Image: Still from Udju Azul di Yonta by Flora Gomes
reflecting on her return to guinea-bissau, writer & poet yasmina nuny silva considers the relationships between theory & praxis as a Black feminist
words Yasmina Nuny Silva
Trigger warning: Sexual assault
The limits to Black women’s voices shift according to their economic class, sexualities, geographies, among other intersectionalities. Geography was an element that I had taken for granted for the greater part of my political awakening. As I settled into myself at university – I completed both of my degrees in the UK – I exercised the voice that had been won for me through centuries of struggle as far as the limit would allow through my academic and creative work.
With the relative freedoms and comfort that I had in the spaces that I navigated, I paid little attention to the obstinate precarities of Black womanhood beyond the racial and sexual. The very intersections that opened me up to violence had empowered me. I had blueprints from Black women before me – most of them in the United States – who had learned how to negotiate co-constituting systems of oppression through their survival wisdom and led the way in defining my own Black feminist praxis. That is, doing work in service of humanity’s liberation and community.
I would come to learn just how much geographies would affect the voice that I had come to discover. With my visa expiration looming, I prepared to leave the UK where the public voices of Black women were a “hot commodity” (Collins, 2006, p. 57) and returned home to Guinea-Bissau to remain, for the first time in 22 years.
Image: Bissau Bedju © Oppy Sobitan
Repatriating was a bittersweet process. I was leaving behind the home that I had built for myself over four years, with friends, a partner, and the career in poetry that had been so central to my praxis. But I was returning to a home that I would never have left had it not been for the civil war in 1998. I was also returning during the campaigning period for the presidential elections. I had seen, in one of the candidates, hope for a new kind of leadership that I had not seen for a long time in the country.
The (my) candidate had elaborated a plan for Guinea-Bissau to hit the ground running while the other appeared to be freestyling his way through. My candidate had years of political and diplomatic experience and I had faith in his capacity to follow through. The other, well, he had populism on his side. From the first round of elections, where my candidate had swept most of the votes, it had seemed as though he would be the victor. The government in force had also reached gender parity. I know better than to put my faith in the representation politics, nevertheless, it was an invigorating change for this small country still so dominated by male chauvinism. Adding to the hopeful atmosphere that I was returning to, I began working at a local organisation that dedicates itself to empowering rural women by promoting their inclusion in democratic processes at the village level through co-created women’s associations and providing leadership training.
Bissau-Guinean women make up the backbone of the agriculture industry and given that agriculture is the backbone of the national economy, it follows that rural women are the backbone of the economy. So, the programmes carried out by the organisation aim to facilitate Guinean women’s work in agriculture to empower them financially, but also to help feed the nation. It falls then, right into what I understand to be Black feminist praxis; the work of rural Guinean women aims to “optimise the well-being for all members of a community (commonweal),” and so in contributing to this work I was also, in small ways, contributing to the wider Guinean community’s well-being (Phillips, 2006, p. xxv-xxvi).
It was an exciting time, feeling as though the country was on the brink of a progressive move and like I, doe-eyed and fresh out of university, was contributing in the small ways that I could to the cause. Perhaps for these reasons I did not predict a regime of censorship based on my gender or dedication to freedom. Rather, I expected to learn how to articulate my politics in my mother tongue, Kriol.
A few weeks after repatriating, the country suffered a coup d’état. Before the election results were confirmed and declared, one of the candidates – not the one that I had been hoping for – decided that he would be sworn into power, and so, he was. With military forces in his corner, he took control of all government institutions and sacked the incumbent government, among them, one of my familiars. In the span of a week, I saw the streets of the capital become militarised and the homes of ministers invaded by the new powers that be. With it, came a precarity that I was unfamiliar with. The immediate threat of my home being invaded was sobering and the need to exercise my voice against violence and injustice was eclipsed by the strategic and survival wisdom of silence.
“I adjusted to my new local realities by keeping my head down. It was easier to disengage entirely from local politics given that I could not openly critique them”
Silently, and in the midst of growing COVID-19 restrictions, I observed the consequences of speaking up against our new self-proclaimed leader. He weaponised the military to subdue any dissidents and images circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp – as they often do – of men brutalised for their audacity. Here, at home, there were limits to expression that manifested differently to the racial oppression that saturated my knowledge bank. It was not quite (yet) gender oppression either, but the general threat to humanity and freedom in the country offended my Black feminist sensibilities. I was unsure, though, of how to navigate this matrix of domination that differed from the ones in the UK that I had grown familiar with or the ones in the US that I had read so much about (Collins, 2000, p. 228).
Had I still been in the UK, I would not have dwelled so long on whether or not I should speak out against the suppression that was being experienced in the country. My geography would have provided me with a safety that I was not guaranteed when military forces could simply invade my home. Using that privilege, I think I would have taken to the media, social and mainstream, to write about what was happening back home because digital surveillance would not have had immediate material consequences. I would not have been brutalised or annihilated because I would have existed outside of this matrix of oppression.
