Parlance: Tricia Hersey

Performance artist & community activist Tricia Hersey expands on her belief that rest is a form of resistance and reparations

words Elvira Vedelago

 
 

The night before I interview Tricia Hersey, I cry. I hadn’t planned on getting emotional while preparing for our conversation. Yet, reflecting on not only my own relationship with sleep but also that of the women within my family history, alongside the considerations of a societal hierarchy of sleep and who is afforded the ‘privilege’ of rest - particularly in the current climate where ethnic minority key workers are the worst hit by COVID-19 and black people in the UK are reportedly four times more likely to die from the coronavirus than their white counterparts - all left me feeling overwhelmed and frankly exhausted.

When I mention this to Tricia over our telephone conversation, she offers a sympathetic ear and reassures me that others respond similarly. Listing off the hundreds of messages that she regularly receives on Instagram, she details the range of emotional responses to her organisation’s key point of rest as resistance and reparations: from shame and guilt to anger and sadness. “It’s like a confessional,” she explains. “People are saying that it’s shifting their thought process.” A casual scroll through any of the posts on her Instagram page (which holds at the time of writing 127 thousand followers) supports her statement. Comments, from a predominantly female audience based everywhere from the UK to Brazil, roll in on a daily basis, expressing praise and gratitude for the regular reminders to rest. Her organisation, The Nap Ministry, has thus garnered a global following who are eager to join her quiet revolution, and what she calls “a beautiful resistance”, against our capitalist society.

 
 

AN EXHAUSTED BLACK WOMAN

The growth and interest in the organisation, within a relatively short space of time, is impressive - a testament to the power of social media but also the strength of The Nap Ministry’s message. Founded in 2016, the early conceptualisation behind the business was formed three years earlier as the Chicago born, Atlanta based performance artist and activist was studying in seminary college. A series of events, including her involvement in the Black Lives Matter protests, dealing with the personal loss of two family members, getting mugged in broad daylight with her then six-year-old son, and managing the workload of an intense graduate school programme, left Tricia “physically, mentally, spiritually” drained. “It definitely came as a total reaction to me being exhausted,” she recalls. “An exhausted black woman in America living in the South, going to an all-white institution.”

Burdened by the emotional trauma of witnessing numerous black bodies lynched in her country, often replayed on the television or online, whilst also studying cultural trauma as a black woman in a predominantly conservative, white, male school, and conducting research into black plantation labour of the South, prompted Tricia to reflect upon both her own exhaustion (she remembers sleeping anytime she could, all over campus) and the collective exhaustion of the black community at the hands of white supremacy and colonisation. Connecting her body, and what was happening in the world around her, to the suffering of her ancestors became a way to honour them and use rest as a tool to claim reparations. For Tricia, rest was therefore recontextualised into a subject of social and racial justice, deeply rooted in black liberation theology. “We have to reframe our whole mindset for this liberation and I believe rest is one of the key things for our liberation as black people,” she posits. “I am all about uplifting the stories of what capitalism, what white supremacy, what colonisation has done to us and what it looks like. How that structure still exists now [and] who is worthy of rest”.

“I am all about uplifting the stories of what capitalism, what white supremacy, what colonisation has done to us and what it looks like. How that structure still exists now [and] who is worthy of rest”


Indeed, it is important to recognise that rest and, more specifically, sleep act as clear indicators of a community’s health, wealth and overall well-being, something that Tricia was already conscious of holding a bachelor’s degree in Public Health. While studies across the globe confirm that we are getting less sleep than ever before, distinct inequalities exist across different ethnicities, with black communities often impacted the most. Reports from the US evidence that approximately half of black Americans do not get enough sleep, compared to a third of white Americans, and thus struggle more with disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea. A similar issue exists in the UK and leaves black populations more susceptible to the development of conditions such as high blood pressure and heart disease. “It becomes, at that point, a public health issue, when black people are suffering more from diseases that cause them to be sick because they’re not sleeping,” Tricia comments. 

