Folding. Clasping. Grabbing.

The women in my family were not feminists. At least, I didn’t hear any of them pronounce themselves as such. Intrigued, but mostly ambivalent to my own obsession with thoughts and ideas, these women were and still are a group of women that propelled themselves into action. They were not interested in what they understood to be the abstraction of words, but, rather, they moved. Theory and ideology had raced them. It had gendered them; understood them to be inferior. So in attempt to make a meaningful life beyond the ideas and beyond the words, they moved.

Slowly and deliberately at first, these women stirred about.

Folding. Clasping. Grabbing.

They moved as they thatched the grass roofs of the huts together. They moved as they planted and extricated food from the earth. Scurrying past the threshold of poverty and the working class experiences that dominated their unreachable villages, they zoomed into white suburbia on rickety taxis.

They moved respectfully and with continued restraint as they navigated the tricky terrain of (small) madams and masters. They sped past the damnation of cloaked priests and etched their way into the body of Christ. They moved swiftly, ordered by grace and redemption into the promise of a better eternity.

They moved to and from rooms filled with a teacher that taught their daughters to speak in English with nasal accents. Moved as they sustained a life for them, that was unlike their own.

Moved and moved.

In trying to piece together my thoughts on feminism, sisterhood and the lives of black women for this paper, I have thought of these women over and over again. I have thought of how these women disrupted my assumptions about the feminism that I read on the pages and the femininities that were expected of me in public. Working through my own analysis about what a contemporary feminist agenda might look like, I have had to rediscover the contradictions that pervaded my own personal thought and have had to re-shift and renew the discursive tools that underpinned that particular theory. Despite these consistent ruptures, I have held onto their movement and used the stories of women oscillating in varying spaces and various forms of oppression as the basis from which to start theorizing.