Writing Black Feminist Living Now

A rhetorical question, phrased in African American vernacular, hides in the declaration of Jennifer Nash’s book title, How We Write Now. The book makes the assertion, cued in the subtitle: Living with Black Feminist Theory, that the present moment is contoured by a praxis of Black feminist living that has been and is always emerging. Nash frames the project as both inevitably personal and political—an enduring feminist theorization that encompasses Nash’s “slow motion” loss of her mother to dementia and public discourses of “Black loss and Black survival as tethered to Black mothers and their ‘wake work’” (1).

Nash’s project is to explore and name some of the kernel aesthetics of Black feminist living amidst the inexorably human experience of loss, in the midst of its unfolding. The book names and claims the extraordinary yet quotidian orientation of Black feminism towards a radical acceptance of grief as generative of and endemic to living. The urgency of the book is a result of Nash’s own maternal loss and what she describes as the “frame that has been developed, circulated, and honed with a particular intensity in the period of Black Lives Matter” (1). At stake is a critical method and reading practice that can recognize and appreciate the nuances and importance of Black feminist rendering of grievable and loveable Black life. Just as Barbara Smith (“Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” [1978]) and Barbara Christian (“The Race for Theory” [1987]) argued regarding Black women’s fiction, Nash asserts that it is imperative that we understand the literary forms of Black feminist loss in order to appreciate the work of writing and the work of grieving.

This orientation marks a significant if subtle departure from other major theses of death, debility, and decline as exceptional conditions to be negotiated and bounded, as articulated in some discourses of necropolitics, biopolitics, and bare life. In How We Write Now, Nash sits with the query, “How are we right now?” without succumbing to the adjacent and demanding question, poignantly posed by Toni Cade Bambara in her novel The Salt Eaters (1980), “Are you ready to be well?”

Nash’s book is structured as a sequence of studies of texts primarily by Black women on the topic of intimate loss and grief. Each chapter title articulates a lesson from the text at hand (e.g., “Staying at the Bone” comes from Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir, The Light of the World [2016]; “An Invitation to Listen” from Imani Perry’s Breathe [2019]). According to Nash, Black feminist writing is less invested in the promise of wellness than it is in the fact of being. The book is shaped by the author’s reckoning with her mother’s diagnosis with and progression through Alzheimer’s disease. The relationship between narration and vocabulary and love bonds is made palpable as Nash traces time through her father’s letters to her mother during their 1950s courtship, her mother’s post-diagnosis recasting of a fork as “that thing you eat with” (92), Nash’s professionally-prompted relocations from New Jersey to Massachusetts (twice) to Illinois to North Carolina. Marking time, as well, is a cohort of Black feminist writers and thinkers—living and deceased—who have made a project of narrating existence in the midst of the terminal human condition.

How We Write Now blends memoir, philosophy, and literary criticism in both its writing and in its objects of study to name recurring features of Black feminist thought. The most conspicuous of these observations involves the identification and aestheticization of loss as an integral preoccupation to be acknowledged rather than outrun. In texts and testimonies by Alice Walker, Claudia Rankine, Natasha Tretheway, Saidiya Hartman, Imani Perry, Elizabeth Alexander, Christina Sharpe, Patricia Williams, Patricia Hill Collins, Jesmyn Ward, and others, Nash identifies rich aesthetic devices—namely, mothering (8), eavesdropping (53), beauty (13), the epistle (56), the image (68), and, from Alexander, “staying at the bone” (25)—that are powerful in their implications for research in the Black feminist tradition.

With respect to beauty, Nash explains that she “use[s] the term beautiful to capture repetition . . . in Black feminist theoretical writing that allows their authors to whisper in their readers’ ears” (5). It is this investment in aesthetics—a beauty bound to ethics—that underwrites Nash’s thesis “that how Black feminists write now is in a beautiful voice, one that we find essential to staying close to what has become our central preoccupation: loss” (5). Indeed, Nash pointedly declares, “I am also insisting that Black feminist theorists treat loss as, in part, an aesthetic question” (5). The assertion here is that recent Black feminist writing has intentionally greeted the universal human experience of loss with beautiful images, prose, and theory. Nash is careful not to fully equate loss with death, though a number of the works with which she engages—including Natasha Trethaway’s Memorial Drive (2020) and Elizabeth Alexander’s The Light of the World (2015)—explore surviving the death of a beloved. Nash is interested in a more expansive phenomenon of loss, one that is heralded by Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007) and that accommodates her own mother’s waning existence in the present.

Indeed, each chapter of the book reads as a response to Hartman’s title, with an interest in how to navigate maternal loss in or even before its inevitable unfolding. Nash scans her father’s decades-old love letter to her mother for traces of a relationship that bloomed before her birth and finds, not “an account of desire intensified by physical distance,” but “a different kind of love letter, one that is suffused with the details of ordinary life” that, now, offer evidence of loss itself—including the loss of other letters, stashed in a now-missing shoebox, misplaced during her parents’ move from New Jersey to North Carolina (67). Calibrated by Christina Sharpe’s poignant Ordinary Notes (2023), Nash recognizes the letter for what it is—“an archive of my own desire to capture a moment in which I didn’t exist” and for its inertness to the archivist’s and the daughter’s desires for restoration (67).

The book attempts to make sense, through writing, of the incalculable rupture that is the loss of the mother: the death of the origin of one’s world. In this light, the project must be regarded as productive, even urgent, albeit as incomplete as any attempt to mobilize writing to extend or explain a life, be it Scheherazade’s or Tristram Shandy’s.

