro-Palestinian activist.
“We found ceremony in political dissent, spoken word, and soca. We found ceremony in the knowledge that Ësú is alive in all of us.”
Fidil emphasized the importance of listening to and amplifying Palestinian voices and echoed calls from Palestinian liberation organizers to be increasingly critical of Western sources of information about the ongoing genocide. This is inclusive of information from news media, political pundits, academics, and génocidaires colluding with Israel’s settler occupation and ethnic cleansing.
We were invigorated by the incantations of Black Feminist Fund waymakers, Tynesha McHarris and Hakima Abbas. We found ceremony in political dissent, spoken word, and soca. We found ceremony in the knowledge that Ësú is alive in all of us.
We also learned about the extrajudicial killings in Brazil that targeted Black women like Marielle Franco, a queer activist, politician, and human rights defender, from Lígia Batista, the Executive Director of Instituto Marielle Franco. We also learned about the importance of global Black feminist solidarity from Jaimee A. Swift, the Founder, Creator, and Executive Director of Black Women Radicals. Swift’s and Batista’s reflections reinforced the importance of building Black feminist worlds beyond the borders of the United States.
“...theorizing does not originate from academics but from those working at Saturday market and kitchen tables-”
While critiques have been levied against US Black feminisms’ overshadowing of localized feminisms, “Black feminisms” is not an essential category, monolith, or discrete geographic descriptor. The US has also been historically shaped by feminist thought and figures beyond its borders, including the Caribbean. What’s more, a pluralized “Black feminisms” works to decenter the United States by foregrounding those theorizing and organizing in the geographic margins – from Barbados to Ghana, and from Barbuda to Guyana.
A pluralized “Black feminisms” means that theorizing does not originate from academics but from those working at Saturday market and kitchen tables – from revelers in Monday mas and from community organizers fighting carceral violence. Knowledge should always be accessible, but it does not mean that theory should always be easy. There is value in struggle – of struggling to arrive at meaning about our pain, our selves, and our differences. True transformation is borne out of struggle.
Left to Right: Lígia Batista and Jaime Swift at the 2024 Black feminisms forum
The speakers in this session called for solidarity with Brazilian feminist-activists, including those working toward justice for Marielle Franco. This call echoes the following reflection on Swift’s blog: “For example, while speaking at Casas das Pretas on the night she was murdered, Franco ended her speech by citing Caribbean-American lesbian feminist, poet, and activist, Audre Lorde, from her 1981 keynote speech, ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’: ‘I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.’” Despite the power of Lorde’s words, calls for solidarity with folks from far-flung regions of the world are sometimes met with wariness and reservations.
Many therapists with increasingly visible platforms on social media have been rightfully critiqued by other wellness experts, grounded in a decolonizing political sensibility, for encouraging people to turn away from today’s crises to preserve their mental health. Many such therapists remain silent on the effects of CTSD (Continuous Traumatic Stress Disorder), with roots in imperial and colonial violence, while narrowing their psychological foci to depoliticized interpersonal relationships. Not only does this work to uphold white comfort and supremacy at the expense of the subaltern, but it also encourages folks within feminist movements to maintain equally narrow solidarity efforts amid today’s polycrisis.
However, it is important to identify the different affective power positions of those who express “solidarity fatigue,” as they require distinct and careful responses. In a world of asymmetric power relations in which care and solidarity are unevenly distributed, these reservations, especially when expressed by folks from the Global South, are moves toward self-preservation. It has so often been the case that, in addition to the continuous assault that Black people are subjected to globally, solidarity is linear and unrequited.
As feminist organizers, activists, and scholars, we often respond to this wariness by underlining our shared struggles – that the imperial powers that harm Black and other racialized communities “over there” are also interfering in our lives over here. We can identify with trouble in other places because we are similarly troubled. Not only are we asked to put ourselves in another’s shoes, but we are also tasked with identifying commonalities as a prerequisite for solidarity. It is a call to see our struggles reflected in another context. It is a sentiment that conjures the powerful slogan, “none of us are free until all of us are free.” It is a call for empathy.
However, even as we continue to grapple with the contours of transnational solidarity, I would caution against a simple recourse to empathy. I have been helped by the insights of Saidiya Hartman in this regard, who reminds us that empathy is only one mode of relation and one that we should hold in careful suspension to identify what it offers and forecloses. There is a risk in rooting solidarity in an empathy that demands we place ourselves in the position of another, as it flattens the differences we should be turning toward.
In Scenes of Subjection, Hartman highlights the limitations of empathy as an organizing, affective framework against oppression. She begins by defining it as “a projection of oneself into another” to understand their plight, with the caveat that in making their suffering our own, we often end up feeling for ourselves rather than for those we are trying to help. While Hartman was writing about the empathy of white abolitionist spectators who inhabited dramatically different power positions compared to enslaved Black people, her insights into the displacement of the other with the self, as a mode of solidarity, nevertheless underpins what she describes as the precariousness of empathy.
