"To Be Available to the Universe": Trauma and Healing within Black and Brown Freedom Movements

Toni Cade Bambara begins her 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters, with an audacious question posed by Minnie Ransom, a local healer, to Velma Henry, the protagonist of the novel: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” Velma is a community organizer in the imaginary, Southern, all-Black town of Claybourne. She is the founder of Women for Action, an organization that, according to her comrade-sisters, had taken on “entirely too much: drugs, prisons, alcohol, the schools, rape, battered women, abused children.” Velma had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide as a result of her exhaustion from political activism and personal betrayal after her husband cheated on her. She was brought to the Southwest Community Infirmary, and she now finds herself completely taken aback by Minnie’s daring question. Velma does not know what to say, and wonders why Minnie is “asking some stupid damn question like that, blind to Velma’s exasperation, her pain, her humiliation.” But Minnie probes Velma even further, saying “you’ll have to choose, sweetheart. Choose your own cure … There’s nothing that stands between you and perfect health,

Minnie’s suggestion that Velma must choose her own path toward healing initially feels exasperating and burdensome. Minnie, however, explains that paying attention to one’s interior life has nothing to do with being “good” or making oneself more convenient to others. Instead, finding one’s own sense of well-being was about being “available to the universe … to any and every adventure of the human Bambara believed that people could “plug into other kinds of intelligence” and “be a higher sovereign than the – this was especially relevant for Black readers, who faced daily and structural conditions of death and whose humanity had been deeply violated. According to Bambara’s colleague and Black feminist scholar Gloria Hull, Bambara belonged to a small but prolific group of Black feminist writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker whose blending of “radical-feminist-political realism and spiritual-supernatural awareness” created a new form of African American Bambara was surrounded by Black people who practiced spiritual technologies that gave them the sense that the “universe was a wondrously mysterious but ordered and purposeful organism.” They were using dream analysis, the Ouija board, crystal work, and Tarot cards, among many others to converse with ghosts and tap into a higher power than what they could see and touch in the physical realm. This spirituality had overlaps with the New Age movement, but it aimed to achieve much more than the individual self-actualization envisioned by most white New Age practitioners. Black feminist practitioners like Bambara sought to see their cosmic connectedness and spiritual power so that they could create an alternative destiny for the whole world.

This essay joins scholars interested in creating a more expansive and politically robust understanding of trauma and healing within freedom movements than traditionally imagined. It takes part in conversations initiated by Black and Latinx feminist and disability studies scholars who have unapologetically believed in the liberatory potential of Black and Latinx feminist thought in creating a new way of being If we seriously consider philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s claim that “the systemic revalorization of Black peoples can only be fundamentally effected by means of the no less systemic revalorization of human being itself,” then we can begin this process by paying attention to Black feminists’ vision of a new Wynter’s response to global warming, climate-destabilizing free-market capitalist economies, hierarchically stratified systems of labor and of being human was not her own redefinition of being human apart from the ideal of the white, post-Renaissance concept of Man/Human, but a question: “What does it mean to be She boldly declares that humanness should no longer be considered a “noun” or an ontological given; instead, “being human is a She borrows from Frantz Fanon’s focus on sociogenesis to highlight that “I am who I am in relation to the other who sees me as such,” and therefore, reimagining what it means to be a human requires not only thinking about it, but also working it out with others.

Black and Latinx feminists’ way of working out a new praxis of being human involved a challenge to epistemological dichotomizations adopted within Western societies. In particular, Black and Latinx feminist activists rejected the dichotomization of the “good freedom fighter” and his evil twin, the “bad criminal.” They did not view activists as “heroes” who were immune to psychological harm, nor did they view ordinary people of color as locked in a position of “victimhood,” overburdened by irreparable trauma or incapable of forging their own path toward self-determination. Instead, they viewed all human beings – including activists – as possessing conflicted feelings, psychological pain, troubled relationships, as well as an expansive capacity for wonder, love, grace, healing, and power. They were attuned to their own trauma – traumas caused by racial and gender oppression, movement work, as well as the everyday injuries of living in a society ruled by the logics of extraction, blame and individual gain. And they were willing to invite others to join them in their work of self-remaking and collective liberation.

The three Black and Latinx feminists discussed in this essay demonstrate a feminist praxis of liberation centered on inner transformation. Aurora Levins Morales’s processing of her trauma as a victim of child sexual abuse and patriarchy; Toni Cade Bambara’s use of fictional narratives to uncover the quotidian struggles of Black women against patriarchy and a politics that denied one’s sacred interior; and Ericka Huggins’ processing through the loss of her husband and separation from her daughter through meditation in prison all exemplify different approaches that Black and Latinx feminists took to address human suffering in the various forms that they experienced and witnessed it. They differed in their approaches to addressing trauma. Whereas Morales primarily recounted her personal experiences of trauma in the form of memoirs to create “medicine stories” for fellow activists committed to building political liberation, Bambara mostly used fiction to address the collective grief that Black people experienced in the 1970s and 1980s, in the aftermath of the civil rights and Black Power movements. Huggins’ primary mode of public engagement has been through poetry, oral histories, interviews, and spiritual education. All three of them practiced the kind of “revolutionary mothering” that Alexis Pauline Gumbs defined as the kind of mothering that involves much more than one’s relationship with their biological children and extends to all practices of “creating, nurturing, affirming and supporting Still, the spiritual transformation that Ericka Huggins experienced as a result of her separation from her biological daughter led her to eventually practice restorative justice with Watani Stiner, someone who was involved with the murder of her husband. As a biological mother, she blended the kind of mothering that is considered “soft” and traditional with the more radical project of “revolutionary mothering” and embodying abolition politics. Morales, Bambara and Huggins thus possessed different experiences of trauma, different ways of processing them, and different ways of discussing them in public.

