I had originally named and promoted the course as “Black Womanhood Revival” because I wanted Black women to associate it with the renewal, celebration, and power they may have felt, observed, or heard about in Black church tent revivals. I wanted participants to remember Spirit moving in and through community, lifting up a weary people’s soul, to think about hand-clapping, collective singing, dance, and a life-changing, life-saving word. In Black Womanhood Revival, though, our word would come from the Lorde (and other Black feminists), to counter balance and counter act some of the demonization of Black womanhood we and our foremothers had heard at those same tent revivals and in regular church services.

I never said any of the above publicly or in promotional material. I had taken an online course to learn how to sell Black Womanhood Revival, and the course coaches said my messaging was too unclear. They said I needed to make promises, tell people how I would take them from their sad and miserable point A to who they would be at point B, after taking my course. You’ll stop being afraid and learn how to speak up for what you want in your relationships! I’ll take you from feeling like you’ve lost yourself to having a blueprint for the rest of your life! You’ll go from frigid in the bedroom to releasing your inner sex kitten!

Yeah … you can imagine how trying to incorporate that advice into promoting a course rooted in Black feminist principles went.

After that, I took some time to think about my vision, the space I wanted to create, the people who I hoped would find their way there, and how our lives might change as a result of us gathering there. I looked back, ironically, at some of the Black Womanhood Revival course material, and honed in on a portion of Alice Walker’s definition of womanist:

Loves the folk. Loves herself. Regardless.

Love of the folk and my own experience with sisterhood had driven me to create Black Womanhood Revival. I’m an only child, but circles of Black girls and women in extended family, academic, artistic, and religious circles have surrounded me since birth and influenced me more than anything else. I love us, and I wanted us to love ourselves more.

I had known at least since 2016, when I penned the declaration in the newsletter I sent out following that year’s presidential election, that “self-love in a world that hates you is the most subversive act you can commit.” I didn’t have a contrived Point A and artificial Point B, but I knew reading Black feminist scholars and literary authors had led me to love myself more, to recognize harmful teaching and cultural influences, be less vulnerable to them, and begin to heal.

I came back in 2021 with The Black WRAP and in 2022, thanks to a grant from the Leeway Foundation, I facilitated an in-person course focused on Black women’s bodily liberation, like I had wanted to a few years before. I thought mainly about Black women trying to undo bodily and sexual shame inflicted by conservative Abrahamic faiths. The topic had been a struggle for me, both due to and despite my sisterhood circles, and every time I’ve thought the intersecting impact of race, gender, and religion on Black women’s pleasure and bodily autonomy was a tired issue that no one cared about but me, something has reminded me of the topic’s relevance.

Over the past year, the nudges have come from a few different places. There’s the rise of white Christian nationalism in the U.S., the uncanny unfolding of dystopian novels like The Handmaid’s Tale and Parable of the Sower, with Octavia E. Butler’s plot playing out exactly when her first novel in the series, published more than 30 years ago, said it would. There’s the violent pushback against the right for sexual or gender minorities to exist. In the pop culture/welcome distraction topics that show up in my news feed, debate raged over whether the dress a Black megachurch pastor’s wife wore to a gala was appropriate for a church First Lady. Anger over another pastor calling the dress-wearer a “two-dollar whore” quickly followed.

More personally, I moved to Ghana. The absence of dance and movement in my life since the move has affected my wellbeing deeply. I miss the post-workout endorphin rush, but I also miss teaching fitness classes and dancing in community with the strangers who also love house, West African, and Afro-Cuban Orisha dances. I miss expressing Oshun’s sensuality and Oya’s and Ogun’s power, Yankadee’s flirtatiousness, and house’s freedom—and I’m without all of that while also guarding myself against the religiosity and patriarchy on The Continent, the culture of respectability, and gendered subordination that has pre-colonial and colonial roots.

African Americans have long looked to Africa as home, a place where we can be free, where we can be ourselves in body and spirit. But as a Ghanaian sister at the country’s Pa Gya! Literary Festival pointed out to me when I asked about this Black Western Atlantic interpretation of Africa, “Colonization fucked us up, and we all have a lot of healing to do from that.”

I heard her “us” as “continental Africans” and “all” as “descendants of the colonized and descendants of the enslaved.” At the same literary festival, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, author of the book, Seeking Sexual Freedom: African Rites, Rituals, and Sankofa in the Bedroom, appeared on two panels. I attended both. And months later, as I read her book for review, it occurred to me that it could do a lot of healing—if Black women read it together.

So the next Black WRAP course series is about Black women healing—in Africa and the African Diaspora—by reading, writing, and learning together. Like my previous course, Rewritten, Re-read, Unbound, and Unafraid, we will read together, tell our stories, and plot our journeys toward freedom through the taboo and writing the unspeakable parts of our lives. To help facilitate this global healing ambition, all course sessions will be held virtually.

Are you a Black woman who’s ready to enter a space that centers YOUR liberation, hears YOU, and deepens YOUR sisterhood and community with other Black women? Then stay tuned! Subscribe today so you don’t miss the start of this healing journey.

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