Black Writers Matter

by Whitney French

—

  A law that was supposed to change everything. I looked at the cliché in the opening line and was convinced I would bomb the assignment. It had been a few years since the government enacted the Safe Schools Act, and my grade ten teacher demanded we learn about it. A very important law, she called it. I read through the opening passages and knew exactly what it was supposed to do: weed out the bad kids and suspend them. Sure, that will make schools safe, I thought, chuckling to myself. Safe for who?

  I had another assignment on my mind: English. The teacher insisted we learn how to formulate an argument and deliver it in front of people. It would help us in our future lives, she said. Twirling her fingers through her long black hair, she instructed us to write a rant.

  I sat on my bed with three pages torn out of the yellow notebook where I often wrote my thoughts; safe schools could wait. The blank pages sought the companionship of ink from the pen resting on the comforter. What would people think if I did this? But I knew it didn’t matter. I was tired. Of the jokes, the insults, the stupid stereotypes that made no sense. I was angry and I wanted to prod them into anger too. I grabbed the pen and scratched the topic at the top of the page. The tip forced its way through the paper and onto the book I was using as a writing surface when I underlined the title: RACISM.

  “There is no such thing as reverse racism,” my hand scribbled in a fury of barely legible words. I wanted to attack the ridiculous response I often heard when I complained to teachers and friends about unfair treatment. I looked down at the two-page paragraph and scoffed, this will really get them going.

  I stood at the front of the classroom, staring at students in the second row. I shifted between the page and my classmates as I spoke each line. My voice grew louder when I got to the part on reverse racism. A blonde-haired girl in the front row bit into her fingernails and peered at the floor. Perhaps she thought my presentation was payback for not skipping over the word nigger when it was her turn to read To Kill a Mockingbird aloud. When I finished my speech, students looked at each other, not knowing whether it was okay to clap. I walked to my seat, my chin parallel to the floor, and leaned back into the chair. I didn’t look towards the teacher’s desk; her opinion didn’t matter. She told us to write a rant, so I ranted.

  We got our results. I got an A and a simple comment:

  Great passion.

  Apparently, I was good at being angry.

  —

  “Angela,” the teacher called across the silent classroom, “the principal wants to see you.”

  Snickers rose from chairs behind me. I knew exactly what she wanted to discuss. I tossed my textbook, notebook, and calculator in my backpack and headed to the office.

  It was only two months until graduation, but she wasn’t going to make this easy. When I walked into her office, Ben was already sitting there. His dirty blonde hair peeked under the red baseball cap he always wore; as though toques weren’t readily available in Canada during the winter months. He looked at me as I sat down, smirking.

  The principal swivelled in her chair and leaned in towards us. “Ben tells me you had an argument and said some nasty things to him on the bus this morning,” she said.

  “Yes, I told him to shut the fuck up.”

  Her eyes widened as though she had seen a ghost. “Why?”

  “Because I’m so tired.” I let out a huge sigh, and my shoulders dropped into the back of the chair. “I don’t care about him.” I folded my arms and sank my hands under my armpits. “He hangs out with those white supremacists and I know what they say about Black people, they’ve been bothering us all—”

  “But I know what it’s like to be discriminated against,” Ben interjected. “I’m Italian and kids used to make fun of me because I had curly hair.”

  The principal stuck her hand in front of his face and he recoiled into his chair. “That is not quite the same thing. It is important to understand that slurs used to insult Black people are not the same as being made fun of because you have curly hair,” she said.

  I looked at her and blinked four times before I realized she was serious. It was the first time she had shown any concern for Black students. When a white student who was part of the crew of white supremacists on campus showed up to a dance with SKIN HEAD emblazoned on his shirt, she was unfazed by his drunken threats to go after Black students.

  My thoughts filled the void of silence as I remembered every slight from the past year. The many times a white supremacist bumped me while I was reaching into my locker, each time white supremacists used the word “nic-nack,” like we didn’t know it was a stand-in for nigger. The wad of spit that flew out of a white supremacist’s mouth and landed on my friend’s cheek. I closed my eyes to prevent tears from forming. When I opened my eyes, all the frustrations converged on the tip of my tongue and I blurted out, “You don’t know how hard it is to be a minority. We get so little supp—”

  “What do you mean? Black people are not minorities,” the principal said. “There are plenty of Black people at this school. The real problem is that you self-segregate yourselves.”

  My shoulders fell forward, and I clasped my hands between my thighs. There was so much to say, but it was pointless. I knew the name of every Black student in that high school. I made a list in the fall when I was trying to solicit support for Black History Month. Out of one thousand students, twenty were Black; twenty too many, apparently.

  I saw her lips move, but didn’t hear anything. It was time for me to go. The matter was settled; she wasn’t going to discipline me for cursing on a school bus.