I examine these three authors despite their differences because they were actively involved in the Black and Brown freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and they demonstrated common practices of healing. First, they possessed a radical faith in people’s self-healing capacities. Rather than imagining people as “victims” who should receive healing from an “expert” healer, they believed that those who had experienced harm or suffering had all the resources necessary to attain one’s own self-healing – only, they needed to gain the awareness to see the spirits, ancestors, universe, and their own experiences supporting their recovery. Black and Latinx feminists were conscious of the various forms of dehumanization they had suffered as people of color and as women. Not only did they bear the psychological injury of witnessing the repression of the Black, Chicano and Puerto Rican movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but they had also experienced particularly gendered forms of psychological harm. In the late 1960s and 1970s, government officials demonized working-class mothers of color receiving welfare aid by falsely accusing them of “cheating the system” and calling them “brood mares” –when in fact all they wanted to do was to provide the basic means of sustenance for their Black, Indigenous and Latinx women lost their reproductive autonomy as they were disproportionately targeted for forced sterilization because neo-eugenicists believed that the world’s survival depended on the extinction of poor people of Black women who sought protection from sexual violence were often told that their suffering mattered less than the violence experienced by Black men under police killings simply because they were less

In the face of such traumatic experiences, Black and Latinx feminists refused to feel shame regarding their dehumanization as “welfare queens,” “disposable,” “sexually deviant” or “excessively Rather than viewing their trauma as a terrifying specter from which they should seek an escape, they thought of it as a portal to experience a deeper transformation in their consciousness. As Gloria Anzaldúa put it, suffering is “one of the motivating forces of the creative impulse, the cauldron through which fragments, inconsistencies, and contradictions could be stirred and cooked to a new integration.” Those who had experienced this new integration could engage in spiritual activism and become nepantleras, which Anzaldúa defined as “supreme border crossers.” Nepantleras, as Anzaldúa imagined, “move between the worlds … and can circumvent polarizing binaries … they think in terms of the planet, not just their own racial group, the U.S. or Norte América … they serve as agents of awakening … and serve as reminders of each other’s search for wholeness of Nepantleras would thus infuse political movements with spiritual insights, creativity, and boldness of imagination.

To Black and Latinx feminists, paying attention to one’s spiritual voice was not simply an exercise toward the self-actualization of the individual – as envisioned by psychotherapists – but a step toward the remaking of the world. It was a reevaluation of one’s entire alignment with dominant ideologies, systems of power, and ways of relating to others. Bambara articulated this orientation as her commitment to create a world beyond “anticolonialism.” In The Salt Eaters, she critiques the limitations of political work that is not infused with a broader, more transformative kind of vision through a conversation between Fred, the bus driver, and a man he knew as a child named Old Jimmy Lyons: “Old Jimmy Lyons … told [Fred] … that ‘Negro people were fours and so long as they paid more attention to folks trying to pen them in, hem them in, box them in on all four sides thinking they had them in prison than to the work at hand, why then they would never get a spare moment to look up at the sun and build.” To Bambara, being attentive only to the fact that one was “boxed in” by European colonialism was like “collaborat[ing] with your captives … to lend them energy … providing them with the power to keep you locked in.” There was “something before colonialism and there is something that persists in spite of it. It’s that core that interests me,” she

The second common practice that I found among the three authors is connected to the first one: part of the reason why they were attentive to their inner “light” as self-healers was that they were also curious about their “shadow.” The “shadow,” as conceptualized by psychologist Carl Jung, constitutes “all aspects of a person that are unacceptable or distasteful to them,” or “what is rejected by consciousness, both positive and negative In particular, nepantleras like Morales, Bambara and Huggins were curious about the shadow resulting from their experiences with intimate harm. Although they were critical of the values instilled by capitalist, white supremacist, and heteronormative societies, they recognized that they had been conditioned to internalize them. Part of transforming the world then required, in Audre Lorde’s words, “recognizing the enemy outside and the enemy Their confrontation of harms caused by state violence did not foreclose their desire to dismantle intimate forms of harm as well– those resulting from their relationship with intimate partners, movement comrades, and They were willing to confront the emotionally fraught topics of intimate harm and self-harm not so much because they wanted to absolve the state, but because they recognized their higher capacity for self-transformation. They were committed to a way of being that Kevin Quashie has called “Black whereby Black feminists prioritized their desire to respond to their own soul’s desires and ethics rather than anyone else’s. Their “aliveness” was not something that they could receive from the state or anyone else; they had to nurture it themselves.

