Transformative Radical Self-care by Women in African and Pan-African Spiritual Traditions: Divine Power of Joy, Lemonade Self-care, Self-love Holiday

ABSTRACT

Exploring radical self-care practices as liberatory political resistance exposes the paradox that freedom from suffering is not free or an entitlement, instead it is a daily practice. This is a particularly important political claim for the three radical self-care practices surveyed in this article: Queen Mother Maasht Amm Amen’s The Divine Power of Joy events live-streamed and held in-person in the United States; Nalokai, Omisade, and Julia’s The Lemonade Series: Self-Care and Renewal Retreat in Treasure Beach, Jamaica; and Oyabunmi’s The Self Love Holiday Retreat in Dominicale, Costa Rica. Each practice was envisioned, organized, and led by Black women linked to African or Pan-African spiritual traditions between 2018 and 2020. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and digital print media, what emerged from these events are theories and practices influenced by a worldview reflective of a collective spiritual and political response to the afterlives of punitive public policies including Johnson’s “War on Poverty’’ and Nixon’s “War on Drugs’’ which have contributed to the othering and subjugation of Black bodies, Black experiences, and Black politics enforced through violent punishment. The execution of these punitive public policies consequently provides an enduring context for alternative forms of radical and liberatory political resistance. Intersectionality, as a liberatory practice for Black women, proved to be a useful methodology for analyzing and making sense of how the COVID-19 crisis exposed racial, health, and economic disparities, the global mass resistance to anti-Black racism, criminalization resulting in police murders of unarmed Black and Brown people, and the rise of radical self-care events. The three radical self-care practices created by Black women are examples of new legacies being forged through ongoing and evolving strategic activities and techniques that produce what I call transformative radical self-determination.

KEYWORDS:

• Wellness
• self-care
• Pan-African
• African worldview
• war on poverty
• war on drugs
• COVID-19
• intersectionality
• structural racism
• mass resistance
• divine power of joy
• retreat

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Many of the traditional African spiritual practices have similarities, usually with regard to ideas about divination, sacrifice, and the concept of deities. While the Yoruba system has garnered the most prestige and attention, due to the fact that their divination system is highly organized with regard to the priesthood as well as the corpus of poetic and written stories, most of continental Africa has similar traditional spiritual systems (Abimbọla 1976; Oyewumi 2015). Malidoma Patrice Somé’s (1995) text, Of Water and the Spirit, exposed the West to the Dagara spiritual practices of his ancestors in Burkina Faso. It is fairly well known that the Haitian Vodou system originates primarily in Benin with features that are similar to both Yoruba and Congolese practice (Bellegarde-Smith and Michel 2006). Yoruba-derived spiritual practices are also to be found in the diaspora in Cuban Santeria and Lucumi, Candomblé in Brazil, as well as the Shango Baptists and Shakerism found in Trinidad and St. Vincent respectively (Abimbọla 1997).

2. For more on the origins of intersectionality theory in writings and speeches by Black women see, Maria W. Stewart (1831); Sojourner Truth (1851); Anna Julia Cooper (1892); Angela Y. Davis (1981); Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith (1982); Barbara Smith (1983); Paula Giddings (1984); bell hooks (1984); Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 1990)). For more on intersectionality as a methodology, see Kimberle Crenshaw (1989; 1991); Cathy Cohen (1999); Michelle Tracey Berger (2004); Harriet Washington (2006); Nikol Alexander-Floyd (2007); Julia Jordan-Zachery (2009).

3. The disdain for the poor started as an unintentional, perhaps, result of Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and the Moynihan Report which created a national narrative of crime ridden inner cities populated by uneducated, “lower class” and broken Black families, dependent on government assistance. It is for these reasons radical Black feminists, such as the Combahee River Collective insist, “the personal is the political” (Collins 1986; 1989; Crenshaw 1989; Davis 1981; Giddings 1984; hooks 1984; 1989; Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith 1982; Lorde 1980; Moraga and Anzaldua 1983; Smith 1983). Thus, everything a person does is political, and the personal is the starting point of all resistance or struggle. Learning from the historical memory, the spirit of unwavering collective resistance to the -isms and phobias is the pulse of the people.

4. See https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/cares.

5. See https://lemonade-retreat.weebly.com/

6. See https://lemonade-retreat.weebly.com/