Reclaiming the Essence of Who We Are: A Q&A with the Authors of Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels
Black women are multitudinous, yet we are still slotted into categories such as mammy, whore, Angry Black Woman, and savior. Our sharp edges are seen as weapons, our soft parts are taken for the comfort of others and not reserved for ourselves. Even as we step into the highest courts in the country like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, become the celebrity’s celebrity like Beyoncé, or upend tech and scientific arenas, we are still pinned by stereotypes that siphon our power and personhood. But, as I’ve said, Black women are multitudinous. Even as these stereotypes are lobbed at us, we hit them back and flip the script.
In one such case, Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels: Myths, Legends, and Other Lies You’ve Been Told about Black Women (Black Lawrence Press, 2024) is an essay anthology that explores Black womanhood while also challenging stereotypes and misconceptions entrenched in our communities and professional spaces. Edited by Drs. Jan Boulware, Rondrea Mathis, Clarissa West-White, and Kideste Mariam Yusef from Bethune-Cookman University, the anthology employs real-life stories and perspectives to subvert expectations of Black women as mother-figures, sexual objects, and, as Dr. Yusef states, “the anthology provided an opportunity to collect women’s voices about our humanity and vulnerability.”
These narratives help further legitimize the multidimensionality of our lived experiences. We are more than our sexuality, our anger, and our ability to serve, but those aspects are still part of us in ways that go beyond the superficial. I wrote about my first childbirth experience in the anthology, and as a contributor, I was interested in learning more about the creation of Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels.
I spoke with Drs. Mathis, West-White, and Yusef via Zoom about how we as Black women reconceptualize self-care, express ourselves, and disrupt our social spaces as mothers.
DW McKinney: What inspired you to curate Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels?
Dr. West-White: I saw a call for manuscripts and reached out to my colleagues about drafting a proposal. We were having this conversation about many of the topics that are represented in the submissions. At that time we were meeting almost monthly for lunch. Many of those conversations would tend to lead to issues about blackness in America as a female, especially in academia, and as mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, or ex-wives. It just seemed kind of natural [to do]. We couldn’t be the only people who had these issues and concerns.
Dr. Mathis: [In our group,] one person is the dean at [Bethune-Cookman]. Another is department chair. I am a junior faculty member. And then Dr. West-White is now the university archivist and historian. So we’re all in these different lanes, but we found ourselves having the same concern. The project really comes out of this similarity across the difference of our experiences as Black women in this country.
McKinney: You mentioned how having these conversations about being wives, ex-wives, and mothers influenced this anthology. Can you share any specific personal experiences that came to mind while you were curating it?
West-White: In my introduction, I talk about my mother, a veteran elementary school teacher who now suffers from dementia, and how self-care has probably moved further up our list of things to do for ourselves. I take lessons from my mother’s life. She did everything for her students because she taught elementary for thirty-eight years. She was up all late at night readjusting lesson plans. She did all the things that you would think a really good, caring teacher would do. These are things that students couldn’t care less about because they don’t know that all of this happens in the background of delivering their instruction. For her, it led to insomnia. For me, it’s a lesson to not put so many things ahead of ourselves. For my part, my concern is Black women learning to place themselves first.
Dr. Yusef: For me, it was like, “We’re tired.” I agree with everything that Dr. West-White said. In my piece, I spoke about my mom who passed away from stress trying to manage land in Ethiopia and entrepreneurship and fighting for women’s rights and raising children. For me, [the anthology] also came from us trying to plan lunch dates and our schedules being so hectic and wearing all of these different hats that we didn’t feel like we had time to honor one another in this academic space and also support our other endeavors. It’s important to recognize that we’re tired and that we don’t always have the space to say that. We’re just expected to keep pushing and keep pressing.
Mathis: There’s a quote from Barbara Christian in her essay “The Race for Theory,” where she says, “What I write and how I write is done in order to save my life. Literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, [and] that whatever I feel is. It is an affirmation that sensuality is intelligence.” She goes on after that. Having been raised in the tradition of Black feminist theory, I am used to seeing anthologies of Black women and white women speaking up, speaking back, speaking outright, standing up, and saying, “This is my lived experience. My lived experience is important.”
McKinney: Church is a significant cornerstone in Black American life for many in our community. How did you recognize the intersection of theology and Black womanhood?
Mathis: As a Black girl who grew up in the Missionary Baptist Church, I was very unfamiliar with seeing Black women in any sort of leadership and with any sort of voice. Yet, I have always been outspoken. Black women in the church are often silent; Black women in their lives are not silent at all. I had a conversation with my grandmother, who is part of the Church of God in Christ, and she says she doesn’t believe in women in any sort of leadership. I said, “What if you have something to say or what if you have something to add?” She said, “Oh, no, I have to tell that to someone else, and they will pass the message for me.”