Other scholars have similarly explored the priorities that led Black feminists to be willing to have public discussions about gender politics within movement work. Despite the risk that others might demonize the Black Power movement by exaggerating its patriarchy, Black feminists were willing to talk about their feelings and their experiences because they sought to shed light on what motivated them aside from their political opposition to white supremacy. According to Robyn Spencer, Black women from the Black Panther Party (BPP) committed themselves to “co-creating a new world” by creating a community that was “neither a bastion of joy nor absent of hierarchy and dysfunctions” but nevertheless gave them a “profound feeling of hope and Others like Shatema Threadcraft explored Black feminists’ pursuit of “intimate justice” through discussions about sexual, reproductive and caretaking activities because they recognized that they wanted more than the mere redistribution of material goods –they wanted the “conditions necessary to the development and exercise of individual

The three authors I examine here did not all identify with disability – only Morales did – but their willingness to interrogate intimate harm resonates with the praxis articulated by disability studies/crip theory scholars. Crip praxis, as imagined by the editors of Crip Genealogies, involves a disregard for normative criteria used to invalidate certain knowledge systems based on the notion that they are considered to be “irrelevant, unreasonable, unuseful, and In response to such criteria, crip scholars intentionally orient themselves to that which seems “useless.” La Marr Jurelle Bruce echoes this sentiment when he argues that “mad methodology” cultivates a critical ambivalence toward that which is deemed to be “crazy” by normative standards in mainstream society because it recognizes that those who are labeled “mad” can act as “critical theorists and decisive protagonists in struggles for Thus, the kind of orientation that crip theorists adopt overlaps with Black and Latinx feminists’ way of being. The latter group’s experience or witness of trauma led them to feel pain and agony about their injury, but they did not consider themselves “damaged.” Instead, they looked at their “shadow” with curiosity, and gave themselves permission to engage in activities that were deemed “crazy” or “unreasonable” by others while pursuing healing – whether it involved forgiving an “unforgivable sin” or having conversations with trees. They were willing to deviate from normative standards of behavior so that they could pursue their own “erotic” – what Audre Lorde described as the “measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can

Lastly, the Black and Latinx feminists examined here were tethered to an abolitionist ethics of care rooted in their understanding that all systems of power are relational. Recognizing that the carceral duality created by the “victim/perpetrator” framework does not match the lived experiences of human beings, they responded to their own shadow and that of others with compassion. They rejected, as prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba put it, “really simple narratives around perfect victims who are assaulted by evil monsters.” Instead, they called for more nuanced narratives that took into account the fact that “in a particular situation, we’re victimized, and in other situations, we’re the people that perpetrate This practice led them to adopt a radical stance against moral purity and toward radical compassion – directed toward themselves and all those who seemed different from them. They forged a distinctly feminist vision of the revolution that pays more attention to the capacity for human transformation for both victims and perpetrators than the need to shield oneself from harm.

There is more at stake in this essay’s examination than ever before. As healing justice activists Cara Page and Erica Woodland have pointed out, we are witnessing the whole “erasure, co-optation, and misappropriation of healing In the midst of the ongoing crises of global warming, fascist regimes, premature death of Black, Indigenous and people of color, unsustainable work conditions, and loss of bodily autonomy, we have been witnessing attacks against free speech, academic freedom, and political dissent in more recent years. While people’s sense of collective rage and grief resulting from these crises is growing, their access to spaces that can appropriately address their emotional, psychological, spiritual and political needs are few and far between. Instead, the concepts of “self-care” and “wellness” have been commodified to such an extent that “Spirit” has become a tool for individual self-actualization and accumulation of social media influence. Mainstream healing practitioners have commodified spirituality so that it is used to escape our present material conditions rather than to actively engage with it. What Black and Latinx feminists demonstrated, however, is that the way to process trauma is not by avoiding it or pretending one can be immune from it, but by working through it. Their legacy is manifested in the work of contemporary healing justice activists. They are critiquing the individualist ethos of mainstream health care systems, but they are not rejecting science entirely. Instead, they are created partnerships with nurses and health practitioners who are ready to disrupt their complicity in the systems where they worked. Organizations like Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective in Atlanta, GA and Casa de Salud in Albuquerque, NM have been modeling this kind of work since the 1990s. They are partnering with doctors, nurses, therapists, environmental justice organizers and healing practitioners to integrate traditional and Western medicine and provide affordable universal healthcare that addresses collective grief and trauma as well as basic health care I hope this essay can provide a longer historical context to the work that is already taking place and contribute to the collective knowledge that activists and scholars are building toward healing justice.

Listening to the Power Within

For Aurora Levins Morales, telling her story as a victim of child sexual abuse is both an act of personal healing and a political tool of building feminist solidarity. According to her memoir, written in 1998 and revised in 2019, she grows up as the child of a Puerto Rican feminist and a Jewish American biologist who are both politically active in independentista and socialist organizations. She holds a position of relative privilege as the blonde child of a university professor among poor coffee workers in rural Puerto Rico. Her privilege as “blonde, light-skinned, and ‘americanita’” ironically places her in a position of greater vulnerability as it gives her greater value within the international sex traffic of children. Her fourth-grade teacher, who manages the local branch of the international sex traffic, threatens to kill her family, and secretly rapes, tortures and photographs her without her parents’ knowledge for five The torment ends when her family moves from Puerto Rico to Chicago, and she joins women’s consciousness raising groups when she is fifteen. Therapy and women’s consciousness-raising groups help her understand the connections between her symptoms and her trauma. Through therapy, she discovers that her inability to sleep and persistent intrusive violent images are common responses documented among victims of sexual abuse. At her first women’s consciousness-raising group meeting, she discovers the power of listening and bearing witness to others:

As each woman in turn spoke about her life and we recognized how much we had in common, we became able to identify the sources of our anger, frustration and self-doubt in the treatment we had received at the hands of men. Our exhilaration came from the realization that our pain was not after all a character flaw but a direct result of systematic injustice and that our reactions made complete

Political education and collective listening allow Morales to set aside her feelings of shame and self-blame and move into a place of righteous indignation. She is able to attain what many psychologists and spiritual thinkers call “transcendence,” in which victims of trauma are able to “assimilate the terrible, the unbearable, transforming it into something that can be integrated; something that can nourish us and leave us with a vision of the world, of ourselves, of humanity, that is bigger than the horror,” as Morales put it. She recognizes that the cost of avoiding this kind of inner work would leave her “vulnerable to all the errors of judgment that unresolved trauma generates in To write about her story, despite the unspeakability of trauma, is an essential part of her survival and self-healing.

Her commitment to self-healing, however, is not detached from her political desire to dismantle patriarchy and sexual violence alongside all other victims. Telling her story is a political act against patriarchy since silencing is such a powerful tool of domination used by perpetrators. Quoting psychologist Judith Herman, Morales explains that sexual abusers do everything in their power to attack the credibility of their victims and promote forgetting in order to control disclosures of abuse. Victims’ willingness to reveal their stories to the public, then, becomes a vital part of resisting the history of sexual domination. By refusing to privatize her suffering, she offers her “medicine bag and a tool kit” to all “travelers” who are “facing and recovering from the traumas of ongoing, violent oppression in the middle of trying to dismantle

Still, Morales does not imply that one can will oneself to retell one’s experience with trauma. Retelling any narrative of trauma is difficult. The physical and psychic experience of reliving the trauma can be too much to bear at times. In her essay “Histerimonia: Declarations of a Trafficked Girl, or Why I couldn’t Write This Essay,” Morales reveals that, when “I set myself to write what I call a histerimonia of my own sexual exploitation within the immense and malevolent traffic in raped girls and women,” she experienced nightmares, headaches, and could not eat or sleep well. Remembering those “men with knife eyes who threatened me with torture and death if I talked” sickened her with “rage” and she “could not maintain residence in [her] own Indeed, as psychologist Judith Herman explained, victims of sexual violence experience a “conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud,” often making the retelling of their stories “contradictory and

If the task of retelling a horrifying event is not difficult enough, Morales faces the additional burden of being a Puerto Rican-Jewish woman. As such, she is vulnerable to the kind of public consumption of her narrative that can counter her own healing. As literary scholar Leigh Gilmore has argued, women of color have to meet inordinate public demands for accuracy and In a neoliberal environment in which patriarchy is assumed to be legitimate, claims of sexual violence by survivors are often met with the pathologizing claim that they have “false memories” that can be “implanted” by malevolent or misguided therapists. Having to prove one’s truth within the broader public can thus be further traumatizing. As a woman of color, Morales is also at risk of being made into a spectacle of suffering, an object that the mainstream literary market has been eager to commodify as a form of white

Morales thus chooses to carefully retell her experience with sexual trauma in the 1998 publication of her memoir, Medicine Stories: History, Culture and the Politics of Integrity, more than seventeen years after she became a published author. Here, she tells a full, coming-of-age narrative, revealing both her wounding as a victim of sexual violence as well as her reckoning with being a descendant of slave-holding families in Puerto Rico. Morales weaves these two narratives because she does not want to define herself exclusively as a “victim.” Instead, she lays out a “political and spiritual practice” that is necessary for the “healing of perpetrators” as well as victims. She challenges the notion that “healing” is only possible or necessary to “victims” of abuse, insisting that perpetrators must experience their own healing as well. Contrary to popular belief, Morales argues that denying her family’s participation in systems of exploitation is more burdensome than being held accountable for it. Whereas remaining in feelings of “guilt and denial” about her family’s consolidation of wealth at the cost of human exploitation “require[s] immense amounts of energy and are profoundly immobilizing,” giving up such feelings and “deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act” and leads to “greater integrity.” Reckoning with her participation in the enslavement of people is intricately connected with her healing as a victim of sexual abuse, as both processes require that she move from a place of powerlessness and “self-pity” to a “spacious, powerful and whole” self where she can “tak[e] charge of things, for changing the world and

