I am struggling with sanity, reality questionable except those things I can still touch like earth and water. What I see is not to be trusted. Images appear manipulated. We doctor our faces so that in Zoom we look our best or choose to show up silenced or on mute, camera off. It is easy to lose oneself in such normalized environments. It is easy to lose others. We check the participants listed and can’t see everyone’s name. Who’s in the chat? Is the chat enabled? Can I save the chat? Why would I want to chat?
Reminds me of undergraduate lecture halls at UC Berkeley when I was a student there. The speaker doesn’t know who was in the room or to my knowledge care. However, in the more intimate virtual spaces we do want to know, which is why we enable everything and if possible have transcribing so no one is left out of the conversation which is as rich as it is to accessibility to all thoughts and feelings.
I have been attending a series of Our Freedom Sanctuary meetings hosted by the Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom. gina Breedlove, Medicine Women, Sacred Sound Healer has been facilitating these free (donation based), workshops for BIPOC (no one turned away), with primacy to Black women. We are sounding through the chakras, the last two weeks heart and throat. To get to the throat we breathed through the pelvis. Had to figure out where that was for a moment and then gina suggested the kegel exercise. I remembered from womb work after and before childbirth to prepare the uterus and then to tone it thereafter. Birthing a rigorous exercise. And for those who did not have a uterus, they could also participate in visioning that space.
I think about Michelle Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” project honoring the lives of enslaved women, Anarcha, Lucy and Betsey whose bodies did not belong to herselves, so their white owners leased them to J. Marion Sims to experiment on them, supposedly to cure them of fistula. Instead these Black wom(b)en endured horrific torture without anesthesia. The myth, Black wom(b)en (Black people) feel no pain despite the visible and audible evidence to the contrary present with every slice, cut, intrusive instrument. Think about these wom(b)en when you think speculum, forceps, Black maternal health. Sims’s ghost lives on in the high rates of Black wom(b)en child maternal mortality despite social economic educational level of the mother or family. Blackness still trumps race and gender equity.
Right now, Browder is working with artisan Dana Albany at her Box Shop studio in San Francisco to complete these three monumental statues. May 9 the foundation will be laid in Montgomery where Sims’s offices stood/stand. I saw his office building and in another location at City Hall his stature glorified with that of other criminals. I believe the confederate flag also flew. My visit, for Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Institute’s opening reception for the National Memorial for Peace and Justice (lynching memorial) and the Legacy Museum, from Slavery to Mass Incarceration, was just after Memorial Day where the City of Montgomery honored both outcomes of the Civil War. I wondered what the Black children visiting the capital thought when they realized this alternative celebration was about their freedom. I wonder what the white children thought when imagining what it would feel like to have that kind of power over another human being?
Browder’s “Mothers of Gynecology” centers the focus. The ideology is not lost in abstraction. Black women as breeders kept the slave system supplied with workers. More babies were born in captivity than imported from Africa once this form of capture was outlawed Jan.1,1808. This meant the manufacture of human beings specific to a particular kind of life was a particular kind of demonic enterprise, these three wom(b)en emblematic of the worse capitalism imaginable, presented a problem if the leased “womb” did not function.
In a Wanda’s Picks podcast interview (3/10) with Michelle Browder and J.C. Holman, writer, researcher who is writing a book about Anarcha, the woman whose history is more easily traced and documented than the other “Mothers,” states that what he learned that from the barbaric medical practices on Black women emerged a system of care developed in response, where these women took care of each other. This kind of caregiving continues today.
While the Mothers of Gynecology story is not as well-known until recently, the story of Henrietta Lacks, whom I call the Mother of Modern Medicine, is, her centennial birth, August 1, 2020. Her immortal HeLa cells are still curing disease.
Wombfulness Gatherings™ and MAAFA San Francisco Bay Area is curating the Libations and Prayers Ceremony for Mothers of Gynecology Easter Sunday
On Sunday, April 4, 2021, 10-11 a.m. there will be Libations and Prayers for the Mothers of Gynecology at The Box Shop, 951 Hudson Avenue, San Francisco, 94124. All are welcome, esp. BIPOC. For information Facebook @anarchalucybetsey and anarchalucybetsey.org and Facebook @maafabayarea
Michelle Browder was one of the Gaia Wom(b)an presenters at the first bi-monthly, “Wombfulness Gathering” for Black wom(b)en. The next Gathering is May 22, 10-12 noon. For more information: wombfulnest@gmail.com; FB@wombfulnest or call 510-255-5579.
“Honor the wombs that bore you,” Allah says in the Qur’an (4:1). The root of the word for womb (RHM) is the same as Ar-rahman, Ar-rahim—beneficence, mercy, grace and compassion. At this point in time, all human life comes through a womb. It doesn’t matter if you like it or not, the point is, if this wom(b)an decided not to bear young, there would be no life – yours or mine. My young mother said she had no prenatal care, that after nine months she went to the hospital and they yanked me out with forceps. Mama said if you complained the white nurses would slap the patients, so she kept her mouth shut. Hers was such a rare case, the attending physician brought in an entire class to watch her give birth. (Charity was a teaching hospital and in the charity ward, I don’t think the patients were asked for consent probably signed away at admission.)
There was no acknowledgement of the beauty of life and giving birth and the inherently beautiful Black mother- she vessel, she chamber, she force of life.
There was no conversation, no anesthesia. After they pulled me out her young body and stitched her up, they gave me to her, “a living baby doll,” she said. I was born with a string of flesh in my mouth and the doctor took a hot iron and seared it off. Again, no medicine for pain—babies don’t feel pain either. Could these assumptions be based on the fact that we have no voice? Audible, the absence of power mutes the sound and negates the vibration, an affirmation communication prompts between living beings. The Black wom(b)an (girl child) does not exist—she, inhuman. She, not worthy of contemplation.
To read the rest visit Wanda's Picks April 2021.
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