“Hey Mama;” “Dear Sister;” “Sister Love”: Black Women’s Healing and Radical Self-Care through Epistolary Work

Abstract

This work is an examination into the act of letter-writing as a mode of radical self-care, paying special attention to the significance of the practice when performed between Black women. Black women’s lived realities often involve confronting both tacit and explicit demands that they censor and deny various aspects of their being, and internalize a set of dominant lies about themselves they’ve been led to believe are true. That being so, I argue that what letter-writing can offer is a rhetorical space of community generated through exchanges between interlocutors, a zone though which Black women are free(er) to express these ostensibly “illicit” aspects if their being and to lay claim to a different, more affirming set of truths around which to construct lines of selfdefinition. I also posit that letter-writing as a practice that demands of individuals to sit, slow-down, and gather themselves, represents a rejection of a neoliberal imperative that urges prioritizing speed and acceleration over ease and taking one’s time. Letter-writingas- slow-work is therefore political not only in its rejection of this imperative, but letter-writing enacted among Black women is a disavowal of neoliberalism and how it masks the reality that that some individuals—across various economic, social, and political domains—are made to more cumbersomely bear the burden of speed and expedition. Specifically, we know that Black women are cast as beings capable of working without ceasing. Thus, when the Black woman sits down to write, she telegraphs a commitment to slowing down and taking care. To illustrate these claims, I deploy my letter-writing experience with my grandmother and reflect on Pat Parker and Audre Lorde’s letter complied in Sister Love (2018).

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