Ain't I a Womanist, Too?: Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought

14 Embodying Womanism

14 Embodying Womanism Notes toward a Holistic and Liberating Pedagogy Arisika Razak Drawing from twenty-three years of work in the field of women’s healthcare and over a decade of academic teaching in a small, private, graduate institution in the San Francisco Bay area, I offer a framework for constructing an embodied, holistic spiritual and liberating pedagogy that can be successfully employed in the pluralistic humanities1classroom of twenty-first-century United States of America, by using Alice Walker’s womanist definition.2 As a womanist teacher, my pedagogy is informed by the scholarly fields of feminism, women-of-color feminisms, critical thinking, postcolonial discourse, and ethnic and religious studies. It utilizes diversity theory and antiracist praxis, experiential exercises and therapeutic movement, personal sharing and written narratives, and art, journaling, and music. I also use Buddhist meditation practices, rituals from “African Derived Traditions,”3 and yoga or chi gung in order to provide a supportive space for liberatory transformation for the students. While I do not claim that the womanist epistemology and pedagogy I propose is appropriate for all socially marginalized groups, I believe that it supports the educational empowerment and liberatory transformation of black women and other women of color who claim diverse religious traditions and class backgrounds, and who embody an assortment of national, gender, sexual, ethnic, or racial identities, etc.4 In my experience, a womanist pedagogy has been a successful teaching vehicle for supporting the empowerment of other marginalized members of the dominant society—e.g., Euro-American women, lesbians, and older women. 217 Standpoint I embrace Alice Walker’s definition because Walker’s affirmation of the self, the body, and the sacredness of nature echo my own personal beliefs. While I am not a Christian like many of the other scholars in womanist religious thought, I regularly invoke the memory of my enslaved African ancestors who transformed the Christianity of their owners into a soulful refuge and a spiritual home. The Christianity they created was a vehicle for self-love, liberation, profound faith, and moral and ethical behavior. But I also prize the religions that enslaved Africans brought from Africa—religions in which God was female (at least some of the time), women were priestesses, and sexuality was a sacred act that could be talked about in polite company. If I choose to venerate African deities—which I sometimes do—I believe that I celebrate my foremothers’ gods. Walker’s definition of womanism asks that we pay attention to the dynamic tension between the personal and the political. The womanist she describes is not only fiercely committed to the struggle for liberation, but has personally resisted the ubiquitous racist, classist, homophobic, patriarchal, fat-phobic, and heteronormative oppression of American society. She has successfully affirmed her right to love herself, her body, her people, her culture, and the natural world, “[r]egardless.”5 Writing about Walker’s affirmation of self-love, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes notes: I read the last reference to love, “. . . (loves) herself. Regardless,” to be a critical admonition for those seeking to emancipate and empower women, especially and most critically black women. . . . The failure to love self makes it impossible to love others, and our hateful acts toward others are often a measure of our feelings about self. Some of the greatest threats to human development among the poor and the non-poor, among the black and the non-black are rooted in low self-esteem.6 As a midwife and women’s healthcare worker, my sense of the sacred is inextricably linked to the physical realities of the female body. For twenty-three years of my life, I worked as an inner-city midwife serving the needs of indigent women and their families from over seventy countries. Standing as witness, companion, and helper to women in labor was a life-changing event for me, as was my own experience of birth at home. Nothing I had ever experienced before had prepared me for the holiness of the moment in which a laboring woman turns away from her preoccupation with the world to focus on the 218 | Ain't I a Womanist, Too? world making within her body—a moment that for me, revealed the face of God/dess making the world again. However, my work with women also demonstrated the immense constrictions under which women live. As a midwife working in a county hospital, I learned all the good, bad, and...