I adjusted to my new local realities by keeping my head down. It was easier to disengage entirely from local politics given that I could not openly critique them and amplify instead the voices of protestors across the world as they confronted state violence. I got on with my work, but I was also increasingly conflicted between contributing to the commonweal and working within a precarious professional environment.
Despite the organisation’s outward politics of women’s empowerment, I slowly began feeling disempowered by the internal interpersonal dynamics. As it turned out, my employer, who was a well-known face of social movements and progressiveness and the director of the organisation, was also a product of the misogynistic society that raised him. Initially, I was convinced that my experience and enthusiasm were the reasons I had been taken on board. But as the sexual harassment escalated from passing comments to unwanted touching, I questioned whether there was an expectation for reciprocation as thanks for being hired.
“Though there is overlap in the concerns of Black women in the diaspora and on the African continent, there are differences in what is prioritised by Black feminists in the west and African feminists.”
Though there is overlap in the concerns of Black women in the diaspora and on the African continent, there are differences in what is prioritised by Black feminists in the West and African feminists. While the experience of a coup d’état falls within the concerns outlined by Nigerian social scientist Olabisi Aina as an immediate need to survive war, among other things (1988, p. 65-88), my challenges at the workplace were not in gaining access to a profession (that Aina also points to), which many Guinean women continue to grapple with, but rather in navigating the sexual politics in it. In the context of the UK, though sexism and misogyny are widespread, they are at least, rhetorically, politically incorrect positions to hold in society. In Guinea-Bissau, they are cultural to the extent that the new autocrat encouraged military forces to sexually harass women because it is tradition for them to do so.
I wrestled with the prospects of calling out my employer for sexual harassment. Given his prominence as a public figure and simply the fact that he is a man, and I am a woman, I feared that I would not be believed or that I would be blamed for his advances. Furthermore, what purpose was there in speaking up and out when the culture required sexual violence against women and would punish me for trying to change it? I believe that the potential for retribution from powerful and power-adjacent men is what forced Guinea-Bissau as a nation into apathy. “Ka bu liga”, some would say, which means “don’t pay it any mind.” “You are not in Europe anymore,” I would hear from others. “If you keep your head down, you will not suffer.” That is to say, if you learn to live with little air for so long, suffocation will not feel like suffering.
Simultaneously, though, I felt growing shame for remaining silent, as though I was betraying myself, my politics and everyone who might have or would suffer at the hands of my employer as well as the country’s new leader.
My relationship to silence began to change the longer I spent in community with Black feminists through literature, particularly Patricia Hill Collins’ Black Feminist Thought (2000) and Layli Phillips’ edited book The Womanist Reader (2006). That is to say, my voice, and the voice of other Black women across the country, continent and world, are actively suppressed and there are times when this can and should be challenged. But there are other times when remaining silent ensures survivability by allowing us to “accrue the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold [our] own in the often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle” (Hine, 1995, p. 382; Collins, 2000, p. 125).
This psychic space is not, in my experience, a metaphor. Though months of silence about my experiences of work were ridden with anxiety, I also found the courage to share, at least privately to my parents and siblings, that my employer had been abusing his power. Silence can be transformed into a language of action (Lorde, 2007, p. 40-44) and with their support, I left my place of work; it was a small, personal victory.
Image: Titina Silá mural © Mila Silva
There remains work still to discover the language that I need to stop being silent. Language is one of the ways that we hold the people in power accountable for their violence. There will always be fear, “of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation” (ibid.). This body of work is, in many ways, exercising my voice again. I find the same safety in writing this in English that I had in my geography before coming back home and so my hopes are still to learn how to articulate my politics in Kriol. Part of finding my voice though, in the context of this particular geography is understanding how the local realities interact with my Black feminism. It became clear to me over the past year that my praxis cannot look the same as it did in the UK because the lived experiences and the limits to my voice are not the same. I am trying to discover, while I am here, how to shift my praxis so that I may continue committing to freedom and the well-being of community, in a different language and different geography.
References
Aina, Olabisi. (1998). “African Women at the Grassroots: The Silent Partners of the Women’s Movement” in Nnaemeka, O. (ed), Sisterhood, Feminisms, and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, 65–88. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Collins, P.H. (2000) Black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge
Collins, P. H., (2006) “What’s in a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism and Beyond” in Phillips, L. (ed) The Womanist reader, 57-68. Routledge
Hine, D. C, (1995) “For Pleasure, Profit, and Power: The Sexual Exploitation of Black Women” in Smitherman, G. (ed), African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas, 168–77. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Lorde, A. (2007) “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” in Lorde, A. Sister outsider: essays and speeches, 40-44. Crossing Press
Phillips, L. (2006) “Introduction” in Phillips, L. (ed) The Womanist reader, xix-lv. Routledge
Williams, D. S., (2006) “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices” in Phillips, L. (ed) The Womanist reader, 117-125. Routledge
Yasmina Nuny Silva is a Bissau-Guinean writer and poet with a background in political economy and African Studies. She currently works as a communications assistant at a local Guinean NGO and is a freelance writer on the side. Read more of Yasmina’s work on her blog or at Verve Poetry Press.