Understandably, living in often crowded and noisy neighbourhoods with higher crime rates adds to these issues of poor sleep, as well as the realities of having to work multiple jobs or overnight shifts to improve financial stability. Yet, socioeconomic status is not the only contributing factor, where sleep differences are still present for black individuals who don’t live in those environments or work multiple jobs. Evidently, black people’s relationship with sleep and rest also suffers from a history rooted in systemic oppression, having lived through years of state violence and navigated incessant discrimination, all of which still continues today. Oppression that has worked to maintain an underlying state of trauma, tension and stress in these communities. Not to mention, the propaganda that followed from the slave trade and slander from popular 19th-century eugenists painting black people as inherently ‘lazy’ - a stereotype that justified whipping as the antidote to exhaustion on plantations and is still weaponised today (in 2010, the popular French perfume brand, Guerlain, faced legal action over racist comments after one of their perfumiers was interviewed about the creation of a new fragrance, saying ‘I worked like a nigger. I don’t know if niggers have always worked like that, but anyway’). Black communities have been perpetually conditioned to live on edge and never granted the space to truly relax. 

And I haven’t even begun to discuss the gendered aspect of this issue, considering the demands of unpaid labour on women, then compounded by the impacts of misogynoir and the tired stereotypes of black women as ‘strong’ or ‘superwomen’ undoubtedly affecting their ability to rest even more.

 
Photograph: Women taking a nap in church nursery during Freedom Summer Voters Right Movement in 1961. by: Paul Schutzer

Photograph: Women taking a nap in church nursery during Freedom Summer Voters Right Movement in 1961. by: Paul Schutzer

 

For Tricia, the issue of sleep deprivation has always boiled down to capitalism and white supremacy. “African people, who were enslaved, were capitalism’s first experiment,” she declares. An ideology she states as thinking, “Let’s see if we can work a human being like a machine, and have them work up to 20 hours a day, every day, for centuries.” She links today’s grind culture to a long-standing white supremacist framework that values productivity - how much one can produce, buy, trade or own - over the natural and primal need to rest. We discuss the changing landscape of work culture, how unions fought for the right to have weekends off (which wasn’t enforced in the UK until the 1930s) and the development of the 21st century’s ‘sleep when you’re dead’ mentality which ultimately confuses workaholism with heroism. Today, burnout is sold as the price of success and as a result, people are getting sicker for it. “Capitalism doesn’t care if you work 24 hours a day,” Tricia exclaims. “You have to see that grind culture is violent, it is an extension of white supremacy, it doesn’t look at you as a human being.” Consequently, she has made it her mission to challenge this beast, but on her own terms. 

THE NAP MINISTRY

By the end of graduate school, Tricia decided to blend all of her experience as a performance artist, community activist and archivist to illuminate the issue of sleep deprivation. She hosted a one-woman show, titled Transfiguration, to examine the commodification of black bodies, and by placing a bed on a stage, centring herself, as a black woman, publicly sleeping in front of an audience, she felt that she was able to “uplift the concept that rest is resistance [and] reclaim the dream space that was stolen from my ancestors by resting now”. I comment on the significance of that performance: the dressing of public sleeping as an act of protest for black people living in a society which judges them for that human activity (in 2018, a white Yale student called the police on another black student for sleeping in the common room) and I question what space is there available for public rest. To which Tricia replies, without hesitation, “there is none”. 

The second part of her presentation involved the hosting of what would become her first collective napping experience, where she invited friends and family to a yoga studio complete with tea, pillows and blankets, as well as an altar adorned with archival images of black people sleeping. She expected 10 people to attend but 40 people turned up eager to rest. Attendees slept for two hours and were invited to join a post-nap debrief. “People were crying, [saying] ‘I didn’t know I was this exhausted, I haven’t taken a nap in like two years because I take care of my sick mother’,” Tricia recalls. “That’s when I thought this is a calling, this is touching people in a way that I wasn’t expecting.” As such, Tricia would continue to spread the message of rest and educate the sleep-deprived on the liberating power of naps. Last year alone, she hosted 50 pop-up collective napping experiences at various community sites across the country (the largest attended by 60 black women in Denver), welcoming members of the public to simply rest. “I really feel blessed that I’ve been able to see thousands of people go into a sleep state,” she reflects. “It’s a spiritual thing to watch people sleep, it’s powerful to see people’s bodies at rest.”