The political and cultural context of the late 2010s allows Morales to reveal yet another layer of her trauma. In the 2019 edition of her memoir, she discusses her more common experience of being seduced by a social movement leader. Morales, along with five women in five other U.S. cities, were seduced into a romantic relationship with a Chilean revolutionary leader, while he “manag[ed] a wife and a mistress at home, lying to us all, reaping our support of him like a cash crop, and leaving the soil of us wearily Critiquing patriarchy within Black and Brown freedom movements was a significant challenge for women like Morales whose experiences with infidelity and sexual objectification were often ignored because they were deemed “secondary” to the greater importance of maintaining political unity against white supremacy. According to Robyn Spencer, leaders from political organizations like the Black Panther Party espoused to dismantle both white supremacy and patriarchy, but often fell short of such a lofty goal. Even as Huey Newton invited women to speak up against gender hierarchy within the Panthers, women’s testimonies of sexual abuse or mistreatment were met with silence at best, and punishment at When women from the Young Lords Party (YLP) formed a Women’s Caucus within the YLP and demanded an end to their sexual objectification within the organization, they were accused of being It is not surprising that women like Morales waited until political movements like the #MeToo movement emerged in the late 2010s to bring their stories to the public, when revelations of seemingly “non-catastrophic” forms of abuse could be recognized as a legitimate form of trauma. As Leigh Gilmore explained, “trauma is never exclusively personal … remembering trauma entails contextualizing it within

Whereas Morales used a memoir to create a practice of self-liberation, Toni Cade Bambara used fiction to express her spiritual hunger and forge a more spiritually grounded Black revolution. Instead of writing about her personal encounters with harm, Bambara created fictional characters to discuss Black people’s collective wounding from the political struggles of the late 1960s and 1970s and their psychic and spiritual search to be a “higher sovereign than the state.” The struggle that Velma Henry, Bambara’s main character in The Salt Eaters, faces to recover her sense of self symbolizes the fragmentation that Bambara sees within the Black nation. Velma’s struggles with a mental breakdown, betrayal from her husband, factionalism and patriarchy within political and cultural organizations, gender violence, and careerism represent the grief and inner conflicts of Black people as a whole.

While it is impossible to know all of the reasons why Bambara chose fiction rather than a memoir to express herself, we can attempt to unpack the myriad desires and constraints that shaped Bambara’s pursuits. Her love of the arts as a form of political activism emerged early on, when she joined groups of undergraduate students who used theater productions to critique McCarthyism at Queens College in the 1950s. She identified herself as a “cultural worker” whose main job was to “make revolution irresistible” rather than morally imperative. Based on her biography by Linda Holmes, it is clear that she was not as willing to divulge matters related to her family conflicts with the public as her brother Walter Cade was. During interviews conducted by Holmes, Walter Cade revealed that their parents’ relationship was troubled by their father’s infidelity and physical abuse, and their father left the family when Bambara was only ten years old. Bambara’s own marriage with Anthony Batten did not last longer than a year, and she raised her daughter Karma as a single Bambara was familiar with trauma in her own life, but such experiences did not necessarily lead her to want to write about them as an act of survival or self-liberation.

Aside from her own preference against self-disclosure, Bambara’s writing was constrained by white supremacy, as well as Black Americans’ coping strategies with it. Bambara probably recognized that her position as a Black working-class woman rendered her vulnerable to white demands for accuracy and objectivity that would be impossible to meet – a predicament that she shared with Aurora Morales, but in its more insidious form. When Bambara wrote about the disappearance of men, women and children in Atlanta in If Blessing Comes (posthumously published under the title Those Bones Are Not My Child), she revealed that she had favored writing about the disappearances through fiction rather than investigative journalism out of concern for her safety and protection from libel Unlike Morales, however, Bambara operated within a much stronger collective agreement among Black people that a “culture of dissemblance” was an essential tactic of survival for Black To violate that principle and publicly reveal any personal struggles with self-harm or intimate harm would invite criticism among Black readers. Even Alice Walker’s fictional account of domestic violence and marital rape in The Color Purple (1982) had led some Black readers to denounce the work as a “betrayal of Despite the blurred boundaries between fiction and reality, fiction provided relative freedom for Bambara to pursue more “liberatory possibilities of the

Fiction allowed Bambara to address particularly fraught sources of pain at the time of the publication of The Salt Eaters – the collective racial grief that African Americans had yet to mourn for the premature decline of the civil rights and Black Power movements, as well as the particular wound that Black women experienced with misogyny within Black political organizations. As Aida Levy-Hussen argued, narratives about historical trauma allow readers to address contemporary injuries as well as articulate fantasies of The repression that radical Black organizations faced from FBI’S COINTEL-PRO (Counterintelligence Program), including psychological warfare, imprisonment and assassinations; factionalism within political organizations; the reversal of civil rights gains under Nixon’s and Reagan’s administrations and the defunding of social safety net programs including welfare left the majority of Black Americans feeling angry, hopeless and cynical. Yet most public discussions of Black mental health ran the risk of pathologizing their feelings, as if Black people experienced feelings only in their excessive and negative forms – if Black people felt cautious, they were imagined as “paranoid”; if they felt weary, they were described as Within this constraining backdrop, Bambara does not map out a political strategy to respond to political repression, but she invites readers to feel the pain that Black people experienced through Velma’s character. The figure of a Black woman dealing with psychological turmoil and in search of a deeper spiritual core becomes the symbol through which Black readers might give themselves permission to scream, grunt, or moan.

