Brownness: Reflections, 40 Years Later

The year I wrote Brownness, 1980, my daughter was four years old.

The year I wrote Brownness, 1980, my daughter was four years old. I was invited to my first writers’ group. All white women. All feminists. Most lesbians. That same year of the call for submissions for This Bridge Called My Back, I was fired from my job for saying I was, “Black, lesbian and feminist,” by the state of Louisiana. That same year I sued the State of Louisiana with the resources of the ACLU. While my suit made case law, I lost many friends, my family, my social and political communities, and much of my extended family for years, I  have never reconnected with till this day. No black person from my life appeared with me in state or federal courts. My primarily white lesbian community helped me raise money, looked after my daughter, and showed up with me in court. However, my support among my white lesbian community was diminished because I was not found to be addressing the working-class issues of lesbian white feminist women. My black mothers, family and extended family, my Black friends and my Black political communities were silent and absent. I was abandoned.

Still, I was not radicalized by participating in the Civil Rights Movement of my teens, or the Black Power and Back to Africa Movements of my college years. I was not radicalized by Black radicals or white feminists. I was radicalized and womanized as a girl child by my mother, the women in our family, the women in our extended families, our women neighbors, and church women. They taught me the movement work of creating, sustaining, and maintaining colored women in solidarity and community. They taught me the value of service. They taught me the value of collaborative learning and the teaching traditions of ‘Each One Teach One’, sharing the knowledge and skills we gained collectively. They taught me to love and respect all Coloredness in all forms, that I belonged, and belonging was the most precious thing we shared with each other. While no Black women showed up in court or accepted my white woman lover with anything approaching ease and acceptance, Black women taught me, role modeled for me belonging, service, activism, storytelling, and standing up for what I knew was right.

Over the following twenty years, I moved from The Gulf Coast to the West Coast, to the East Coast and back to the West Coast again as teacher, therapist, and anti-violence advocate, Aids care giver, and homeless activist. I slowly recovered from the ravages of childhood sexual abuse and the losses of home and belonging. During all those years, I always belonged to a woman of color writing community. 

While writing Brownness, I examined, questioned, felt though, looked through, thought through and through, how to define and express myself, my coloredness, my womanness, my intellect, my politics, my spiritually, and these aspects of my being collectively, and in the service of my survival in this country, in this world. I threw out all the definitions about my coloredness to examine myself from the inside out rather than from the outside in. I moved through centuries of denial, lies, theft, manipulation, rape, murder, and the suppression and erasure of the histories of this land, of colored histories, of women’s histories, of their combined sacrifices, heroism, resistance, determination, persistence, and arrivals in these present moments of emerging racial and ethnic power, while at the same time, facing into the ascendency of misogynoir, authoritarianism and white supremacy in the here and now. I came to name all the places from which I saw, I listened, I felt, I resisted, I persisted, I determined, I acted, I declined to act as Brown.

Writing Brownness was a crucial part of my political, emotional, sexual and spiritual growth, a reckoning. It predated my ability to examine my black and political identity and relationships, more particularly, familial, extended family, black community, and political relationships. These relationships being primarily straight with all differences of gender and sexuality communally understood and known, but heavily censured and on the ‘downlow. The reasons for the censuring, lying, and self- erasure about who one was, or who one loved, or who one experienced themselves as sensually and sexually was purported to be for the protection of the general welfare of the entire community from setbacks to the attainment of civil and economic rights, and political power, to reverse the effects of historic-systemic racism and economic exploitation, and from embarrassing the race, other Colored people, Black people. These relationships were based in my South Louisiana, Mississippi River, and Gulf Coast communities. All my people had emerged from one the most extreme forms of enslavement known. Some of my people emerged owning land they had been enslaved to. Some of my people were school educated. Others had been schooled by their elders with generations of knowledge handed down by word of mouth and deed, by the land, by the skies, by the rivers, by the sea, and by the toils of their hearts, hands, bodies, minds and souls. 

Writing Brownness also predated my ability to examine my radical-feminist-lesbian communities, friendships, political relationships, sensual-sexual relationships, and familial-extended family relationships. My lesbian community was primarily white and from other regions of the country, and yet, again, these relationships were conducted mostly on the ‘down low’, in hiding, for reasons communicated by their families and social, work, and faith communities. 

