This piece is part of our “Critical Creative Series,” in which, once a semester, a regular or guest author adopts a creative form (literary, visual, or audio) to reflect a strain of critical inquiry in the medical and health humanities.
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introduction
As a 2024 Poet-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), I’ve been reflecting on the relationship between healing and home alongside beloved Black artists in my community.
“Homeplace Poems: on Black Feminist Interior Design and Liberatory Living” is my culminating poetry collection for this residency. In it, I merge Medical Anthropology and Medical Humanities to develop a Black Feminist Healing Arts Praxis that embodies a homegirl healing ethic on behalf of the folks. I engage a poetics that illuminates the spiritual, ancestral, sensory, and somatic nature of homemaking for Black women with fragile/ fractured relationships to home. I ask, how does home influence what we know of holistic healing? how do the homes we grew up in inform the homes we curate today?
Homeplace Poems is a poetic extension of my forthcoming book, entitled Home/Girl Healin’ : the Sacred Geographies of Everyday Black Feminist Healing Arts in Oakland, California, in which I define Black Feminist Interior Design as a sacred curatorial praxis that is informed by a dialectic exchange between physical, metaphysical, and interior space-making between bodies, selves, and homes. This collection is additionally inspired by bell hook’s “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” and written in conversation with Key Jo Lee’s curation of “Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors & Radical Black Joy,” as well as Jessica Monette’s “Unveiling Histories: a Fabricated Archive,” both of which were exhibits on view at MoAD in Fall 2024.
The following is an excerpt from Homeplace Poems that theorizes intergenerational trauma, intergenerational healing, integrative healing arts praxis, and Black geographies of care. These pieces grapple with psychological distress, somatic weathering, and motherhood suffering, and engage a discourse of home as both a medicinal and a spiritual matter. I move between first, second, and third person to depict my personal experience alongside the experiences of anonymous black women healing from matrilineal wounds. Parts of this excerpt may contain triggering content for some, so I encourage you to do what you need to do to tend to yourself as you journey through this.
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invocation
homeplace poems ponders hometowns.. homegirls.. healings.. houses that raised my mothers.. houses that raised me.. black geographies.. interior design.. black feminist interior design.. the insides of houses and homes and selves and saints that live beyond me.. multiplicity and metaphysical design.. the portals we make through the rooms we make and the doors and the dreams and the distance.. the beds the couch the crayola markings the makings of mothers and wind.. body.. flesh.. mirrors.. mourning.. the wondering of a self beyond this.. the journeys we took to be here.. migrations.. meditations.. matrilineal healings.. the humor.. the havens.. the huddles.. the hues.. the grannies ghost lingering in living rooms.. black living rooms.. how we make more living room.. more liberatory livin’ for the folks..
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i ask myself questions about places that raised me and people that raised me and homes and healings and heartbreak and harm. the ways that so many women who i love in my lineage are still stuck seeking and longing for home as descendants of the African enslaved.
the city. the south. the homes we made. the homes we still stuck reaching for. the migratory medicine passed down each generation, across every Black geography.
South Carolina. Gullah Geechee. Georgia. ‘Bama. Mississippi. Creole. Hoodoo. Kentucky. Detroit. Atlanta. Philly. Oakland.
Louisiana. Louisiana. Louisiana.
the ongoing wounding of diasporic displacement. the never quite at home and yet always making home.
i ask myself these questions —
if a birthplace is a mother, then what might it mean to mourn her? if the womb is the “first home we knew,” then what might it mean to tend to those wounds?
if home is a mother, and a mother is kin, and kin is akin to heartbreak, then what might it mean to catch ourselves in the weight of all that falling and failing?
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invitation one: our grandmothers’ homes
she honors homemaking as a sacred praxis. a geographic reordering of things
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grannie’s poem
blue black baby
mama made me in a hurry
here, there
there was no love
just lust. lies.
quick fucks. giving up
and me. the seed
of her surrender
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spiders
my grandmother arrives
in spiders
i spent my girlhood
terrorized by her presence
crowded round my mother’s
bedroom door
them strange silk spiders
spillin’ out on wood floors
haltin’ all access to that
basement door
the threshold to reach
my mother
yea, my grannie, she arrives
in spiders. but i did not know
til’ the dream
i met my grannie
past age 18
when i faced my fear
of the spider
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a Philadelphia house
gospel. grannie’s
green and gold
silk scarf. rollers
puffed and pink
johnson and johnson
baby powder in her
church shoes.
baby lotion. baby oil.
brown skin glisten
girls get combed
hot. popped. scalp. twists
flinch. fry and die and lay
to side
sunday mornin’
god so close yet
far away, in this
Philadelphia
brick house of
unfreedom..
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faux fur. plastic covered couch
and them doilies grannie got from
dolla tree, still stainin’ the wood
we left behind
how did them women
make the
“hard look soft” ?
cuz im drownin’
head spinnin’ in orbit..
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invitation two: our own
..the “material world is a house that is only as safe as flesh..”
