{"title":"a wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness","authors":"R. Botts, Osceola Ward","doi":"10.47106/4rwj.11110477","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47106/4rwj.11110477","url":null,"abstract":"a wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness is a call into grief for communities of Black folks working to survive Quarantine 2020. We meditate on what wake work looks and feels like in this particular season of Black suffering, as we grapple with the weight of quotidian Black death and the possibilities for the restoration of sacred Black lives. Using a methodology of reflexive poetics, we paint portraits of intimate ontology, inner worlds, and unraveling. We use repetition as a tool for deep emphasis, and write in and out of I and We statements to illustrate the multitude of voices present within this text - the collective love of we, the individual I, the communal fight of us, and the sacred oneness of Spirit. We work to reimagine our relationship with reading, writing and words in order to reject performative notions of intellect that often divorce us from the intimacy so necessary for engagement with the Black intellectual tradition, particularly the subsets of our tradition that center our imaginaries of fugitivity beyond suffering. We acknowledge that, in order to write care into the wake, we must first center language that makes space for our affective experiences. By refusing the gaze of academia and reclaiming our intimacy to education beyond the project of schooling, we free ourselves up to write creatively, illegibly, and in dissonance. In fact, we see our writing as a fugitive practice in and of itself, one that allows us to reclaim our voices to map out new sites of marronage where we might nestle ourselves up into alternative scapes of freedom.","PeriodicalId":340170,"journal":{"name":"Root Work Journal","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123843667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Question","authors":"Miracle Okoro","doi":"10.47106/11099304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47106/11099304","url":null,"abstract":"In this poem, I struggle to balance God’s goodness with the injustices happening to the black community.","PeriodicalId":340170,"journal":{"name":"Root Work Journal","volume":"414 ","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133621686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Root Work JournalPub Date : 2020-08-24DOI: 10.47106/4rwj.11.11107614
Crystal S. Rudds
{"title":"Tekhenu","authors":"Crystal S. Rudds","doi":"10.47106/4rwj.11.11107614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47106/4rwj.11.11107614","url":null,"abstract":"Tekhenu is about a parent losing their memory and praying to be remembered. But it is also about how one survives any type of pillage -- whether by disease or enslavement and oppression. The work that African Americans have had to do to recover their connection to ancestry is a travesty. But our great loss has also yielded many treasures that the Other cannot understand. This is what the Ark recalls me to: at once the site of mourning and a powerful inheritance.","PeriodicalId":340170,"journal":{"name":"Root Work Journal","volume":"26 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116706467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afternoon Remembrances","authors":"Jaminnia R. States","doi":"10.47106/4rwj.11109354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47106/4rwj.11109354","url":null,"abstract":"\"Afternoon Remembrances\" is an attempt to answer a question that many of us are afraid to ask ourselves, or to even contemplate when asked by wise elders to consider the meaning of our condition. To do this, I told the story of my contemplating in story format, condensing several months of pondering and Soul-Listening down to a few pages, and setting this \"mind conversation\" in a place familiar to many of us via some experience or another. The \"characters\" are representatives, archetypes really, of very real people. Like all good questions, it has led to more questions than answers.","PeriodicalId":340170,"journal":{"name":"Root Work Journal","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122230401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black is Beautiful","authors":"Lacey Belinda Smith","doi":"10.47106/4rwj.11101199","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.47106/4rwj.11101199","url":null,"abstract":"To honor our colorful history and hold sacred the sacrifices our ancestors endured for our freedom.","PeriodicalId":340170,"journal":{"name":"Root Work Journal","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133902564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}