Resources

The following is adapted from a talk given by Dr. Jennings during the 2024 Wabash Center’s BIPOC Faculty Luncheon at  the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). You sound   What do you sound like in the rain, Standing between claps of thunder and lighting strikes, untamed and terrifying?   Silence, though wise, is not an option given your task of directing toward shelter, while rain drops clean your face including your teeth, as if it were their right and duty.   Storm time covers your time, threatening to last as long as your will to communicate, your willing locked into battle against blowing wind, promising many episodes, several seasons.   But what do you sound like? Does your sound collapse under the weight of the elements, reduced to a shouting whisper, only inches from your inner voice?   Or   Have you found a bullhorn with fresh batteries that give your sound that familiar grabbled sound indistinguishable from anyone else seeking quick victory?   Choices must be made in the storm, since you are yet directing and eyes blurred with much wet are still watching, straining to hear.   But maybe the question to dis-cover the sound of your voice is what do you hear in it?   One of the most challenging tasks of life in the academy, especially for people of color, is cultivating one’s own voice—and within that cultivation, to know one’s own sound. Voice and sound here, as I am using them, are thick metaphors that bring together the one and the many, the self and the institution. Voice in this regard is your self-witness, the testimonies you give, big and small; the pieces, the fragments of yourself you present; your showing and telling, depending on what you need or want to communicate in this world—in this academic world. Your sound is your way with your voice. At one level, your sound is your style inside your drama to speak and to tell. It is your bend with your pen as you write your own story page after page. But at another level, your sound is how you hear others hearing you. Your sound is your awareness of other voices and the way you weave in and out of other sounds. My friends, in the academy being heard (having voice) and being able to hear (knowing your sound) is still frontier work for us. I named two things here, voice and sound—being heard and being able to hear. Being heard and finding our voice in the academy is a challenge in the best of times. As I have written about this, it is the struggle against white self-sufficient masculinist form—that suffocating form of self-presentation and self-articulation around which flows the evaluative ecology and reward systems of the academy. We struggle against the pull to mimic the voice of that man, the finished man, who shows he has mastery, control, and possession of his knowledge. That struggle comes at us from outside of us and from inside. Outside, from the forms of formal and informal evaluation layered across our bodies. Inside, from the often-severe voices that we have internalized; those voice which place on us a quest for unattainable excellence. Inside and outside, forces bound to our will to survive—for our own sake and for the sake of our peoples. We know, however, its possible to resist that voice and find your own voice. We stand in the legacy of people who have, and are, doing just that. There is a poem in my book, After Whiteness, that tells the true story of how one sister helped another sister begin her journey toward her voice in the academy. It begins with the elder sister’s recognition of the struggle: My voice trembles always at the sound of your voice, which began for me so long ago, gently guiding me to what was good, great, weak, strong, straight into the vise, tightening ever so slowly that I mistake the hurting for stability, constrictions for conscientiousness I learn labored breathing, tighter thinking until I make the sound for help with every sound I make. But I think, this will not be forever. I will break free even if I must tear skin from my flesh to loose your stability. Sara saved her, took Joan from the other voice and placed her inside. She knew how, having lost enough skin to form a womb outside her body – the mindbodywomb - where bathing light would cover Joan’s thinking, protecting her from glaring light – light against light – knitting truth into her inward being before it could be snatched away by the other voice, until she emerged from Sara’s wombbodymind intact, and hearing none, the i passed unharmed into Joan’s voice flowing like refreshing waters ready to heal torn skin and cracked voices.[i]   Finding voice is a constant work of abolition, of freeing your voice from his voice. But I have come to realize that the work of finding voice carries within it the task of learning to hear your sound. Over the years, I have met too many scholars, especially BIPOC folk, who do not know their sound. What do I mean by not knowing their sound? On the one hand, they have very little idea of what they sound like, they do not hear others hearing them. And on the other hand, they do not know how to move in sound and let the sounds of others flow through them. Let me tell you a story: There was this scholar who always spoke truth to power. He had made it up the rough side of the mountain. He knew what needed to be said in every setting, to every individual, every administrator, every colleague, and every student. Right, bright, brilliant, and insightful, he claimed his voice in white spaces, announced his present freedom to speak and his commitment to the struggle. His voice was and is urgent, vital, and necessary, but his colleagues have longed for his absence. They can’t stand him. Without knowing more details, you might say that he was simply being prophetic, marking the journey of so many BIPOC folks struggling against white hegemony. But in this case, the desire for his absence is unanimous among everyone, including BIPOC folk. He cannot hear himself which means he cannot hear others hearing him. He closed himself off from the sounds of others, and turned his own voice, aimed toward freedom, into his own prison. He is alone, bitter, and convinced he is too controversial and radical for the academy. He may be too controversial and radical for the academy. But, he is also bound to the voice of the white self-sufficient man even as he articulates freedom. What is missing from this scholar’s voice is the working with sound.   