I didn’t know what to do with that as a Black woman who was called to preach. What does that mean if there is no space for me in the church? I look to literature. We have Nanny, Janie Mae Crawford’s grandmother in Their Eyes Were Watching God, who said I wanted to preach a great big old sermon, but there was no pulpit for me. Or Baby Suggs Holy in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, who takes to a clearing because that was the space where she could preach, not in anybody’s church, but she took to the woods. What I find is that Black women build pulpits wherever it is that they are, and their ministry is wherever it is that they are. In the selections for the book, it’s that same idea. How did you figure out who you are in a world that has tried to tell you who you are? How do you define yourself in a world that has thought to define you?
McKinney: Given your interests, how did criminal or social justice issues appear in the anthology?
Yusef: I thought there was going to be more pieces on political violence because of the time in which we were writing. We didn’t have many of those kinds of entries. We talked about the right to have a child and that process. We talked about sexuality and the right to express ourselves. We talked about the body in more of a holistic way, a way that is inclusive of our rights to self, our rights to express sexuality but not in the destruction of our bodies.
In my introduction I spoke to the dissection of Black beauty. I talked about how I was 35 or 40 before I was comfortable enough to stand in front of a mirror naked. I’m African. You know, we don’t do that. It’s like first world problems. You don’t have time to worry about what this looks like and how this fits. I also juxtapose that to my mother. It’s so funny how much our mothers and mothers’ mothers impact us in this space, but my understanding conceptions of beauty have always been related to [my mother] and what I thought is the most ideal or the most beautiful person I had seen.
In America, coming from Africa, it was like, “Oh, you don’t look African,” or “What kind of African are you” because you look more like whatever is accepted of our community. So, for me, that section was about disentangling colorism, European features, African pride, all of that stuff, but in a way that causes us to reclaim the essence of who we are, and however we see it, and whatever it looks like.
McKinney: How do you see mothers taking up and disrupting space for themselves and their children?
Yusef: I have three children. I’m a single mother. My children, for the most part, have grown up with me on college campuses their whole life. I’ve had to take them to conferences and in classes. I was breastfeeding during my dissertation. I also tend to exert my academic credentials in only the spaces of their academics. The only time I say, “I’m Dr. So-and-so” is when I’m at their school so that their administrators know who they’re dealing with. I’m not someone who expresses that in general conversation, but I find myself, particularly in white-dominated spaces, having to remind their administrators. It’s unfortunate if you don’t have that. I know all the research about the school-to-prison pipeline. I know about suspension rates, dress code violations for Black girls. I work in this space, and so I’m hypersensitive to it.
It makes my children a little fearful to share with me when something happens because they know the arsenal. They can’t just tell me something and my response is “okay.” I tend to have to show up a certain way in that space that is more rigid and masked. There’s an armor that you have to put on in spaces because as the mother, it’s your obligation to protect your child from anything.
West-White: There were submissions by writers who clearly were mothers and then others where there were mothers in the pieces they submitted. For those that we categorized as self-help, you could tell that they were getting themselves together for their children and grandchildren so that they could serve as a model for how you deal with problems and stress.
Mathis: Well as the person without children, I do believe that everything we do is informed by Black women’s penchant for nurturing, and the work that we do in the classroom, the work that we do in administration feels like mothering to me. I really feel like I don’t have to have children because I have so many every semester. I had a student who slipped and called me mom. Now I think that there was this disconnect because I didn’t want them to think that I’m here to mother them, but at HBCUs, one of our chief responsibilities is to nurture, strengthen, uplift, and to educate. The work that we do pulls on so much of us.
The idea in the self-care section is the idea that you have cared for everyone else, now it’s time to care for yourself. How do you do that when that’s been called selfish instead of self-care? How do you learn how to say no when the world has told you that women are supposed to say yes?
About the Author
DW McKinney is a Black American writer based in Nevada. She serves as an editor for Shenandoah and editor-at-large for Raising Mothers. Her writing has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, The McNeese Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Narratively, PANK, and the anthology I’m Speaking Now (Chicken Soup for the Soul, 2021). Say hello at dwmckinney.com.
Related Posts
Processing Trauma Through Personal Narrative: An Interview with Bridey Thelen-Heidel →
Playing House: An Excerpt from BRIGHT EYES →
Transformative Support for Single Moms: A Q&A with Jeremiah Program Brooklyn →
One Response to Reclaiming the Essence of Who We Are: A Q&A with the Authors of Mamas, Martyrs, and Jezebels