Practicing Black Feminist Dreams

By Anna Blaedel

The following is an excerpt from Anna Blaedel’s in-process dissertation, in which they weave a theopoetics of collective liberation by tracing and reconnecting lineages of divergent sacred wisdom circulating and emerging among poet-activists, freedom dreamers, prophets, mystics, and misfits of myriad varieties. Spiritual practices of Black feminist creativity, wild transqueer kinship, heretical magic, and fierce and tender abolitionist care enliven and sustain our repatterning life toward survival, solidarity, and shared flourishing–enfleshing collective liberation in the present tense.

In 1862, Harriet Tubman had a dream. (*1) Despite being a wanted fugitive, Tubman remained active in abolitionist resistance, seeking freedom from enslavement for herself and her people. Leading her people–family, friends, and strangers–to freedom earned her the sacred honorific “Moses.” Working as a spy, a scout, an herbalist, a cook, and a nurse, Tubman’s methods were subversive, and her labor rooted in the longing for liberation–helping her people survive. She knew nourishment and healing were crucial components of survival; so too was imagining a world in which joyful flourishing is possible. In her dream, Harriet Tubman visioned freedom. Tubman had been trusting her dreams and visions for a long time. When she was twelve, she suffered a traumatic brain injury at the hands of a white overseer when she refused to participate in the torture of an enslaved man caught after he attempted escape. Vivid dreams and visions resulted from this trauma; Tubman claimed her disability as an ability to see the future, to imagine the world. She considered her visions a spiritual gift, a source of sacred wisdom and divine insight. When she awoke from her 1862 dream, she proclaimed: “My people are free.” Brimming with joy, she kept repeating: “My people are free.” Harriet Tubman proclaimed freedom in the present tense and collective sense. Conjuring a queer temporality, she bore witness to the end of slavery even as policies and practices of enslavement raged. Only a few months after her freedom dream, Tubman went down to South Carolina, and started organizing.

***

In 1974, a group of Black feminist, lesbian, socialists in Boston began collecting themselves, gathering together for study, retreat, consciousness raising, and political organizing. They traced their lineage through generations of Black women activists participating in “the continuous life and death struggle for survival and liberation.” (*2) Regardless of deep roots in this struggle, their attempts at building and sustaining coalition left this collective of Black feminists increasingly dissatisfied by the siloed focus and moderate purview of the movements and organizations they witnessed coalescing. Their “experience and disillusionment” within both the women’s movement and the movement for Black liberation found them in need of “a politic that was antiracist, unlike those of white women, and antisexist, unlike those of Black and white men.” (*3) Involved in the formation of the National Black Feminist Organization the year before, they quickly encountered “serious disagreements with the NBFO’s bourgeois-feminist stance and their lack of a clear political focus.” (*4) They were energized by a “more radical” dream. (*5) “Major systems of oppression are interlocking,” they insisted, and “integrated analysis and practice” against “racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” was critical for understanding and resisting “the manifold and simultaneous oppression” creating the conditions of their lives. (*6) Black feminism, they maintained, was “the logical political movement” to transform these conditions. (*7) Grounding this dream and guiding their politic was “the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable.”(*8) They collectively imagined Black feminism as a transformative political movement, a continuous struggle, a living lineage, and a radical dream: incarnating a world aligned and alight with this primordial conviction of inherent value.

Imagining a world in which Black women’s lives matter–intrinsically, immanently–was a practice at once ancestral, as well as emergent. The Black feminists in this collective drew wisdom and courage from lineage. “Contemporary Black feminism,” they claimed, germinated from “countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters.”(*9) Their kinship extended to “Black women activists–some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E.W Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown–who had a shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles unique,” they wrote. (*10) Though rooted in lineage deep and wide, this anti-capitalist, queer, Black feminist collective also sensed the novelty of how they “examined the multi-layered texture of Black women’s lives.” (*11)

Lived experience grounded their participation in political struggle; examining the particularities of their shared experience was a practice of collecting transformative wisdom and cultivating collective power. “The overwhelming feeling that we had,” this collective would later write, “is that after years and years we had finally found each other.” (*12) Finding each other, and finding resonant textures in their struggles and longings, they found common cause against the interpersonal, systemic, and structural violences threatening their lives, and sacred aliveness. They considered what to call themselves. They were perturbed by white women who “were taking the names of Black women, particularly Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, and using them for different projects,” thus perpetuating core logics of white supremacy and practices of enslavement: theft, extraction, and erasure.(*13) They almost became the Harriet Tubman Collective, but as Barbara Smith, one of the founding collective members, remembers reflecting, “Let’s not name ourselves after a person. Let’s name ourselves after an action. A political action…And not only a political action but a political action for liberation.”(*14) The Combahee River Collective was thus conceived.

