Feminist Spaces Summer 2022

Black Women’s Aliveness: Black Feminist Poems Shanique Mothersill In Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), she asks, “What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push toward our death?” Her response advises that wake work should both address the “needs of the dying” and “also the needs of the living.” How might Sharpe’s multiple instantiations of the wake inform our understanding of Black women’s aliveness?

Like Christina Sharpe, my theoretical inquiries of Black aliveness enter through death’s door. I engage with accountability and emotion, and I incorporate other modes of thought such as my own poetry. I was guided and supported by Dr. Sika Dagbovie-Mullins, who encouraged me to explore Black aliveness, and motivated my recent coursework on Black death where I presented (and will present here) a poem entitled “And Now We Pronounce You GREEN”, which investigates eco-feminist perspectives on death. I am interested in using an intersectional, radical, and Black feminist approach to prove the significant associations between death and aliveness, and more importantly, between aliveness and being. My aim here, as is argued by Nyong’o, is to “de-dramatize death and dying, insofar as death and dying have become in my view unbearably overinflated in 134