"my body is not a hindrance to my spirit, but a manifestation of it." - Ntozake Shange

a chorus of black feminist insights from/for a bodymind embroidered by inflammation

fibro princess vs. I-285

I had a COVID-scare that turned out to be COVID at the beginning of February. I think it was the beginning of Feburary. Yes, the second day, i remember because i went to the doctor and the beautiful black lady ob/gyn talked too fast but referred me to all the specialist i wanted to see. and then i came home to the worst pain imaginable. tossing and turning and wearing out my mama’s heating pad until what i now know is “decidual cast” made its way out of me and i could breathe myself to sleep. and then i woke up scratchy in the throat, achy in the bones and the test was a strong positive (despite the negative PCR test the week before).

All this too say i spent three weeks in isolation. missed a conference i was very excited about and had my valentines day plans spoiled by…sickness. and i was MAD. and scared. and alone, save for the grace of my mama-turned-nurse who I was terrified of infecting.

The month before this acute sickness, after so many test for every auto-immune disorder under the sun, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. The chronic illness of “your blood won’t tell us what’s wrong, here take some anxiety medicine.” and Fibro BEAT MY ASS as soon as i got over COVID.

The trouble with diagnosis is that brings as much relief as it brings uncertainty, especially this one. Content with my current pysch meds, i opt for prescription “Lifestyle Change.” Diet, Exercise, Rest, Routine. reformer pilates, expensive Ayurvedic analysis (i’m a vata-kapha type which is holistic for too much air/too much earth, or Mercury in Gemini/Scorpio Rising, or manic-depressive), meal plans, now acupuncture, physical therapy, and after reading Ntozaké Shange’s Lillane: The Ressurection of the Daughter, i set out looking for a pyschoanalyst (dear reader: it takes serious time and money to lay on a couch confessing to a child of freud. this impulse was ultimately abandoned.)

BEING DISABLED IS EXPENSIVE. If I were to do all these things consistently i’d be paying Bay Area rent to live in my own body. But under the heart-aching course correcting energy of the Full Moon in Virgo, I gained a path altering insight.

screen grab from audre lorde reading “today is not the day” in Berlin in 1992.This would be her final reading before she “uncoiled in the waters/a vessel of light/moonglade.”

The Lorde once said:

“Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself.” (Eye to Eye: Black Women, Anger and Hatred)

The essay begins with an epigraph from a poem by Dr. Gloria Joseph, Audre Lorde’s partner who, from 1981 till Audre’s transition in 1992, set up a healing-life for their love on her home island of St. Croix.

While the essay is principally about discovering the roots of self-hatred that lead Black women into harsh interpersonal relations, as I read it now, I’m struck by the way The Lorde describes this internalized anger as a life embroidered by fire. Something about the invocation of a stitch traced by flame makes me think of the inflamed nervous system branching across my body. the makings of the “pain disorder” some “doctors” suggest may be all in my head.

“Where does the pain go/when it goes away?” Dr. Josephs asks.

In my body it hides out until the next morning when the Arnica gel/oil/bath wears off. It heavies my eyes and leadens my body. It leaps out of my chest begging for love and affirmation. It floods out my eyes. It makes no sense. Just ache and ache and ache.

When i type out “ache” its soundlooks like “axé” the Yoruba-derived invocation: “So be it.” but it be so much more. Axé be a whole philosophy of being. Be life-force pressed into each being (human, no-human, animate, inanimate) by the kiss of Oludumare. Nothing exists without Axé. Nothing moves without ache.

Where am i going? Back to Shange who blesses my head and gifts this post a title. If “my body is…a manifestion of my spirit.” Its ever-present ache, which is its ever-present Axé, its ever-present power, is something conjured up from a sacred place.

This does not mean i “made myself sick” through some ableist application of the law of attraction. It means, maybe it means, that the ache reflects my spirit’s vulnerability as a witness to a world on fire.

It mean

i am blessed/with a body/equipped/with sensitive antennae.

It mean, the Black Mothers within were telling the Truth when they whispered:

“I feel, therefore, I can be free”

-Audre Lorde,”Poetry is Not a Luxury”

It mean, June ain’t lie in “Where is the Love?” when she said:

I’ve never thought Shange & Lorde & Jordan together like this. This was not premediated. Each quote came to be in this piece in real-time. they each, in their own very real manifestations of sickness, of madness, of “creative maladjustment,” offer me my own prognosis for the future of the sensitive, communicative, powerful witness of a bodymind i call home.

By virtue of being born black, femme, in and of the horrors and fugitive possibilities of Georgia cotton fields, My [bodymind] has been entered into “a struggle that will most certainly transform all the peoples of the earth.”

Caring for my Black disabled bodymind [even when that means canceled plans, missed meetings, virtual classes, and expensive treatments] “is not self-indulgence. It’s self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”

I think we sometimes take for granted that our foremothers were writing out of sickness, out of disability, out of the frustration of denied accommodations. Jordan’s call for love was/is a call for care. a call for interdependence - which according to the pioneering queers of disability justice means, “that all people have needs, that none of us can get through this world solely on our own, and having needs [is] not weak or shameful.”

There is no end. There is no ceasefire to quell the burn of these global atrocities and the ways they blossom out of our bodies. I mean that literally, there is not perscription to heal Nakba, the murderous extraction of resources in the Congo, and the seemingly endless civil war in Sudan, and the violation US-sponsered occupation of Ayiti, and the eco-cide militarization of Cop City.

Our bodyminds are at war.

“It's not just a battle over turf and who has the right to use whoever resources for whose benefit, right? It's not just rhetorical. It's not just political. It's not just any of things. The war is also being fought over the condition of truth itself.”

- Toni Cade Bambara (1983)

This is an attempt to “do language” when i probably should have been sleeping. But this meandering externalizing is a respite.

I read a piece off twitter about how “rest is not resistance and that’s okay.” it’s brilliant, and necessary, and i wrestled with it’s description of choosing rest as a false choice.

yes, I have the privilege of a workplace with loopholes I can exploit to accommodate myself (because LORDE KNOWS they ain’t structurally committed to accommodating shit). But yet and still, through grief, emotional, behavioral, and physical disability ignoring my bodyminds need to rest is a false-choice. If I ignore my bodymind for the sake of a check, I will die.

The prophecy is written in Black feminist blood.

APG been told us:

“The university was not created to save my life.  The university is not about the preservation of a bright brown body.   The university will use me alive and use me dead.  The university does not intend to love me.  The university does not know how to love me. The university in fact, does not love me. But the universe does.”

- Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “The Shape of My Impact” (2013)

ya’ll, i’m literally falling into the medicine as i write. right now. re-membering. i dont hope it makes sense but i hope you’ll let yourself follow along and see where you land. it’s all unfinished. and i still don’t know what to do when i can’t lend my body to the global calls for action. but best believe i’m organizing from bed and midwifing radical black feminist consciousness in the classroom.

and i’m laying my ass down. opening myself to receive healing without having to prove myself worthy of it. i’m slowing down. i’m asking for help. i’m letting my tear-stained yet jubilant inner child lead the way as i recover from each day.

through the ache, i’m loving myself, my kin, and this world with my whole heart.

*i’ve enabled paid subscriptions/pledges to invite in “green energy” that can help support my medical expenses, there may be special offerings in the future for paid subscribers but for now i’m just passing the offering plate down your pew*

Give, and it will come back to you.

Good measure,pressed down,shaken together and running ovaaaaa