  I threw my backpack onto my shoulders and walked out of the office. I turned to walk to the classroom, but went outside instead. The breeze brushed against my face and I felt the weight of the textbook on my shoulders. I sat on the ledge; my back couldn’t stay straight and I slouched forward, elbows on my knees. Looking at the ground, I thought about Madame Leclerc. I wondered if she still returned to school to visit even though all her former students were gone. Did she walk through the hallways, remembering the stories that were imprinted into the crinkles in her skin? Did her children ever learn her native language? I looked out at the parking lot, hoping I would see her striding towards the building. I wanted her to sit on the stone ledge next to me. To lean forward with her eyes directly in front of mine and tell me, tell me she understood.

  Shame and the Kinship of Sexual Violence

  — Rachel Zellers —

  All community accountability work is science fiction, because it calls us to create that which has never been created. At least, not yet.

  —Inspired by Octavia’s Brood

  My mother was raped for the first time when she was a teenager. My mother, a small-town girl from central Pennsylvania, was sodomized by a local college boy one night during a campus party. When she told me this story, she recalled that her body had been pressed into saliva-moistened leather seats of a red convertible my grandparents could never have afforded. There was another rape and more sexual violence during her heavy drug-using years before she got clean, but it was this experience of being a young woman—drunk, aroused, deeply curious, and losing her body for the first time—that she wanted me to know about first. I was fifteen or sixteen when she first shared this history with me.

  I don’t know exactly what I did with that story of my mother’s rape through my college years. I fucked. Made love. Had unprotected sex. Watched friends turn up hiv positive. I was sexually assaulted in college, and when I graduated it is fair to say that my relationship with my body was still an ambiguous one regarding the full safety of it. My mother’s story, as I understand now, was only intended, in part, as warning. The information she intended to impart pertains to shame and the familial kinship of sexual violence.

  It has taken the last twenty-five years to experience the full weight of my mother’s story of rape. I spent my teenage years in Narcotics Anonymous (na) meetin
gs in West Baltimore with my mom, where she spoke openly in front of me and a room full of strangers about her past and her feelings of shame as part of her recovery. She was full of shame for what she had done to friends and family members during her active addiction years. Before she went into rehab for the first time, a month or two before she nearly overdosed, she left my three-year-old brother with a man she had known for only a few weeks while she was working the night shift. He sexually assaulted my baby brother and altered the course of his life forever. My mother went into rehab soon after she chased this man out of our apartment with a baseball bat. I had just departed for my father’s house for the summer. I don’t exactly know what the outcome of that attack was; it occurs to me only now that perhaps her first trip to rehab was a way of avoiding charges or jail time for assault. And maybe this explains why she relapsed so easily the first time, too. I do know that she lost her nursing license, and so, lost her only means to provide a decent life for me and my baby brother. My brother and I lived with our fathers, two different men, for the next few years.

  Our absences only increased my mother’s shame. When my father found out that my mother was in rehab, my annual month-long summer trip turned into two years in his house. Certainly, my mother knew what kind of violence I would witness in my father’s care. Certainly, she suspected what kind of damage would be done, and she suffered knowing that she was powerless over it. As a mother now, I cannot imagine what it took her to trust that I would somehow be all right while we were separated for those two years. I used to think that I would have died. But now I understand the greater terror in leaving behind children without me alive to fight for them. I would indeed survive, and she must have believed that too. My mother relapsed only once.

  My mother was ashamed, too, that she had had so much sex in ways that she had not enjoyed and that, in the process, she had caused great harm to her body. She was ashamed of the way my grandfather had put his hands on her when he first recognized desire in her. I can remember how my mother cried when she first shared with me the beating my grandfather had given her in tenth grade for coming home on a Friday night with a passion mark on her neck. She had bounded through the door at curfew, she explained, excited, joyful, and filled with a quiet pleasure she held from making out with a boy who had been tender with her. This boy had made her body feel good and safe, and he had respected her boundaries while they stood together, hands and mouths wandering, making out behind her high school building. She had no idea he had given her a hickey, but my grandfather saw it immediately when she came in the door, giddy, with her best friend trailing behind. Before she could form a full sentence of explanation—her pleasure, please, no sex in it—my grandfather snapped his leather belt loose from his waist and came down upon her body. As she told me this story, she recalled all the places he beat her that night: the hunched length of her long spine, her forearms, flailing hands and fingertips, calves, and the fronts of her legs, as she stood spinning wildly and partially disrobed, in the centre of my grandparent’s living room. “I always remember that beating against the pleasure I felt coming in the door,” she said as she finished telling me the story. My mother also had her period that night.

  Afterwards, she explained, shame and pleasure and the safety of her body got all jumbled up in her mind. She was ashamed of the things that were good for her, ashamed that she had wounded her father somehow, ashamed because his eyes averted away from hers for years after that beating. “I felt a shame that I had never known possible before that night; I still feel it,” she shared with me. My mother also told me this story when I was fifteen or sixteen, and when she was done, she promised to never shame me for my sexual desires or my sexual explorations. She honoured that promise in full through my high school and college years until she died in 1999.

