Black Feminist Love Lessons
A few weeks ago, a friend and I were musing about love — Something we do often and, for the past several years, from the vantage point of our mutual singleness and celibacy, each informed by a different suite of wounds, losses and circumstances. Recently though, both of us have felt ready to venture back out into the expanse of what romantic love holds.
She asked me “how do you hold out hope that love exists for you after enduring so much trauma in your past relationships?” I spoke about the importance of solitude, rituals of self-retrieval, and of learning to be comfortable with the reality that I will disappoint people. We also discussed at length about how we are still healing from the many ways we are led to believe that romance is the supreme and most important form of love (which usually comes at the expense of friendships between women, in particular). In short, I gave a rambling answer that felt true but lacked precise roots.
After we hung up, I knew something was missing from my response: An acknowledgement of all the ways my study of Black feminism has informed how I consider, practice, feel, enact, receive and return to love. Afterall, Alexis Pauline Gumbs denotes Black feminism as a “rigorous love practice.”
Black feminist thought has taught me to hold contradiction and complexity without flattening either, to build bridges between theory and praxis across all areas of my life, to regard my emotions and experiences as valuable epistemological tools, and to listen for the moments I am ready to open my heart up. A “rigorous love practice” indeed.
Below, you will find several quotes that have buoyed me through the past two years spent healing from what bell hooks names “lovelessness” and finding my way back into love’s redemptive light.
“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.” - bell hooks, All About Love
“To be in love / Is to touch with a lighter hand. / In yourself you stretch, you are well.” - Gwendolyn Brooks, To Be In Love
“Love is or it ain’t. Thin love ain’t love at all.” - Toni Morrison, Beloved
“I fall in love with myself, and I want someone to share it with me. And I want someone to share me, with me.” — Eartha Kitt
“Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore” - Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes We’re Watching God
“The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; Love has been our survival.” - Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider
“You must learn to love only that which cannot be stolen.” - Alice Walker, The Temple of My Familiar
“If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.” - James Baldwin
“How can I ever begin to explain to you the way things were? / Bare and open / no bones broken / This space *before* in those dark recesses of loving you ~~~~ / that passageway when curled within I could forget that I was born dying” - Legacy Russell, Us
“Now when I experience myself it is as if the center of me had light cascading constantly through it. I draw those I love close to me simply by breathing and when I breathe fully, those I love pass through me full of light. We bless each other. We ask and receive forgiveness. We go on with our separate lives but they are changed, shaped, sustained, supported by this love that is light and free and fine-spun gold.” - Kathleen Collins, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary
“I love you / because the Earth turns round the sun / because the North wind blows north / sometimes / because the Pope is Catholic / and most Rabbis Jewish / because the winters flow into springs / and the air clears after a storm / because only my love for you / despite the charms of gravity / keeps me from falling off this Earth / into another dimension
I love you / because it is the natural order of things / … / I love you / because you made me / want to love you / more than I love my privacy / my freedom / my commitments / and responsibilities / I love you ’cause I changed my life / to love you / because you saw me one Friday / afternoon and decided that I would / love you / I love you I love you I love you”
- Nikki Giovanni, Resignation
A lovely read.
Thank you, Camille, for your words.
Resonant and necessary.
saving this for re-reads ❤️