Bambara’s main character in The Salt Eaters, Velma Henry, struggles to find her sovereign self in the midst of the cacophony of voices that both validate and invalidate her existence. She distances herself from others by overworking, in part, because she is dealing with “Malcolm gone, King gone, Fannie Lou gone, Angela quiet, the movement splintered, enclaves In the midst of such political fragmentation, Black male leaders like Jay Patterson only offer uninspiring models of survival by prioritizing his career as an electoral leader and exploiting Black women’s labor within political organizations. When Velma reflects on her life of political activism, however, she comes to see the contradictions of her own choices, including the irony of working toward the liberation of Black people while also holding a job at Transchemical, a nuclear plant that is known to emit radioactive fumes in the air of the working-class Black community in which Velma resides.

She thought she knew … how to build immunity to the sting of the serpent that turned would-be cells, could-be cadres into cargo cults. Thought she knew how to … stay centered in the best of her people’s traditions and not be available to madness, not become intoxicated by the heady brew of degrees and career and congratulations for nothing done, not become anesthetized by dazzling performances with somebody else’s

To fight against the intoxication that comes from being driven by external validation, Velma realizes she must look inward and rediscover herself. She is at times engulfed by the terror surrounding her: “[Velma] was still trying to resist, still trying to think what good did wild do you, since there was always some low life gruesome gang bang raping lawless careless pesty law straw nasty thing ready to pounce.” What good would “healing” do for her, in a world where violence against Black women is so pervasive? In the eyes of the health workers at the infirmary, she may look like another “crazy Black woman:” “the news of the spitting, biting, bleeding, thrashing Velma, ‘active hallucinating’ … it had so taken her breath away, [the health worker] could get nothing in her throat to Like so many Black people who are pathologized as “crazy,” Velma can easily be reduced to an object of contempt and devoid of Still, Velma’s desire to fight for her life persists. She realizes she is not fighting alone and listens to the spirits around her “wait[ing] to be called out of its chamber, embraced and directed … to claim her life from the split imposter. But called out from the mouth of the heart, coaxed out silently by baby-catching Velma learns to mother herself, imagining the spirits that will catch her when she feels like she’s falling. She learns to take responsibility for herself – not because she wants to become useful to the movement again, but because her commitment to honor her life guides her to rediscover her own inner light.

The end of Bambara’s novel does not necessarily present a “redeemed” or “healed” Velma, but Bambara uses a poem by Doc Serge, a former gang leader who manages the infirmary, to shed light on the kind of self-love and ecstasy that can one day restore Velma’s interior life:

‘I am one beautiful and powerful son of a bitch … Smart as a whip, respected, prosperous, beloved and valuable. I have the right to be healthy, happy and rich, and I am the baddest player in this arena or any other. I love myself more than I love money and pretty women and fine clothes … I love myself in error and in correctness, waking or sleeping, sneezing, tipsy, or fabulously brilliant … he continued his litany, having long ago stumbled upon the prime principle … that self-love produces the gods and the gods are

To move from a place of terror to ecstasy, Velma needs to do the inner work that only she can do for herself – loving herself “in error and in correctness.” But she does not attain this alone. She’s supported by an infirmary where there is an integration of Western and traditional medicine, as well as different traditions of spiritual practice. At times Velma seems to be entirely skeptical of therapists, tired of “starchy explanations from the quacks who called themselves guidance counselors, social workers, analysts, therapists, whose views had more to do with their own habits of illusion than anything rooted in the natural, the Yet she recognizes that the way back to herself will require integrating the knowledge of those who are “psychically adept” with those who are “political.” It is not surprising that Bambara is critical of mental health professionals, given the dominance of the therapeutic ethos that white liberals adopted in the U.S. since the 1950s, which imbued a more paternalistic form of racism than any effective resistance to it. But her attitude toward therapists signals a critical ambivalence more than outright rejection. The infirmary that carries Velma through her moment of crisis fuses “Western medicine and the traditional arts.” Patients regain a sense of wellbeing through the “drug rehab acupuncture clinic” alongside the “resourcefulness of … the grannies and midwives, the root men, the conjure women, the obeah folks, and the medicine people of the Yamasse and Yamacrow.” A more traditional “prayer group” is also available since some people “held on to sickness with a fiercesomeness that took twenty hard-praying folks to The universe that envelops Velma with care and a new sense of possibility blends traditional and nontraditional forms of medicine and religion.

Bambara certainly recognized the power of the Black church, but her spiritual versatility emerged, in part, from her detachment from traditional Black familial and religious institutions. She was raised by a single Black mother in New York City without an extensive family network or Black church community nearby. Her openness to the mysteries of spiritual knowledge led her to gain a wealth of spiritual resources from Black practitioners she met at locations as varied as voodoo festivals in Galveston, Odunde ceremonies in Philadelphia, and universities –she once met a “black female university dean who can Bambara described her own process of writing The Salt Eaters as a “dream,” a process of “discovering” and responding to a spiritual call that was initially unknown to her. She began to listen to her “contradictions … duplicities of feelings; probed beneath the smooth camouflage of words for tell-tale droppings,” and one day, when she was walking in the woods, “I slumped down next to my favorite tree and just said, ‘Okay, I’m stepping aside, y’all. I’m getting out of the way. What is the story I’m supposed to be telling. Tell me.’ Then I wrote The Salt Eaters.” Writing to her cousin three years after completing the novel, Bambara described that writing her first novel “grabbed hold of [her],” and it became a “compulsion. And a joy. And my unction. And THE

