I looked forward to the dissertation writing process as a doctoral student. I envisioned spending time in cafes, with the freedom to sit with the questions driving my research process: in the afterlives of slavery and colonization, Black trauma is “climate”; amidst a context of ongoing, layered, and intergenerational trauma, how can we heal from wounds that never close? Unfortunately, I developed my dissertation prospectus under duress. From 2020 to 2021, the initial phase of the pandemic was unfolding along with the aftermath of the uprising in Minneapolis. The pressure to continue my research and writing despite these realities was not only external, but internal as well. After successfully passing my prelims, what I had hoped to be a restorative and meditative writing process was unexpectedly arduous. While many of the people around me “went back to normal,” I was acutely aware of the ongoing dangers of COVID-19 infection. But what initially presented as a challenge to my dissertation process became deeply informative. Witnessing folks across political, racial, cultural and class lines participate in the systematic exclusion and deaths of vulnerable populations woke me up to the insidious and widespread nature of ableist disposability politics. Writing about healing in this context has invited meditation on the political contexts and stakes which structure narratives of health and healing.
Amidst a context of ongoing, layered, and intergenerational trauma, how can we heal from wounds that never close?
Key Terms
Total Climate
Christina Sharpe describes anti-Blackness as a “total climate.” In the wake of racial slavery and colonization, the global atmospheric conditions of anti-Blackness also structure the ambient nature of Black trauma. Christina Elizabeth Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2010), 21.
Abelist disposability politics
Ableist disposability politics contextualize whose lives we deem worthy of care and protection. People who have disabilities and chronic illnesses, or who otherwise cannot access or perform ablebodied standards of health and functionality, are devalued and considered expendable.
Black queer and trans theorist Da’Shaun Harrison notes, “There is an explanation for why many of us are desperate to experience healing ‘the right way.’ There is something desirable about healing amongst the collective unconscious. This is to say that being positioned as ‘healed’ in the world is accompanied by a level of social currency that makes healing—particularly in this way—feel especially necessary.”1 This context informs how we may envision healing as a personal achievement which requires the erasure of trauma, the performance of sanity and the acquisition of health. Neoliberal, individualistic notions of healing also fail to account for the realities of Black healing, which may never result in a completely healed state in an anti-Black world. For me, the realities of ongoing violence and trauma invite a reconceptualization of healing. Healing is often situated as the resolution of trauma. Instead, I am curious about how we might theorize and engage healing in its impermanence and incompleteness.
I pursue this vision of Black healing in my research through the lens of spiritual storytelling in diasporic Black novels. Inspired by Black feminist healers and thinkers, I approach “the spiritual” as a metaphysical framework that incorporates the multiple realities and forces which interface with embodied life. I use “Black spirit” as an overarching framework which situates the social, political and material dimensions of Black life alongside the otherworldly, unseen and mystical. These engagements of Black spirit shape the content and context of the Black novels I analyze in my dissertation project. This looks like engaging the ongoing experiences of the dead and disembodied through ritual and revisiting ancestral inheritances of memories and trauma through our bodies. This includes experimenting with Black spiritual technologies of conjuring and dreaming to “live in states of [Black] being not yet in existence,”2 such as freedom.
The lens of the spiritual opens us to the idea of Black life as a multidimensional experience where we can hold the coexistence of trauma and healing together. Through spiritual conceptions of time and space, embodiment, and relationality, we can engage the interconnections of historical and shared trauma, ongoing violence, and attempts at healing in the present. Within Black spiritual frames, we may also access and build rubrics of health, wellness, and healing which are not based in the norms of ableism, colonialism, capitalism and anti-Blackness. When your value is not predicated on your capacity to embody an ideal, ablebodied Human subject3, the meanings of trauma and purposes of healing shift. Healing can be reimagined as an intentional process of reworking our experiences and understandings of trauma without the expectation of a complete resolution.
Through close readings of Black texts by authors such as Gayl Jones, Rivers Solomon, and Akwaeke Emezi, I explore Black spiritual storytelling as a healing practice. In sitting with their depictions of primary scenes of Black trauma such as plantation slavery, colonization, the Middle Passage, and racialized sexual violence, I am moved by how they simultaneously foreground their diasporic frameworks of Black spirit. Encountering the presence of Black spirits and spiritual practices in these texts conjured dreams, memories, traumatic resonances, embodied sensations and psychic expressions within me. This spiritual process of engaging with Black literature has taught me how to hold the dynamic tensions between continuous violence and trauma, and the spiritual forces and knowledges which transform Black peoples’ ability to experience healing within their worlds.
Developing the capacity to imagine, understand, and relate to ourselves in terms which are not rooted in anti-Blackness forms a different praxis of healing. Black spiritual storytelling privileges Black spiritual cosmologies, ontologies and epistemic frameworks as the central frames of storytelling. Writing from this alternative metaphysical basis catalyzes our capacity to make new meanings, narratives and experiences of Blackness. As Akwaeke Emezi suggests, surviving the violence which attends Black life—surviving “being flesh4”—is intertwined with the need to recenter and purposefully inhabit Black spiritual realities. Yet pursuing an exploration of “spirit-first” writing as a praxis of healing has highlighted the tensions posed by an institutional context which valorizes modes of production which are extractive, individualistic and exhausting. I wonder how my engagements with my selected texts would grow without the pressures of meeting writing deadlines, defense assessment standards and marketing my research for jobs and fellowships.
I feel compelled to question: in performing this study, am I moving toward healing or away from it?
As I come to the end of my doctoral journey, the juxtaposition between my research on healing and the ongoing nature of trauma in the contemporary moment feels especially stark. I did not anticipate that writing a dissertation would be healing. But I did hope that the process of exploring my research questions could potentially be a part of my personal healing journey. Now I feel compelled to question: in performing this study, am I moving toward healing or away from it? Ultimately, I find the tensions between the conditions of academic knowledge production and the potentialities for healing through scholarship difficult to reconcile. In thinking about healing as a spiritual process, I recognize how revisiting traumatic dynamics and limitations can produce necessary insights which drive healing forward. My experience of navigating the frictions between trauma and healing in academia has activated a sense of authority which increased my capacity to be guided by inner knowing. My research process and method has opened up possibilities for incorporating Black spirit beyond spaces of spiritual practice, even within institutional spaces which are hostile to the modes and tempos of such knowledge production. The insights I have gained through this process have culminated in a sense of wholeness which does not erase the fractures of trauma, but instead reorients their significance.
- Da’Shaun Harrison, “There Is No Healing in an Antiblack World,” Scalawag Magazine, May 5, 2022. https://scalawagmagazine.org/2023/02/dashaun-harrison-healing. ↩︎
- Alexis De Veaux, JesusDevil: The Parables (AK Press, 2023), 3. ↩︎
- I use the capitalized term “Human” to index Sylvia Wynter’s genealogy of the modern human as an exclusionary, white supremacist and colonial construct. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 260, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0012. ↩︎
- Black enfleshment describes the historical processes of objectification, violation, and gratuitous violence which reduced Black peoples to the status of “flesh,” distinguishing them from Eurocolonial categories of personhood and human subjectivity. Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 21. ↩︎