– Katherine McKittrick
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depression’s daughter(s)
Precious preach a story so many of us asè to. She says, My mom . . . like her life was all the way scattered . . . and I feel like my life is all the way scattered everywhere . . . She just was . . . struggling. She didn’t know what she was struggling with. And she lost her house, that was her baby, besides me. So I just really feel like she was not equipped to deal with that in the way that she thought she could. Precious says this is what led to her mother’s illness, her dis/ease. And her mother is now an ancestor.
she says
her mother’s house
smelled of mold
and molasses
glasses gritty with
age old lipstick stains
and residue stuck
at the bottom of the cup
from somethin’ too thick
to drink all the way up
hot chocolate trapped
in a circular ring
at the bottom of the cup
from last Christmas
it is now June
and Precious plays the same tunes
‘Nita Baker. Amy Winehouse. Nina Simone
and she wonders
is this what depression feels like? the
stench of the carpet and the
chaos on the floors and the unfolded
laundry from the last two seasons
and never enough energy to
tend to the treaty
that she made in the womb
is this what depression looks like?
to be the spitting image
of her mothers rotted teeth
to have the same sort of dandruff flakes
at the nape of her neck
to notice the same symptom, and sign,
of depressed, and yet, to call it something different
something less than what it is
is this what it looks like
to be the daughter of depression
the descendant of
all those fuckin scattered interiors
is this what it means
to be torn up at the seams
and yet never quite cured
of that longing
is this what it feels like?
neglected interiors
when woundings curate
wars inside you
and you never really learned to
grow up?
to get stuck
in that scattered image of her mother
and to never make her your own ?
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cleo
a bathtub and some music
all i need to take a trip
Cleo Sol a psychedelic to me
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the cosmos
“I’d like to live at the edge of death,” she says. Soul stars surroundin’ her navel. Gazing at the gore of the wind. “And I’d like to be only an almost ancestor, not quite there, but close. And I’d like to know Heaven as an inkling of truth, a haven for horror to come home to. But I’d like to be just enough distant so the dumbbells and dun dun drums don’t catch me.” I curate her chorus at the edge of my sleep. Speak words and worlds and wars and women. She is but a piece of chaotic fraction. Fiction. Friction at the meeting of a tongue. I taste the winds and the wounds beneath her. Bare heart. Bitter, tart. Battered drum. Done with the spells they sprinkled on Dumbarton. Past the parking lots and blades of grass. Gone are the dayze of her fickle fairy mother. My god that girl’s known weight. She was just eight when she lost it all – not a call not a couch not a savior. So she saddled up and started saving herself, and waited for the day that death would return as moon mother, that moon mother would return as death. This is why she wishes to fly so close to the ocean, the drowning the dungeon the wave. She is surrendered to the art of dying, for it must feel better than this…
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holes
my house has holes in it
got dirt on it,
like my shirt,
don’t it?
shit, my house
hears noises. voices.
vines and violets
violence and rage
say,
my house
ran away from
herself. she was
holy yet haunted, afraid
my house
got holes
in her clothes
in her soul
her heart got
glove stained
darts on it
my house got a
heartbreak on her
broken glass. broken
bins. broken friends
she all of a sudden
had no right to herself
though it always was
her own two hands
that built the brick
she became
she got walls stained
teeth stained. heart stained
don’t it? and so much
shadow shame
here in the heart of
someone else’s sorrow
lives the lies she
never left behind
her heart lives in the cupboard
baseboard
belly of the beast
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spida’
my grandmother arrives as a spider in my home.. i was told that she, a Gullah Geechee queen, kept eight legged critters in her purse to keep her safe.. and now she comes to me as spiders to remind me that i am safe.. but it was only when i learned to face my fears that i had the foresight to see her..
i watch her web worlds into the tiny corner of my kitchen window.. i watch her fingers forge magic and miracles into the delicacy of each thread.. i think of my crochet.. how my mother and me turn yarn into cloth, yearning for wholeness in each stitch. my grandmother reminds me of the goodness of home. a homegirl granting wishes to her womanhood through the gentle of steady weaving.
i sip tea beside her, and watch the strangeness of those tiny fingers making fabric out the frailness of her limbs. spinning from thin air the blueprint of a life. making “lifeworlds” like Sunday morning.
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[ to continue your journeying with this piece, i invite you to list to its accompanying Spotify playlist, linked here, and journal about what comes up for you as you reflect on your own relationship with healing and home ]
*deep gratitude to the Museum of the African Diaspora for the honor of this residency! it has been incredibly healing for me to journey through these poems alongside art that has spoken to my spirit so deeply. thank you to my bro Dr. Rashad Timmons, who accompanied me via keyboard for an in-person performance of these poems at my culminating MoAD reading. thank you to Elizabeth, Reggie, Cici, Jessica, Brittsense, Key Jo Lee – all the folks who inspired me/ collaborated with me on all these creative projects i’ve been curating through out this season. thank you MoAD for the space and time to ponder with words, and to learn alongside students at the Ruth Asawa School of the Arts in San Francisco. & thank you to the incredibly gifted students who pushed me and stretched me and helped me to arrive at new words to make sense of these broader inquiries on healing and home.
this work is additionally inspired by the list of recommended readings and resources listed below —
On Being at Home With Myself: Blackgirl Autoethnography as Research Praxis
Robin Boylorn
linked here
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Homeplace (As a Site of Resistance)
bell hooks
linked here
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The Homeplace
Poems by Marilyn Nelson
linked here
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The Black Living Room
Shoniqua Roach
linked here
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Making Black Queer Home
Shoniqua Roach
linked here
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In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens
Alice Walker
linked here
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The Yellow House
Sarah Broom
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Kitchenette Building, Amani Morrison
linked here
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Kimbritive’s Kyndred Clinic
linked here