Bambara’s experience echoes the process that Jacqui M. Alexander has theorized as the forging of a “praxis of the Sacred.” Alexander describes this process as a form of “excavation” where one has

to sense the presence of the Soul and commune with her … it is a job of changing the self. And it is a job. It requires work. It requires practice. It cannot be someone else’s excavation that we easily appropriate as our own and use as our own. It cannot be done as spectator or ventriloquist. It requires the work of each and every one of

Like Morales and Bambara, Ericka Huggins also learned to commune with her soul through collective practices of care. But unlike the former two, Huggins was uniquely transformed by her relationship with her biological daughter. She had joined the Black Panther Party (BPP) in Los Angeles with her husband John Huggins at the age of eighteen in 1968. Three weeks after the birth of their daughter Mai Huggins in 1969, her husband and Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter were assassinated. She herself had been charged with kidnapping and murdering Alex Rackley, a member of the New Haven chapter of the BPP, and she was incarcerated for two years as a result. Both events had resulted from the FBI-COINTELPRO’s infiltration in the BPP and their intent to discredit and disrupt radical Black organizations. She was later acquitted of the charges, but the trauma of having witnessed Rackley’s death still weighed her soul While she was incarcerated, she also dealt with the pain of being separated from her baby daughter and had to figure out a way to “stay sane and whole and be OK to see my baby daughter … for an hour each Saturday.” In the midst of dealing with multiple losses, she taught herself to meditate. She described her time in prison as a time of “deep introspection,” and “like a monastery.” Learning how to meditate led her to forgive herself and experience deep joy. “Once I began to meditate, I recognized that there’s no high that can compare to that … meditation just keeps you even and not only that, the inner joy is so endless and Through meditation, Huggins found a sacred interior that she could attend to despite the violence of the state.

While learning to practice Hatha yoga in prison, she continued her organizing work among women. She founded the Sister Love Collective, a group of women who did one another’s hair. In the process of doing each other’s hair, the women began to engage in political education as well. They discussed the various reasons why they had been incarcerated – sex work, substance abuse, or self-defense against abusers. In the process of telling their stories, the “women could feel whole and complete and beautiful” as they took care of each other’s hair and held their pain Huggins’ ethics of care was likely influenced by the collectivist ethos of the BPP, as well as her emerging faith in the Hindu concept of “Shiva,” which means “I call upon God within me.” When she deepened her meditation practice after being released from prison, she experienced a healing from the pneumonia and grief that had plagued her every year around the month of January, when John Huggins had been assassinated. Huggins noted that “this grief I had been carrying for so many years was physically located in me,” but after “a huge bout of pneumonia,” “the grief was gone.” Huggins revealed with elation that, “instead of being this human being that was walking around on Earth with little flecks of joy here and there and a whole big pile of suffering underneath, it turned upside down and shook itself out and I was a human being with lots of joy underneath and these few flecks of suffering that crop up every now and

Taking the Inner Light to the Collective

Morales, Bambara and Huggins paid attention to the “light within” in order to reimagine a new way of being, but they did not simply seek their individual health, happiness or well-being. They took, in Audre Lorde’s words, their “erotic guides from within [them]selves” to “inform and illuminate [their] actions upon the world around Huggins took the lessons she learned through her spiritual practices to her activism and relationships with incarcerated people. Ten years after being released from prison, she returned to California correctional institutions in 1981 to share her practice of meditation and She put flesh in the concept of restorative justice by practicing it with Watani Stiner, one of the two individuals charged with the murder of her husband. After serving his prison sentence for five years, Stiner had escaped from prison to Guyana due to the threat of being killed by one of the people in prison. While raising six children in Suriname, he began to feel the pain of realizing that Huggins’ daughter would never get to know her father. Although he had not pulled the trigger of the gun that had taken the lives of John Huggins and “Bunchy” Carter, he had “carried a heavy burden of guilt, knowing that I had contributed to and participated in the mindset and atmosphere resulting in the deaths of two human

Huggins agreed to enter a restorative justice dialogue with Stiner in 2010, and the two began to correspond through letters. In a letter to Huggins, Stiner revealed that “my journey of love and sacrifice for my own children has opened up my heart and allowed me to feel the emptiness you must have felt on that dreadful day you learned of John’s Huggins noted in the process that “it is amazing what forgiving and being forgiven can do … I deeply believed that this would be important for John’s and my grandsons because forgiveness for the person asking for it and for the one who gives it has ripple effects for Members from Us and the Black Panthers –political organizations to which Stiner and Huggins belonged at the time of the shooting, respectively – remained suspicious of their efforts. They asked Stiner, “why apologize for something you hadn’t done?” Others wondered whether Huggins had been “too forgiving” toward something that was unforgivable. For anybody operating within a retributive justice framework, their exercise of forgiveness did not make sense. If the FBI-COINTELPRO was to blame for John Huggins’s death, Stiner was innocent and did not need forgiveness. If Stiner was to be blamed for it, Ericka Huggins should not forgive him since murder is often viewed as an “unforgivable sin.”

