The Art To Surrender: Creatively Writing about Black Girl Life

• In Event: Black Youth Ingenuity as Disruption Towards Bright and Just Futures

Abstract

I offer a reflexive meditation on how creativity informs a Black feminist ethnographic methodology to explore Black girls’ narratives and ways of knowing. This work builds upon a group of young people situated in structural and interpersonal relationships, systems of exclusion, and surviving violence while enrolled in a Northern California continuation school. I ground ethnographic methods of semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and direct observation in Black feminist sensibilities and methodologies. I situate my work in what is called creative ethnography: an art form of writing that anthropologists, theorists, and historians have taken up to document the lives of those in speculative dreaming and lived experience to share the stories of those who know their lives most intimately in sensorial and imaginative ways. I seek to answer the question: How can I expand traditional ethnographic nodes of writing to portray visceral, sensorial, and lived experiences in ways that are legible to those to who participate in research studies? I start with writing creatively and vulnerably. This work begins with the ethnographic vignettes designed to show the reader what was “observed in the field.” Instead, I employ the writing technique of flash stories to illustrate a moment witnessed between young women I came to know and learn from. Creative ethnography creates an opportunity to share critical theory, ethnographic methodology, and loving praxes to center the dreams and lived experiences of Black girl life with love and legibility to read one’s story.

Author

• Kenly Brown, Spencer Foundation