You Won’t Forget Us: Black Girls Using Altar Practices to Map Their Lives

• In Event: Archive to Unforget: Educational Geographies of Remembering, Reclaiming & the Recovery of Our Collective Memory

Abstract

This presentation offers insights into an ethnographic study conducted (Author, 2022; 2019) as part of my dissertation research project that utilizes Black girl cartographies (Butler, 2018) to map sites of wake work (Sharpe, 2016). Christina Sharpe (2016) describes ‘wake work’ as “processes to enact grief and memory through rituals to remember the dead and our relation to them and “as modes of attending to Black life and Black death.” Through engaging practices of ‘(re)membering (Dillard, 2016) , Black girls part of A Long Walk Home Inc.’s leadership program Girl/ Friends map both the lives and deaths of Black girls in the city. The ancestral practice of activating an altar space or physical sacred station to commune with the ancestors was incorporated into the pedagogy of organization that facilitated our healing through the many ways we experienced ‘loss’, specifically as Black women and girls.

Loss is an inevitable occurrence, but even more so for Black and other marginalized people. Altars offer a sacred, communal, and spiritual space for people to recount collective memory. It is a common practice across spiritual practices and cultures that affirm our cultural identity and our spiritual needs. Therefore the altar emerged during our summer program as a way to move through grief as we first began with our own loved ones, and then added Black women and girls that were killed by the state or by domestic violence. It continued to expand alongside the unfortunate events of Black girls going missing in the city while the police dismissed the happenings as a hoax. The altar emerged unconventionally as a mapping tool that uplifted the stories of these forgotten Black girls.

My conceptualizations of the formation of the altar and its representation is informed by my active participation as a facilitator of the space, collective conversations amongst those who contributed to it and observations of the artifacts placed on the sacred table. Specifically, the altar holds stories of Black girlhood in Chicago for the past, present and future. It exists as an archival artifact in that Black girls’ narrate their own living and death.

Author (2022)

Author(2019)

Butler, T. T. (2018). Black girl cartography: Black girlhood and place-making in education
research. Review of Research in Education, 42(1), 28–45. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X18762114

Dillard, Cynthia B. “Turning the Ships Around: A Case Study of (Re)Membering as
Transnational Endarkened Feminist Inquiry and Praxis for Black Teachers.” Educational Studies (Ames) 52(5) 2016: 406-423. DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2016.1214916.

Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press
2016. DOI:10.1515/9780822373452.

Author

• Aja Reynolds, Wayne State University