“How We Write Now maintains that the paradigmatic form of Black loss that Black feminists have made visible is articulated through a singular kind of voice” (Nash, 4). This statement is clear and compelling for the ways that it reaches beyond the authors considered in the book, to involve an enormous range of work, including, for instance, Erica Edwards’s The Other Side of Terror (2021) and Ida B. Wells’s A Red Record (1895), in an enduring politico-aesthetic project. While the book is addressed to many of the most current voices in the area of Black feminist grief, including usual suspects Hartman and Sharpe and their indebtedness to Hortense Spillers, it joins in a powerful choir that also includes Karla Holloway’s Passed On, Sharon P. Holland’s Raising the Dead (2000), and Kimberly Juanita Brown and Jyoti Puri’s Meridians October 2022 special issue dedicated to “Feminist Mourning” as important forbears in the tradition. Readers will find Nash’s book a welcome addition to the literature, though they will need to—and likely want to—forge additional connections with texts beyond Nash’s bibliography. Similarly, Nash’s arguments about Black feminist work of visualizing grief, rooted here in Tina Campt’s Listening to Images (2017), will benefit from a deeper engagement with the research of visual studies scholars, such as Deborah Willis’s groundbreaking Reflections in Black (2000), Shawn Michelle Smith’s Photographic Returns (2021), and Leigh Raiford’s Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare (2011).

How We Write Now is selective in its citations in ways that can come across as exclusionary. The fourth chapter on the image, for instance, reads primarily as an engagement with Hartman’s work on the image and, in particular, the photograph. It is not a comprehensive assessment of Black feminist visual studies, which would need to include more art historians and visual theorists to make such a claim. Similarly, assessments of listening would benefit from engagement with Black feminist theorists of sound such as Daphne Brooks (author of Liner Notes for the Revolution, 2021) and Imani Perry (author of Prophets of the Hood [2004] and whose book, Breathe [2019], is discussed).

The book is grounded in the sacred experience of a daughter-cum-mother tending to her own mother’s slow but inexorable drift toward the inevitable. Nash is clear in her embrace of Patricia Williams’s principle that “‘impersonal’ writing,” insofar as it is a “denial of self,” is dishonest writing (Williams qtd. in Nash, 5). An objective utterance is a lie, if not an impossibility, as embodiment, truly, is the thing in which we may catch the conscious of our whole selves. As such, the book leaves room for readers to export her observations to other, undiscussed works. And yet, some unmentioned works seem conspicuously absent. For example, how would an engagement with the motherhoods explored so richly by authors Toni Morrison and Jamaica Kincaid, activists Mamie Till and Ida B. Wells, and scholars Joy James and Kimberly Juanita Brown inflect maternal grief with indifference, rage, narcissism, and a host of other affects beyond the saintly? Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s foul and overdetermined pathologizing of Black motherhood in his 1965 report, Crisis of the Negro Family, looms large, perhaps unwittingly inspiring a politics of respectable Black motherhood that also tends to marginalize queer and non-romantic love bonds. The invocation of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s work on queer mothering is welcome, yet one wonders how much more expansive the book’s understanding of Black feminism would be were it to include bell hooks’s charge to consider love of community—not just storge (familial love), but philia and agape—as valuable and vital. What would shift and expand were queer mother Patrisse Kahn-Cullors’s letter to her son, When They Call You a Terrorist, be considered alongside Imani Perry’s Breathe, especially given Perry’s designation of Cullors as one of the “Black death hustlers” with whom Samaria Rice, Tamir’s mother, had issues? There is no shame in telling the truth, and Nash’s truth is hers, though one that may appear to some as cossetted by the financial (but not necessarily spiritual) privileges of academic tenure. James’s work on the captive maternal, as a radical agent actively resisting the ways that class and access deform motherhood, would add an important facet to thinking Black feminist motherhood beyond safety and care (James 2016).

Perhaps How We Right Now’s most provocative intervention is its forceful assertion of a “we”: “a cadre of Black feminist theorists who share an aesthetic, ethical, and political commitment to beautiful writing as a method for staying close to loss” (13). Nash is quite aware of the perils of ontological thought with respect to Black folks who have been alienated from asserting a “we” in the face of an overdetermined afropessimistic social death (here, Nash cites Frank Wilderson’s comment, “Blacks are not Human subjects, but are instead structurally inert props”) (Wilderson qtd. in Nash, 13) and a presumptive, homogenizing universal feminism “that Black feminism and woman-of-color feminism are thought to have disrupted” (Nash, 13). Claiming a “we” is an integral gesture in claiming and naming the critical labor of Black feminist writing that Nash observes as having “shifted” towards greater visibility “in the past decade” (15). To be sure, this is an assertion about institutions and cohorts even as it casts appropriate suspicions upon the contours and disciplining of those locations and groupings. Nash identifies the academy as an important and unique site of Black feminist theory and, moreover, makes plain her primary investments in “a set of authors who primarily work in the university, who primarily publish on academic presses, and who are attached to genealogies of Black feminist theory that are legible in the context of the US university, that circulate across disciplines in the humanities and interpretive social sciences” (16–17). One detects that the point of this clear assertion is not to disparage the role of Black feminist theory for wider publics (Nash acknowledges this popularity), but to advocate for its rightful recognition within the academy as rigorous, instructive, and beautiful. The book is then also a memoir of and an homage to the recent generation of Black feminist writers who have not stopped inevitable losses but have named and honored those losses.

So, how are we, Black feminists, right now? We are. We write.