Today, I celebrated my birthday with family and friends. I like the day to be one where family and friends cocoon one another so I went with my mother and friends to my favorite Mexican restaurant in Manhattan. In the section where we chose to sit, we were near two large Latino families, a Latina lesbian couple, a group of late-20-sumthin, beautifully adorned black women who commanded the room’s attention, and a group of Jamaican women my age who gave the most exquisite analyses of the problems with black men I have ever heard. My Indian waitress was very fly and kept my favorite drink flowing, the restaurant’s specialty Prickly Pear Cactus Margarita. James Brown, Lakeside, and Julieta Venegas (especially my favorites, “El Presente” and “Me Voy”) bumped in the background. It was a perfect New York City outing— I am convinced that you really just can’t get this kind of mix anywhere else. Though I certainly should not have been thinking about work as I celebrated, I found that I was, most specifically in relation to my course that starts next week on Black Women’s Rhetoric. Friends, work, and birthday seem to coincide for me this year.
My two closest friends from graduate school— more affectionately known as Honeijam and Yoyo— are two people who I am thinking about most. I don’t really know how we decided to start sending each other lavish birthday gifts, usually art or rituals for self-care, but I know it started in graduate school and continues today. We were the only women of color in our cohort in graduate school and we made a pact to one another that we would finish the coursework in three years, plus two more years for the dissertation. We called ourselves the Ph.Divas! I was the most unbelieving which probably accounts for the reason why I was the last to finish in our final year. Honeijam was no joke and got in your face all the time and was, unsurprisingly, the first to finish. Yoyo bridged all communication and birthed a beautiful baby girl at the same time that she birthed her dissertation. Baby Diva was in full Diva attire at our graduation ceremonies.
We kept our pact to one another and I know that I would not have made it out if it weren’t for them. The alienation and hostility that you can encounter as a black woman in graduate school is very real. It is still all too common that you don’t see anyone who looks like you; and no one from your history or background is included in the books you must read for your classes and exams. Yoyo and Honeijam were my buffers. That’s what we did for one another. It extended beyond mere support during coursework and dissertation writing though. On one occasion, during the writing of my dissertation thesis, I just couldn’t pay the fees required to maintain matriculation with my 36K/year job as a college instructor with a 5/4 load. This meant that I couldn’t access the library or the other campus spaces/documents that I needed. By that time, I had inherited a house that was a fixxer-upper in a crack-neighborhood that no one wanted to live in at that time, to put it mildly, from an engagement that ended very badly. I was learning how to be my own contractor, putting up dry wall by myself on the weekends, teaching, and doing graduate school, all at the same time, pretty much with a broken heart the whole way through. I had no family in the area and no family with the funds to even ask for twenty dollars, much less a personal loan. Any extra penny went to a bucket of paint; credit cards had to be kept clear to do things like fix the roof before it caved in. In that context and in New York City, that 36K meant cup-of-noodles pretty much every night. I went to campus one day to try and arrange something when I couldn’t access anything anymore because of my unpaid bill (you cannot enter doors of any building in NYC without ID). The desk help just looked at me like I was crazy. “Your bill has been paid” the woman told me. “What?!” I asked her to look again and then the light bulb went off: the Ph.Divas paid it! I was right and it was like pulling teeth to get them to allow me to pay them back and it’s not like they had the extra funds themselves. I could tell countless stories like this about my Ph.Divas— like the time I was really sick, immobile, with no food in the house, 5 dollars in the bank, and no energy to walk to the store to get even 3 dollars worth of something. My then-boyfriend was, of course, nowhere to be found. All of a sudden, I heard a knock on the door and there were the Ph.Divas with groceries and then just went to town in my kitchen and on me until I felt better. That was what graduate school was like: three soul-sisters who pulled each other through. It feels like every conscious black woman that I know can tell this kind of story about their sisters.