***

In 2013, a collective of twenty-one Black feminists made a pilgrimage to the Combahee River, to commemorate the historic uprising led by Harriet Tubman 150 years earlier. These believers gathered to remember, root in, and revitalize the freedom dreams that inspired Harriet Tubman’s abolitionist organizing and the Combahee River Collective’s radical politics, as well as the dreams that became possible because of them. (*15) Alexis Pauline Gumbs dreamt of the pilgrimage to commemorate the “Black feminist visionaries,” of the CRC, and to continue their struggle of creating “an analysis of interconnected liberation centered on the lived experiences of Black women.” (*16) Without compromising their core commitment of centering Black women’s particular lived experiences and inherent value, the Combahee River Collective’s vision of interconnected liberation was astonishingly expansive, perhaps endlessly so: “designed to free us all.” (*17)These Black feminists–Black women, both trans and cis, as well as Black genderqueer folk–slept with quotations from the writings of the Combahee River Collective and pictures of Harriet Tubman strung from their bedposts. Having found each other, they ate, and sang, and chanted, and laughed, and remembered, and prayed, and cried, and dreamed–nourishing, generating, healing, and practicing freedom in the present tense. They traced what Gumbs’s calls the “Combahee throughline,” connecting Harriet Tubman’s dream to the Combahee uprising, which became a turning point in the Civil War, through the founding of the Combahee River Collective and their writing of “A Black Feminist Statement,” to this contemporary moment of figuring out “how to rise up, and keep each other safe.”(*18)  Gumbs’ described the Combahee pilgrimage as “a dream come true: a prophecy in the present tense.”(*19) The experience, according to another participant, felt “like seeing evidence of the impossible.”(*20)

Black feminist wisdom, Black feminist dreams, Black feminist practices. Black feminist imagination. Black feminist prophets, poets, healers. Black feminism as medicine, as nourishment, as radicalizing invitation. A throughline of salve; enfleshing collective liberation, in the present tense. Evidence of the impossible, practiced into possibility. May it be so.

Footnotes:

1. My relationship to the sacred wisdoms and liberative lineages of Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Collective, and Black feminism is further elaborated through the dissertation. For now I want to note my deep gratitude to Black feminist poet-activists, transformative scholars, freedom dreamers, prophets and mystics, for teaching me most of what I know about collective liberation, radical love, creative imagination, bearing witness and practicing withness, and cultivating joy and savoring pleasure as strategies of solidarity and survival. Everything about how I understand and encounter the living legacies of Harriet Tubman and the Combahee River Collective have been shaped, in particular, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, whose brilliant, creative scholarship I experience as a sacred offering, a practice of love, and, to use her words about Harriet Tubman’s dream, a “prophecy in the present tense.” 
2. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 265. 
3.  Combahee River Collective, “Black Feminist Statement,” Home Girls, 265.
4. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Home Girls, 271.
5. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed. How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chigaco: Haymarket Books, 2017), 127.
6. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed. Edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: SUNY Press, 2015), 210. 
7. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Bridge, 210.
8. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Bridge, 212.
9. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Bridge, 211.
10. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Bridge, 210-1.
11. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Bridge, 213.
12. Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Home Girls, 271.
13.  Taylor, How We Get Free, 29-30.
14.  Taylor, How We Get Free, 31.
15. This pilgrimage was organized by Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, a community school based in Durham, North Carolina, and the Mobile Homecoming Project. Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind is based on the belief that “in the contemporary moment knowledge about the insights, literatures, and practices of black feminism, or in other words the intergenerational practice of describing and accounting for how we are transformatively interconnected, is as crucial as learning to read was in the period immediately following the legal end of chattel slavery in the United States.” The Mobile Homecoming project exists “as an intergenerational experiential archive project to amplify generations of Black LGBTQ brilliance.” Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind,” November 29, 2018 https://blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/ and “Mobile Homecoming” https://www.mobilehomecoming.org/.
16. Combahee Pilgrimage, by Julia Roxanne Wallace – Sangodar Akinwale. Produced by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. 2014. https://sangodare.podia.com/combahee.
17. Pilgrimage.
18. Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Sangodare Akinwale, Combahee Throughline Immersion Practice Course, https://sangodare.podia.com/view/courses/combahee-throughline-immersion-practice.
19.  Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Prophecy in the Present Tense: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee Pilgrimage, and Dreams Coming True,” Meridians Vol. 12, No 2 Harriet Tubman: A Legacy of Resistance (2014),152.
20. Pilgrimage.

Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.