“rest is a spiritual practice and sleep is prayer”

Humbled by the response to her practice, Tricia takes her role as ‘The Nap Bishop’ and the requirement to provide spiritual care extremely seriously. Alongside the lectures and workshops she currently runs, she has also put up installations at various indoor and outdoor venues, creating space for the ‘gospel’ of rest to be practiced, even when she can’t be present to enforce it. The most recent, titled A Portal for Rest, held earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland. We discuss her play with religious terminology in the organisation and she admits to applying the structures of a church (having herself been raised by a father who was also a pastor) but reframing the focus around the concepts of community support and public worship. “I have taken on this persona work as a performance artist and it blended into this spiritual thought leader,” she says. “I did that on purpose, it was always intentional.” And while any implicit religious ritual has been removed from The Ministry, Tricia works to uphold the intersection between spirituality, art and justice. For her, “rest is a spiritual practice and sleep is prayer” and she places particular emphasis on the power of coming together as a community for healing and ‘soul care’. “I think there is something really powerful about the collective,” she concludes. Seemingly, her congregants are similarly captivated by the practice of communal napping and the provision of a safe and dedicated space to sleep without shame or guilt. 

A SLOW AND INFORMED REVOLUTION

Nonetheless, the rest as resistance movement is by no means a new concept. The wellness industry has been preaching self-care for over a decade, with numerous blog posts, weekend festivals and yoga retreats routinely promoting the benefits of a slower pace of life. Unfortunately, the commodification of wellness has turned the act of unwinding back into work. Yet, The Nap Ministry, with its motto of ‘this is about more than naps’, goes beyond the commercialisation of self-care and thus Tricia has become a leading voice amongst a growing group of activists who herald sleep as a political act. It is her rest practice, grounded in theory, archival research and community, that truly sets The Nap Ministry apart, as well as the emphasis on cultivating spirituality, dreaming and communal healing. “I don’t want anyone to forget that this started out of me wanting to have a deep connection with my ancestors,” Tricia insists. 

 
 

She reminds me that while her Instagram page may be viewed as ‘cute’, she had been working in the community - in prisons, schools and with young mums - well before the rise of social media and so her message should never be confused as a quick-fix, wellness trend. Yes, she is offering the space to rest but the real work is about connecting the dots on the reasoning behind the movement. Where the Instagram page functions as a deprogramming tool against grind culture and capitalist thinking, Tricia now also offers a monthly Rest Resurrect School in Atlanta as a counter-narrative to our current fast-paced, digital landscape. Inspired by the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, the sessions bring people together to study texts on womanism, reparations theory and cultural trauma, and helps to raise attendees’ consciousness on rest. “The school is my dream [to] really go deeper into the practice,” she muses.

Considering the relevance of her message to the UK, I am eager to find out whether she is planning any international events in the future and while Tricia promises that she has London in mind (post-pandemic), she is taking her time with the growth of her business. As an anti-capitalist, she isn’t interested in mindlessly franchising the organisation, irrespective of the calls to take her practice abroad, and is understandably wary of a commercial whitewashing of her sessions. “I think the message hasn’t been spread in a deep enough way for it to start being replicated anywhere,” she says, and jokes that people “haven’t taken a nap today but want to be a minister” - an attitude she labels as “consumerism, that’s consumption: you wanna extract and consume”. Although she is running a business, Tricia is careful to avoid capitalism’s pitfalls and has no qualms taking month-long detoxes away from all work (alongside the nap breaks she maintains as a daily practice). “I don’t play,” she says, matter-of-factly. “I’m very radical with this. I’m really about practising what you preach.” She does admit to feeling like an outlier compared to her contemporaries, but remains resolute in her process, which I comment is admirable in the current climate and she replies, “I will never be a tool for capitalism. Even just as a remembrance and respect for my ancestors, I will never let my body be a tool for their production.”

So how then does she envision the organisation’s growth? First on her agenda is to create a Nap Temple in her hometown before expanding anywhere else: “an actual building that’s just ours, that’s like a haven, a refuge for people to come”. As a permanent location that can host daily naps, workshops, classes, and performances, it will stand as a small but collective disruption to grind culture and a reminder that there is a better way to live. And for those abroad looking to engage with The Nap Ministry further, Tricia is working on a book (out next year) which she believes will connect the message and the practice together for people who can’t attend her sessions in person. Another opportunity to meaningfully reinforce The Nap Ministry’s mantra that we are all worthy of rest and that “the time is now to rest, you just have to reframe your mind and reimagine what rest looks like.”

Follow @thenapministry

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