Writing with Juliet Iwelunmor

bell hooks in Sisters of the yam, talked about the need for black women to engage in self-recovery. She was writing from the space of the continued devaluation of black womanhood, the extreme difficulties that make it hard for us to even develop a positive outlook of ourselves. Not only are we pitted against each other often, we are sometimes made to feel inferior, ignored, practically never consulted and almost determined to ensure that our roles entail staying behind and watching as others tell us how to sit, talk, walk, or run.

In the last two years, I have seen the depths society will go to make us insane or dead. I know deeply why the need to write here as I do, offers a radically different opportunity for me to dream out loud dreams that are so impossible on their own. Writing as I do every single day has been an intervention, the primary and secondary outcomes for all the ways I know my worth, dream and speak eloquently about it, move out of spaces that fear worthy people, even as I begin once more with knowing my worth.

If I am speaking about worth, it’s because I am ever vigilant for the need to kindle it in our critical consciousness. Being black and woman in whatever spaces you find yourself in hurts. Not just personally but among each other. It retards and instructs the freedom struggle we are all in. Imagine struggling for so long, to hopefully then one day free other Black women just for them to then see you, a fellow Black woman as the enemy, a threat maybe to their own success. Again, we are terrible at times to each other that what we even see in the world pales in comparison to what we do to each other.

If I am airing out our laundry it’s because we are all that we have and the time to seize the day and renew our commitment to each other is now. When wounded individuals as bell hooks would say, come together in groups to make change, our collective struggle is undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally. If I am to work for our liberation, work to end our struggle, I know to well that I must work on all the things that hold me back so as to realize my highest potential with life for like Toni Bambara would say, revolution begins in the self and with the self.

This struggle to dream, to know that it is the highest potential for my life is hard and continues to push and push me to work harder to reach not just some of us, but all of us. I know and continue to know the rewards of struggling. I long to teach it to others, to many like me, so they too can emancipate themselves from this mental slavery they find themselves in. Grant writing affirms and continues to affirm my dignity and presence as a black woman in academia. It’s a manifestation of the joy I always achieve whenever I succeed in being vigilant, knowing that for me, my people, my community, the struggle continues, and all the grants we write, all the time, lead the way…