Stiner and Huggins, however, modeled a way of being that refused the politics of retribution. They recognized their interdependence as sacred beings in one universe, and the enormous power each of them held to be tender to the other. The practice of parenting their biological children had softened their hearts and opened them up to love and the grief that comes with the loss of love. They modeled the concept of restorative justice, which prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba defined as “focused on the importance of repair when relationships are broken, when violations occur in our relationships … It asks the community to step in fully, to be less of a bystander and more of an actor in trying to repair Rather than stay afar as a “neutral bystander,” Huggins chose to actively help repair Stiner’s wound through forgiveness and love. She countered naysayers who reduced Stiner to the figure of a “villain,” asserting that “life is full of paradoxes and is never simply either-or … Humans are capable of the most heinous actions and the most

Aurora Morales has similarly been invested in breaking the binary framework of viewing people as “victims” or as “perpetrators.” Since the publication of her memoir in 1998, she had sought a way to take responsibility for the legacy of extractive relationships that her ancestors had left in Puerto Rico. In 2017, when the island was ravaged by Hurricane María and the colonial economy that had forced its rural communities to produce cash crops for export exclusively, she decided to move back to the thirty-four acres of land in the Cordillera Central of western Puerto Rico that her family owned, as a way of connecting her self-healing with the restoration of the land of the

Morales sees her experiment as part of a larger project of modeling climate justice and food sovereignty. She does not want to think of her relationship with the island as one of individual ownership. “We want to model another way of living from the land,” she writes, “in which livelihood comes not from extracting the land’s wealth but from telling in as much detail as we can the complex story of our relations with it.” Her dream is to build a cultural center and museum of the history and ecology of Indiera, where the community can participate in the retelling of the past. She imagines that “this museum will be filled with family photographs, letters from the migrant children who moved away, and recorded voices of elders Although she deals with many disabilities and chronic illnesses – she suffers from epilepsy, aftereffects of brain injuries and a stroke, predisposition toward diabetes, liver impairment, and impairment of her body’s natural defenses resulting from sexual abuse – she remains adamant that she can live in a solar-powered house and have a rich farm of greens, squashes, tomatoes, okra, basil and peppers through the help of neighbors and like-minded activists.

Just as Morales aimed to remake her relationship with the land of Puerto Rico, Bambara also hoped to use her “adventure with every human breath” to help Black men and Black women remake their relationships with each other. Bambara critiqued patriarchy and gender violence, but her critique was not simply an exercise of self-advocacy as a woman. She aimed to catalyze the inner transformation of Black women and Black men because she saw that traditional notions of femininity and masculinity kept both groups from exploring their whole selves. In her 1970 contribution to The Black Woman anthology, she poignantly argues that “we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood.” Letting go of traditional notions of femininity and masculinity is important for revolutionary Black women since “if a woman is tough, she’s a rough mamma, a strident bitch, a ballbreaker, a castrator;” “if a man is at all sensitive, tender, spiritual, he’s a faggot.” Both Black men and men had been trapped in gender roles, with the framing of the attributes of strength and tenderness as polar opposites of each other. To Bambara, both Black women and men interested in forging the revolution needed to “face the task of creating a new identity, a self, perhaps an androgynous self, via commitment to the If Black women needed to find the freedom to access their inner power, Black men needed to give themselves permission to have self-compassion. Even as Bambara critiqued men who exploit women’s labor in her fictional writing, she did not reduce them to “villain” figures. Bambara consistently demonstrated compassion toward her fictional characters that cause harm on others. In her short story, “Maggie of the Green Bottles,” a young girl named Peaches is troubled by her father’s physical abuse, but instead of calling him a “monster” like her grandmother, Peaches says “I’d feel kinda bad about my father like I do about the wolf man and the phantom of the opera. Monsters, you know, more than anybody else, need your pity cause they need beauty and love so If Black male abusers had been socialized to ignore their wounds, Bambara believed that what they needed was not punishment, but a world that would nurture their capacity to attend to those wounds and remake themselves.

Conclusion

Uncovering histories of trauma and healing within Black and Brown freedom movements may be too unsettling for some, while making others yearn for new ways of knowing and feeling. Studying the political work of people of color without looking at the sacred and affective worlds that animate their lives, though, is like, as Jacqui Alexander said, failing to understand how they “mak[e] themselves intelligible to Black and Latinx feminists like Morales, Bambara and Huggins did not pay attention to their inner voice because they wanted to attain individual happiness or peace. The excavation of their erotic/Soul/Divine, as Alexander explained, was “not to be confused with a preoccupation with the self. The one has to do with a radical self-possession, the other with self-preoccupation on which individualism thrives.” They sought to radically take possession of themselves because they recognized the ways in which Judeo-Christian epistemologies had fractured their sense of self by creating divisions “between sacred and secular, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, in class divisions; and in divisions between the erotic and the The work of forging liberation from these epistemological fractures thus entailed both individual and collective work – communing with their own souls, and listening to their spiritual voices as a guide to remake all human relationships. Their guide was their “erotic” more than whatever logic was validated by society. Morales claimed that “right here in our bodies, in our defense of our right to experience joy, … in our determination to make the bombed and defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, where we have been most shamed, is one of the most radical and sacred places from which to transform the Morales’s determination to experience joy did not come at the expense of her rage against collective injustice. The two came from the same place within. Writers like Morales can serve as an invitation for us to listen to our own poetry –and discover a new kind of humanity there.