  I think of her feelings of shame a lot because she so desperately did not want me to carry it on my body, as she had grafted it onto hers. She spoke of this often. My mother was beautiful, kind, graceful and yet, as her daughter, I could always feel the facade of this disposition. As her daughter, I felt a woman who was waiting for the love of her life to return to her from Vietnam (a sweet, devoted man named Greg); a woman who settled for very little in a man the first time cancer besieged her body; and then finally, a woman who let the dream of romantic love go with the opportunity to live a bit longer. She stayed single through her second bout of cancer, when her body finally buckled under the weight of its metastasized vigour and its reminder of the liver she had destroyed when she was shooting drugs regularly into her veins. The shame that she carried with her to the very end of her life, that she expressed in her fears and simple, abundant gratitudes in the last few days of her life, was two-fold: she was deeply ashamed that she had failed to protect my baby brother—then fifteen and raging beyond her control—and she was ashamed of all the war she had waged upon her body.

  As my mother lay dying in her bed, I shared with her how grateful I was that she had protected me as a child and as a young woman. I was grateful she had fought her way back to me after she came out of rehab, that we had a full decade together before she died from cancer. I was grateful—so very grateful—that she had never left me alone with strange men during our years together or placed any partner, any love, or any lover before me. As a child, I would regularly tiptoe into her room in the middle of the night to sleep next to her, and my space next to her body was never filled. She kept an intentional distance between our home and her lovers, and she never let other men parent or discipline me. Our home was never a resting place for new men, abusive men, and I can recall only one or two times during my high school years when a lover joined us for dinner or a family outing. I was grateful, also, that she never disappeared again or left me to care for my younger brother, eight years my junior. Those choices of distance and solitude that my mother made saved my life.

  And these choices, I believe, are the thing that keeps me so tethered to my own three young children. Her choices have helped me lean into my aloneness as a place of solitude rather than absence and find comfort in this place.

  In her expressions of shame, I know that my mother was testing the boundaries of her own loveableness with me. To see whether or not her own daughter could unconditionally love a mother who had positioned her children within spaces of so much violence. To see whether or not I could love a woman who had been raped more than once in the process of looking for something better than herself. I know she wondered, at times, whether she deserved to be loved at all. I also know now that the feelings that flooded me in the moments before and after my mother died were feelings of the highest kind of love for this woman who had bared herself raw to me, who had extended her heart to me when my teenage rage was most palpable, and who had dared to ask for forgiveness for things that I still cannot write about.

  I mean in no way to cast my mother as a saint. I am both clear and comfortable that she was not. I have reflected about my mother and our relationship a great deal over the last five years while organizing my work against sexual violence. Specifically, I have reflected upon what draws human beings towards the work of accountability in the context of sexual violence, and also what causes people to fall away to the margins as silent supporters, the ambiguous or the outright opposed. In my first year of work, I attempted my first accountability process with a well-known, local community organizer. When his close friend, an academic and labour organizer of colour, heard about the process, he sent a message to me through a mutual friend: “Fuck community accountability.”

  What kind of self-reckoning is demanded for anti-violence work and community accountability? And, most importantly, what kind of relationship with our own bodies do we need in order to accept accountability work involving sexual violence? Community accountability is work that bears no template, no ending point, no certainty, and yet, calls us into its centre to face violence again and again. What happens to a body that cannot bear this violence or retreats to a distant place as a r
esult of this work? Can we train ourselves to swim towards or away from the epicentre when we need to?

  I share this story of my mother and the histories of violence running between us for a few reasons. I believe that she would allow me to share it.

  First, I don’t believe that any useful organizing or activism—particularly in the context of Black women and our experiences of violence—can escape our personal introspection, a return to our childhoods, or our own histories of violence. It is something I am still learning to fully articulate, but I am certain of the destructive disjuncture between the ‘personal and political’ (or in academia, ‘the personal and theoretical’) I witness all around me. Continually, I witness human beings who have razor-sharp analyses and discourses—professors and academics, student activists, community organizers—but treat their children and lovers and kin with a violence that makes my heart hurt. Long-time community organizer adrienne maree brown has asked this question, “How do we say, ‘let’s make justice the most pleasurable experience a human can involve themselves in?’ ” Regardless of the limitations of “justice,” I hear an urgency to deepen the love and integrity in our most personal relationships so that this sensuality and care seeps into all of the work that we do.

  Secondly, I talk about my mother often because the silence in our families, in our communities, and in Black women’s relationships regarding our histories of violence is still deafening. And this silence is, quite literally, killing us. The silence is making us unwell, stealing away our capacities for expanding into our most glorious, unbound selves as we age. This process of ‘killing’ has a long genealogy bound up in our Black radical traditions. I am only now, in my mid-forties, learning how to speak in any detail about the histories of sexual and partnership violence in my own family and life. There are many levels of violence in my family tree, and I am committed to learning how to reckon with the most difficult instances. More challenging is the process of getting clearer about how these family histories have impacted me and bleed into my present life and relationships with people I love.