In this respect, we must ask ourselves, what does it mean to commit to a radical politics of care for marginalized and oppressed people, in whatever context and condition they emerge? It means that our feminist politics cannot be sustained by turning inward and away from differences. It means that, rather than trying to understand another through a projection of the self, and our own contexts, we must meet them on their own existential and political terms. It means that building Black feminist worlds must be informed by efforts to dismantle the levers of power that occlude and make illegible the suffering of others; it means dissolving the structural conditions responsible for enervating, one-sided solidarities.
“The discussion between Swift and Batista exemplifies the forum’s success in facilitating the kinds of dialogue meant to inform our feminist praxis – of the necessity of theory, practice, and self-reflexivity in building Black feminist worlds.”
Audre Lorde reminds us in “The Master’s Tools” that instead of ignoring our differences or pretending they do not exist, we must view them as forces for change. In “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” she says that “it is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.” Therefore, the ultimate goal should not be to find commonalities that get taken up into essentializing terms of a homogenous, universal womanhood or struggle, but to recognize that we are besieged by multiple oppressions shaped by distinct sociopolitical and economic factors. It is on this basis that intersubjective solidarity among racialized women and gender-expansive people should be formed.
These reflections are not a discursive segue from the Black Feminisms Forum. Rather, they are insights that result from the conversations it facilitated that prompt us to organize and think about solidarity differently. The discussion between Swift and Batista exemplifies the forum’s success in facilitating the kinds of dialogue meant to inform our feminist praxis – of the necessity of theory, practice, and self-reflexivity in building Black feminist worlds.
In The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why it Matters, Priya Parker writes that gathering, especially amid increasing authoritarianism and anti-gender fascism, is a political act. She believes that we all have the potential to gather well and that the “way a group is gathered” often determines its success. This book can provide a helpful guiding framework for questions often shared at forums that include “why are we gathering” and “where do we go from here.”
One insight is specificity. She advocates for carefully considered gatherings that examine the “deeper assumptions about why we gather” to avoid “replicating old, staid formats of gathering.” Not only did participants examine these deeper assumptions in a dynamic, self-organized space for Caribbean feminists, but they also demonstrated that there isn’t a singular response to the whys and the hows of gathering. As a single person, I cannot provide the reasons to encapsulate the totality of why we gathered. The organizers of the Black Feminisms Forum have and could certainly reiterate their whys and hows in building Black Feminist worlds, but the many powerful impacts of these kinds of fora often exceed carefully curated plans in ways that we cannot fully account for or anticipate in advance.
“In these and myriad unforeseen purposes of gathering, The Black Feminisms Forum cultivated a rich and generative space of open possibility.”
While specificity and legibility have their proper places and practical uses, they risk effacing the multipurpose aims of Black feminist gatherings that cannot always be foreseen. Sometimes these reasons reveal themselves in the aftermath. In the, “I’m able to organize this way today, or think about this differently” because of the insights or interventions of this gathering.
Perhaps one purpose was to feel seen and heard — brokered by talented translators of Portuguese, Arabic, French, Spanish, sign language, and English. Even more specifically, perhaps a purpose was to feel seen and heard in light of McCarthyite tactics that try to silence dissent and punish racialized people for speaking out against multiple genocides. Perhaps another purpose was to feel held. Even more specifically, perhaps a purpose was for trans and disabled participants to feel held by gathering around so many Black feminists after losing a sense of place during the COVID-19 pandemic. In these and myriad unforeseen purposes of gathering, The Black Feminisms Forum cultivated a rich and generative space of open possibility.
Intersect team members reuniting after a 2-year separation. (Left to right): Sarah-Anne Gresham, Nneka Nicholas, and Annetta Jackson at the 2024 Black Feminisms Forum
At the beginning of the forum, Amina Doherty offered a politics of gathering punctuated by rituals of speaking and movement. While many found ceremony in this gathering, through the curation of spiritual, sensorial, and epistemic bonds, the forum and its aims are not concluded. The work of building Black feminist worlds - of suturing the fissures in movement-building efforts - continues. We build these worlds to be in relation, not isolation - to touch each other across difference, and to hold compassionate space in gathering around our pain. Wherever we meet next, our spatial politics, ethics of care, and feminist solidarity will not be the same.
Endnote
[i] See Glissant’s insights about transparency in Poetics of Relation: “If we examine the process of ‘understanding’ people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is this requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. 1 understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh. But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction.”
Read our “Statement In Solidarity with Palestine”
References for Further Learning:
Key Takeaways from the Self-Organized Space for Caribbean Feminists, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda
Key Takeaways from the Black Feminist Fund session, “Lands and Territories,” Intersect Antigua-Barbuda
Key Takeaways from the Black Feminist Fund plenary, “Building Black Feminist Power,” Intersect Antigua
“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” by Audre Lorde
Is There (Really) a Black Feminist Movement?, Black Women Radicals
“Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopal
Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity by Chandra Mohanty
