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Gathering Our Sages, Mentors, and Healers: Postcolonial Women Writers and Narratives of Healing
- Feminist Formations
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 26, Issue 3, Winter 2014
- pp. 54-70
- 10.1353/ff.2014.0033
- Article
- Additional Information
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By thinking through the relation between racialized women’s writing, spirituality, and sensuality, the article explores how creative and critical writing can offer a kind of “spiritual medicine” for women in general and ethnic minority women in particular, and how creative expressions can serve to develop individual and collective consciousness around healing, political resistance, and social transformation. The article is concerned with how writing and the creative arts can help women make sense of individual and collective pain by offering profound relief for the writer, the reader, and the larger community. Here, it will examine the different narratives of healing by postcolonial women writers in order to reflect on their sensual spiritual interconnection in the global, material, interdependent world. It argues that it is critical for women, particularly ethnic minority women, to take the stance of self-love and self-care, including the active seeking of affirmative self-actualization and liberation. The article suggests that in order to create ethical cultures of positive transformation, recovery, respect, and dignity, women need to gather their sages, mentors, and healers to produce knowledge that can transform them into more holistic, organic, sensual, spiritual, intellectual, interconnected, and accountable beings.