THE ARCHIVE.
WELCOME TO
"We might explain what feminism is or how it feels like but there is way more than books we need. And also the question before was how do we reach, to that point - Art has a lot of power and gaming, playing - like how we play with kids, has a lot of power. So why are we trying, all the time trying, to stay in a cognitive world when we want to express ourselves? To be honest there is a lot of ego. There is a lot of ego playing - okay intersectionality, feminism, buzz words...But who do we want to reach and what do we want to change? With art and playing around with words. I believe that it gives us a lot of opportunity to open our minds and receive perceptions and words..."
“out of the fullest of the heart, the mouth speaks”
resist the depoliticization of feminism
“The problem space we are in today when we speak of Africa, or speak of Ghana as a nation, as a continent, as a land mass, as a people is inherently a part of a colonial story. we can decolonize till the end of the world but colonialism is still a part of our story.”
on feminism: “we are identifying the same struggle…are tying the thread, not so much as to discard our individual contexts, but to kind of weave together a tapestry, a bigger thing, to connect to a bigger thing, to create the thing that links all of us together, Ghanaian, continent, diasporan - to connect the thing that shows up in all of our contexts in similar ways that comes from the same place.”
“there are
african feminists
who have been writing,and confronting
and deconstructing
christian ideas of womanhood
from time”
“doing the work”
“there is a lot
of reading and
a lot of learning.
and it takes
discipline
and devotion”
"If you are not somebody that is interested in people beyond yourself, you are never going to move from point A to point B. If your entire thing is about your experience of a particular thing and freeing yourself of the individual oppression that you are experiencing and not looking at the person next to you who is experiencing that oppression maybe times two. And not looking at that and being like 'How can I stop it for that person', you are never going to get from an individual empowerment to a political understanding of something - never. Until they get to a place where they recognize- And sometimes it is experience that teaches you, cuz when you free yourself of the oppression you see and feel today, the next oppression is meeting you tomorrow. And if you don't collect that understanding of the fact that we are working with systems and we only see individual every single time you are going to be on a hamster wheel for the rest of your life - and maybe it's okay for you. If what we want to do is build a better world you cannot solely think of yourself. And for the people who I think you are describing it is about THEM, they have to get to a place where it is about US. That's when we can then engage and whatever will move from them to us sometimes it isn't always a conversation - sometimes it requires a different sort of experience. "
What does your
ideal world feel like?
dreaming and feminist justice work comes with responsibility
"How do we.....
build a politic that is not about ourselves? as individuals?
How do we build a politic that is all-encompassing of other people and their struggles?
How can we build deeper knowledge of ourselves
even about the things we think we already know?”
on reimagining feminism:
“feminism is not stagnant,
to be feminist is not stagnant.
the word has to grow in the way we grow”
"IT DOESN'T END"
“A person who identifies as feminist cannot be complacent in their understanding of the world and believe that they have arrived and that this is all that there is to know. I don't think that’s feminism”
"THERE IS NO ARRIVAL POINT"
“the way we center alternative
histories of our communities and
ourselves, because we know that
there are inaccuracies in the stories
we are told of ourselves from a western standpoint, is the same way we should center the knowledge and histories of African feminisms before us as a counter-narrative to the narratives we learn”
before the word “feminism”...
“all those fighters - mothers, grandmothers, they were all doing it before the title”