Allow me to return to the first poem and add a few words:   Choices must be made in the storm, since you are yet directing and eyes blurred with much wet are still watching, straining to hear.   So maybe the question to dis-cover the sound of your voice is what do you hear in it?   Do you hear others dreaming out here exposed to the elements, sharing in feeling fragile flesh, turning their bodies this way and that to negotiate with the wind?   Do you hear the thunder calling you to join its rhythms, the lighting awakening you to surprise, pulling toward oneness with flashing light, accepting the risk of free air? Do you sense the rain as your support, your pips to your Gladys Knight, moving when you move even at midnight.   The key here, my friends, is delight, delighting in the sounds, allowing the sounds to move through us, never seeking to possess them but to give witness to a hearing that is without end. Every musician knows, the character of your voice and the power of your sound depends on your ability to hear and keep hearing. What is critical in cultivating your voice is your ability to hear in ways that free you from being pulled toward mimicking the white self-sufficient masculinist voice even as you assert your freedom.   How do we sound freedom even amid despair? This is the urgent question we face as we navigate Trump 2.0. The temptation at this moment is to give into the despair and allow that despair to hollow out our voices. However, we will need to speak prophetically. We must speak powerfully and urgently, speak truth to power. Our speaking must show our hearing, or our voices will reveal that we have closed ourselves off to the sounds around us. For the sake of our students, our communities, and for the sake of our scholarly work, we need to attend to our sound and show both our delight and our freedom for others in, and through, our voices. The sounds of many need to flow through us, merging and weaving in slices and pieces inside our own speaking, thinking, and writing, inside our own self-testimony. If not, we run the great danger of our having our own voices turned against us, weaponized and made dismally predictable in how they do not show a lively hearing. Allow me to close with just another stanza from this poem:   If you hear, they will hear in your sound, glimpses of their sounds, then and there you will know your sound, directing toward shelter, announcing a free place.   Notes & Bibliography [i] After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 119.

The following is adapted from a talk given by Dr. Townes during the 2024 Wabash Center’s BIPOC Faculty Luncheon at  the annual conference of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Self-care is within the matrix of our total health; how we care for ourselves—mind, body, soul, and spirit. Self-care is often the last thing for which the academic life makes allowances. We must decide that we will craft the habits of mind, heart, soul, and body. There is no one way to go about self-care, as we each have our own biorhythms and social contexts. But I believe there are things that we can all hold onto in the necessary work of taking care of ourselves; things that will also help us in bringing people whole in the classroom; things that serve our scholarship, our institutions, our families, and our kin. In thinking these things through, I have found myself revisiting a passage of sacred text that is apocryphal for me. Some may have heard me reflect on this before. This passage has the same kind of holy-fying (wholly-fying) impact on me. It is found in the film, Daughters of the Dust by the African American filmmaker Julie Dash, which tells the story of a Gullah family preparing to come to the mainland at the turn of the twentieth century. Tradition, change, migration, and bondedness to the land, are woven together in the story’s Peazant family. The memories of slavery and working in the indigo plantations of the island are the stuff of history books, written in the hands of the older members of the island and in the stories, they tell to the younger ones, the games the young and old still play, and in the African and Arabic words they continue to teach the children. The passage that I revisit are lines spoken by the character, Eula, who had been raped by a white man. The narrator of the movie, the Unborn Child, is Eula’s child. Only the audience knows that the child she carries is truly the one she conceived, in love, with her husband Eli. Eula calls the women to task for ostracizing Yellow Mary, a prostitute, who turned to this life after her own experience of rape. Yellow Mary had come home to the island to be with her family again and to heal. Eula reminds them all that the fate and hope of Yellow Mary is their own—no one escapes the ravages of evil, no on stands outside of the promise. Eula turns to the younger women and her words are for us as well. ‘There's going to be all kinds of roads to take in life.... Let's not be afraid to take them.  