Writing Brownness, in addition, predated my examining my survival, recovery and coming to thrive after traumatic childhood sexual abuse by a powerful civil rights era Methodist Minister. It predated my examining the cross generational transmission of trauma from my grandmother to my mother, from my mother to me, and from me to my daughter. It predated my examining my own vulnerabilities, victimizations, and exploitations, and those internalized and externalized as expressions of victimizing oppressions. It predated my learning to recover, resist and reclaim myself, my families, and my communities by telling the truth, being the truth, and creating and basking in the radical feminist womanist activism of insisting on joy, living, working, and serving others in joy, pursuing and attaining individual and collective liberation in joy, to constantly create the energetic sustaining power to resist, plan, struggle, attain, maintain, and advance free speech, religion, press, the rights of assembly, to petition the government, and to equality and equal protection in all aspects of our beings and humanity.

Writing Brownness predated my embracing the absolute forbidden, finding, allowing, and basking in the joy of my black woman mind, body, sexuality, voice, creativity, and spirit; in my black womaness in the contexts and realities of surviving, recovering and thriving; in my sensuality and sexuality; in my sexual and relational preferences and choices; and in my coloredness– having finally come to understand that all of these aspects of who I am as seen through the colored lenses that white societies view me individually and collectively and by which white societies seek to control me, exploit me, silence me, erase me, kill me, and profit from controlling me, exploiting me, silencing me, erasing me, killing me. 

Forty years after writing Brownness, I am having urgent conversations about the constant resurgences and reestablishments of white authoritarian supremacy in our histories and our current realities of systemic economic exploitation, racism, and misogyny based on the constant incapacitation and annihilation of the powerful and productive uses “the erotic as power,” as Audre Lorde has taught. By the annihilation of maleness in women, femaleness in men, the erasure of the wide choices and fluidity of biological and emotional realities of gender, sex, and sexuality, by the primary use of men’s bodies for the dominance and violence against women and children, by the  use overseer roles in prisons, in law enforcements, in courts, in schools, and hospitals, white men and their allies have reignited white supremacist ideology and white christian nationalism as vehicles through which to aggressively pursue use of women and children’s bodies for primary dominance, for unpaid procreation, for unpaid and underpaid field, domestic, intellectual, service, and sexual labor, further for and aggressive, violent and killing outlets for further male dominance and profit.

I came to my nows. Now, right now, we must live our lives consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively, like the Marge Piercy Poem, To Have Without Holding. We must make life-giving use of everything in us that struggles, survives, and triumphs over that which hurts us, divides us, attempts to kill us. We mix the poultices, soups, and teas from the herbs of our mother's and grandmother's gardens. We bathe and soak in the scents of healing salts and herbs. We pray, and meditate, and dance, and drum, and sing. 

We make our homes and our close circles as healthy, whole, welcoming, and nurturing as womanly and humanly possible. We love each other. We touch each other in every way we can. We listen to each other. We hear each other. We forgive each other. We reconcile with each other. We eat, move, pray, sleep, and wake up in the arc of each other's love. 

We take requisite care in every part of our lives that we have control of, our hearts, bodies, minds, souls, our work, our creativity, our contributions of money, time, and resources, whatever they may be.

We insist on joy – yes, joy – in these times that call out for us to go deaf, dumb, blind, and silent in self-loathing and hatefulness because of our complicity in our own undoing and death. 

We bask in joy every time the morning comes, a child laughs, our meals are prepared in love, our small circle of friends and family gather, and every time nature shows herself vibrant abandon. 

We require joy in every privileged breath we take, the clean water we drink, and the safe passages we happen to have because of race, class, education, age, gender, immigration status, faith practice, affectional preference, ability, however, relative they may be, and we gladly acknowledge relative privilege and power, and share our relative privilege and power with those not privileged by systemic white power, male power, misogynoir, sexism, ableism, ageism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia......

We command joy’s courage in the presence of all that there is to rationally fear, despair, and give up on. 

We prepare, make, consume, and share our cellular insistence to breathe, to live, to be the antidote, to be joy, to be physical, emotional, creative, sexual, sensual, psychic and spiritual joy for and with ourselves and each other. 

We love ourselves. We find the joy that is always as much available to us as are our rational fears, our past and current pain, and the disabling forces that besiege us all. 

Joy is an antitoxin, a serum, a countermeasure, a cure for physical and emotional violence and disabling disempowerment. Joy delivers breath to our cells and transforms our breath into fuel that awakens and enlivens us to create just and free lives and more joy.  

We celebrate our dead. We bury or cremate our dead. We mourn our dead. We give emotional and practical support to those still living.  

We never rest.

We never give up. 

© Andrea R. Canaan, MSW, MFA

Revised May 9, 2024