“intro. dress up”
Chapter 1 focuses on self-identity. This is a really great book and chapter to start ReSIStance Reading off because Morgan discusses the importance of taking the tools that our feminist foremothers have given us and retrofitting them for use in our lives today. It’s beautiful that Joan Morgan herself is now a foremother whose confessions and insights are being built upon by a new crop of Black feminists.
The foremother that Morgan looked for herself in was Ntozake Shange (depicted above.) Specifically, she hoped to find shades of herself in Shange’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Morgan’s mother refused to bring her ten-year-old daughter along to see the play. This angered a young Morgan who was trying to understand Black womanhood. “I reasoned that the play had something to do with being black, female, and surviving — and those were intuitive if not conscious concerns…” (Morgan, 19). When Morgan grew old enough to go see the play herself, she realized that it was for a past generation. Not that anyone else couldn’t learn from it, but the lives of Black women in America had changed between the years 1975 and 1995. Morgan’s mother needed that play, it served as representation, as reassurance.
Only you know who you are. And if you don’t know who you are yet, only you can find out. Black women are not a monolith. There is no one way to be, so why would we put that suffocating pressure onto ourselves. The diversity within the Black community, within Black communities all across the Diaspora is beautiful and should be celebrated. This also means, that one person cannot bring everyone’s lived experiences to the table, “… stop worrying about encompassing the entire spectrum of black female identity” (Morgan, 25). Free your voice. Free yourself from what people assume you are. What is true to you?
… I honestly believe that the only way sistas can begin to experience empowerment on all levels — spiritual, emotional, financial, and political — is to understand who we are.”
Morgan, 23
Message
There is only so much you can learn, only so much you can change without reflecting and adapting. I am embarking on this ReSIStance Reading journey with y’all, but with every step I take, I am acutely aware that I cannot leave my authentic self behind. Some of the takes that we are going to encounter are not going to resonate, and that is fine. We have to address the problems that plague our daily lives, as Joan Morgan, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and others did before us.
How many of us are going to speak for women of the 21st century? How many of us are going to do our best to confront ourselves honestly, so that we know who we are, not just who the media tells us we have to be? Joan Morgan in 1999 was speaking on the media’s portrayal of Black women encroaching upon our individual identities. Imagine how insidious it has become with the advent of social media.
The enormous task of saving our lives falls on nobody else’s shoulders but ours. Consider our foremother’s contributions a bad-ass bolt of cloth. We’ve got to fashion the gear to our own liking”
Morgan, 22-3
Questions to Reflect On:
- When did you realize that you would have to search to find a reflection of yourself in this world?
- Who are you outside of society’s presumptions?
- Is there a Black story in which you found your identity accurately depicted and validated?
- Do you trust yourself enough to use your voice?
Works Cited
Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: a Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2017.
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