Honey & Blackbone Healing Arts

Originally published in The Peak Magazine, volume 54 issue 2. Guelph, ON, Autumn 2015

Black women's bodies are under control, whether it be due to white supremacist suppression by the State through varied expressions of violence, or an internalization of that violence which we wage on ourselves. My interest as an artist, and as an herbalist is not in the supremacy of the “natural”, or in recovering a lost matriarchal past. I am more interested in psycho-somatic responses to this control, such as agoraphobia as a response to anxieties of surveillance. The wilderness became coded with women, threatening and “out there” away from  the civilized  through the ongoing socio-historical process of colonization  that links nature to a will for conquest, and anxieties about disorder and containment. This is especially true for Black women's bodies, seen as the ultimate wild unknown. Black women's bodies both become disorder, and become “disordered”. Because of this desire to maintain distance from control, the Black woman's body has been divorced from the wilderness. A separateness that may look like assimilation, disregard for life, or experienced as a sense of “unbelonging” on her home planet. This kind of felt alienation from land can be seen as a form of oracular somatics: the body reveals not only its own trauma but also the trauma of generations past, and reveals opportunity to disrupt cyclical patterns of suffering. I see the body as both universe and university; a site wherein historical processes are divulged in visceral ways that can appear to be both prophetic and retrograde.   I want to return the Black woman's body to herself.

Plants provide so much space for us to heal ourselves. Plants work on all levels of the body; the subtle emotional body, the physical body and the spirit, often working through and between these realms. They work across the dimensions of time and space, they whisper in our ears, they carry the messages of our ancestors. Plants promote profound change because they defy and escape the disciplinary gaze of capitalism and white supremacy. Media and normative medicine are entwined institutions that over determine our bodies, telling us what they mean, how to treat what they find to be real, and relegating all that falls outside their purview as superstition or fallacy, at best the subject of a good fantasy or story. It is precisely this anarchic, wild space that I want to inhabit in my self-recovery and self-determination as a Black woman.

I want to be clear that normative medicine provides necessary tools for life-saving interventions for people with disabilities. As a person with chronic illness, I've experienced those tools it employs. But when it comes to doing work that requires non-linear, narrative based healing? Plants have so much to give us! When I think about notions of re-wilding my body, of giving Black people the space to experience our bodies as a site of pleasure, or to excavate long held anger, grief, strife and resentment, I find the plants to be powerful teachers. Plants can restore our vitality, our sense of connection to life as something other than a trial to be slogged through or survived. Plants create space for the testimony that's held in our cells and in our hearts. Weaving plant based healing practices together with art making provides a crucial healing praxis that has allowed me to open up a lifetime of the traumas of childhood poverty, sexual abuse, racism, and physical and mental illness.

I also identify heavily with being from another time or place, as being alien or having traveled here from another realm, the memory of which lives right at the seams of my skin that I can't ever quite remember. Whether I am witnessing a past that I call in through my spirit, through vivid dreams of ancestors in places I know I have never been, or through knowing that I am living a future that those same ancestors themselves dreamed up. Part of why the wild or feral body I have a sense of responsibility to responds to so strongly to the plants is that they've been here much longer than I have, and judging from the state of the world, they'll be here much longer than we all will. These plants know human beings really well. When we take the time to listen, they carry messages and reminders of how our bodies can survive all kinds of circumstances, how to make myself a safe house in the middle of the hostility and to remember that there is a legacy of wild, unbroken resistance I can call upon at any time. Notice a dandelion weed aching its way through a crack in the sidewalk, and discover that resistance lives in concert with you everyday.