You Gotta Know How to Read and Write

• In Event: You're Invited: Black Women Educators (Re)Membering Ghana and the Complex Realities of Building Community

Abstract

“Like the dead seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say” (Hurston, 1991)
What does it mean to travel abroad with 13 people you have never met in the flesh? For me this question was an easy one, listen, be still, and watch for the ways by which one's words and actions align… or don't. My experiences before Ghana with the other participants in this group was a practice of “doing school.” Many of us went to primary school knowing how to “act” because we had the luxury of an experienced teacher at home. Some of us ended up being the only child sitting by themselves in the classroom because our behavior violated community rules. While meeting virtually, everyone participated in the norms we co-created, however, once we reached the continent of Africa, I quickly realized there might be a deep divide between the ways by which we exist, and consequently think we exist, with others in a group setting.
As a womanist, I am committed to building communities that are anti-oppressionist, vernacular, nonideological, and spiritualized (Maparyan, 2006). The literacy of womanism was evident in our experiences with Ghanian women at the market, hairdresser, and seamstress, but the writing of Ghana as we struggled to maintain our now in person community was tough. To read with another woman was easy, theoretically speaking, we were looking at the same book at the same time “Ghana.” To write with another woman takes a level of intimacy, and a repeated exploration into our inner vulnerabilities in ways I am not quite sure we were prepared to manifest. I found myself experiencing moments of optimism about the potential for our community to be a real sisterhood after our experience at a rope course on only our second day in the country. By the middle of the trip I questioned if I truly knew what I was getting into by signing up for this experience. On the last day I shed tears because I wanted us to be the sistas that I could not have ever dreamt of needing before I left home. Implications for this reflection provide space to discuss the rumpled ways we read and (re)member while continuously being challenged to rewrite mistruths we have learned about ourselves, our communities and the African diaspora. We (re)member so we can get well.

Author

• Danie Marshall, Georgia State University
  Presenting Author