So, yes, this is what I am thinking about as I plan my class that meets this week and as I end today’s celebration. I often have my students do presentations where they have to do rhetorical analyses, not of famous activists but of black women they know or are somehow part of their lives (this includes popular culture). I don’t think I have been so good at helping students see that the everyday practices of love, care, and sustenance that Honeijam and Yoyo embody as black women are black women’s rhetorics. I mean rhetoric here as something much more than the persuasive style to move an audience towards your goals. I am talking about a disposition where the most maligned group effects a kind of shift, an alteration of the geographies of white privilege, where you imagine and enact an alternative future and way of being human. It is a counter-ideology that manifests itself in the daily workings of making a black woman’s life possible in settings where that life is not welcomed. I don’t know how to communicate that to my students other than to tell them the stories of my Ph.Divas. One of the best parts of my birthday today was my reminder to do so.
Up close and personal, these black women seem to just shine in a way that museum reproductions will simply never be able to really reproduce. The blue veil on that Sunday-Go-Meeting hat makes the whole wall glow right up alongside the glow of blue lipstick sitting alongside. These are not portraits of the same woman and yet they are connected and connecting.
I want to have a deeply personal conversation with Thomas’s exhibit and so I need different language, a task that Thomas herself excels at!
After witnessing these larger-than-life images and places, I walked into a room of Thomas’s vast array of collages where black women are once again pieced back together again. To the left of these collages is a video display of a striking woman in red and a portrait Thomas has done of her: all I know at this point is that she is called Sandra AKA Mama Bush. The woman in the video poses and shines and it seems like Thomas’s rhinestones are again there to literally capture that shine. 
From here I walk into yet another room, Brooklyn’s unique edition to the exhibit from its Santa Monica beginnings: an installation of four, furnished, domestic interiors made specially for this Brooklyn exhibit. These intricately patterned interiors are, of course, amazing with their level of detail— wall paper, flooring designs, pillows, hand-made furniture, 1970s album covers, shoes lying around— and all so meticulously planned. As you walk around these four rooms, along one wall is a series of more than a dozen photographs in layered, gold framing. It feels like you are at your grandmother’s house, walking past photos of the family, and, for black female viewers, this kind of aesthetic intimacy is, I think, exactly the point! Photos of Sandra AKA Mama Bush line the walls. Like I already said, Thomas creates a world, not pieces on a gallery wall, a world that gives you back to yourself.
We learn that her mother was/is a survivor of domestic abuse, drug addiction, and now failing health/mortality. Mama Bush wanted to be a model but met the barriers associated with the white beauty industry; that is, until she became her daughter’s model, now immortalized in a universe for and about black women as a point of origin. As I watch each moment of this film, a film that Thomas herself made, I can’t help but notice and literally feel the textile work of the chair I am sitting in (I spent the most time in a chair but I made sure to visit each furniture item in the room since each tapestry was different.) I am reminded of black women’s quilting traditions and am deeply struck by the fact that Thomas chose this as the medium in which she wanted me/us to hear her Mother and Muse. I was so overwhelmed that I decided to forego looking at anything else in the museum and just went back to where I first entered the exhibit and started all over again.
My students and I have not seen one another in quite some time now: all classes were canceled for a while in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy; I was in Oakland for a few days presenting at a conference; in between that, we had something of a blizzard (Snow Storm, Athena); students on the Manhattan campus had to pack up all their belongings in 2 hours, in the dark, to be squirreled and packed off to dorms across Queens; some of my students are undoubtedly still cleaning homes and Sandy debris. In the midst of all of that, school goes on: topics for final project topics have been set; we have mandates to make up missed time that will cut into the Winter break; we have been trying to still do our research all along. Some are also teaching so this means they are attending departmental meetings or even doing the assessment/research projects that I have facilitated in my own program. We have a few more weeks left in the semester to grind out like this. It seems safe to say, if my levels of energy are any indication, that we are ALL drained and depleted. But we are here. Same place, same time. And we WILL focus back in on what we really came here to do, despite all that other institutional stuff that gets in the way.
This week we are explicitly reading about black masculinities and literacies and/or black girlhood, womanism, and literate lives. As a way to represent all of that, I want to look closely at 