We deserve them, because we're all good women. Do you... Do you understand who we are, and what we have become?  We're the daughters of those old dusty things Nana carries in her tin can... We carry too many scars from the past. Our past owns us. We wear our scars like armor, for protection. Our mother's scars, our sister's scars, our daughter's scars... Thick, hard, ugly scars that no one can pass through to ever hurt us again. Let's live our lives without living in the fold of old wounds.’ It is within this constellation of possibilities that I want talk about self-care with you. The notion of all kinds of roads, and our willingness to take them. The fact that we are, most of us, good women (and men). We are the daughters and sons of those dusty things that Nana carries in her tin can—there are scars: glass ceilings and other discriminations based on gender, sexual orientation, weight, beauty, race, age, religiosity, culture.  And yes, we do wear some of those scars. For some of us they are like armor because we have discovered that we do need protection. But what does this do to us, ultimately, when we live our lives in the folds of old wounds? When we cannot see another way to be? These are the kinds of questions that come to mind when I am asked to talk about self-care. These are the kinds of questions that ask each of us to think through what it means to be responsible, to take responsibility for creating our health each and every day, to realize that taking care of ourselves is radical witness to God’s ongoing revelation—not only in history, but in the immediacy of our breathing. Indeed, God's presence is the very fabric of our existence, immanent and transcendent, and I think we must stay mindful that a key element of self-care is living our lives with integrity and faithfulness in God. This means coming to a sense of self, finding our identity, treasuring the gift of our lives. For me, self-care is an important component of health and healing in order to create whole and holy selves. So, we must take care that we do not spin our lives, our careers, our ministries around a success ethic that is grounded in measurable gains and regrettable losses. To practice care for ourselves, means recognizing that we can't run off with someone else's scholarship or appointment. Because even when we steal, that doesn't make it ours, it only makes it stolen. Self-care is about stretching into your deepest self to discover anew what restoration and healing can and must mean for you when it is grounded in grace rather than solely on the latest U.S. News and World Report model of success. I urge all of us to proclaim the blessedness, the sacredness of our lives. This can be a challenge. It is easy to lose sight of this in the midst of phones that ring without ceasing, calls that are never returned, e-mail after e-mail, and the oh-so omnipresent Zoom. But, if we think about the call to proclaim the blessedness, the sacredness, of our lives as a strength rather than as a virtue, we can draw comfort and sustenance. As a womanist, I believe that self-care must be embodied, personally and communally, as it brings together the historic force of our spiritual lives with the demand of the spirit to love our faith through our health and through taking care of ourselves as best we can. Self-care is not an abstract, sterile, utopian category. Health and redemption are tools to build bridges that actually go somewhere and give us redeeming time of sustenance building, so that we can continue to make bricks with no straw, if we must. We must, begin with the wounds, those scars, in Eula’s words, those of our mothers, daughters and sisters, thick and hard. We must start caring for those scars, the folds of those old wounds that have, in some cases maimed us with lies, secrets, and silences. These wounds that mark us, do not need to define us. For as wise folk, as people seeking wisdom, we must grasp a hermeneutic of suspicion. That is, we must examine our first works over and over again. Self-care comes in a variety of sounds and textures and I suggest that we need new visions of excellence and adequacy. Because holy boldness does not mean that we work ourselves to death right up to the pearly gates. We are not to provide racialized and gendered cannon fodder for a bureaucracy that likes to declare its holiness, or relevance, or scholarliness while colleagues engage in mind-numbing studious lint-picking from their sanctified navels; while some white male academics rail on about how white men can’t find jobs or a decent match to their self-anointed gifts and then look at all of us as if we should dignify such inane chatter; while issues of class go unaddressed every day and in every way; while “DEI” has suddenly become a four-letter word, while that very same diversity is helping to keep  many of our institutions afloat financially. Or, at least give us enough buckets to keep bailing water until the capital campaign begins to reap benefits. No, self-care means declaring that part of who we are is about seeking liberation of soul and body and intellect and spirit. It means that we must challenge ourselves to ask tough questions of ourselves and our religious homes and our academic institutions and our ministries. Self-care means that prophetic healthiness must be more than so many coins in a bankrupt economy that traffics in people's lives as so much loose change. Self-care means unpacking the gospel into living. So, how do we get moving in the direction of our self-care? There are many models for us. We have much to learn from each other. We should sit down with each other and give each other the important details of living, share with each other how we have survived, how we have thrived. This is not a time for pulling out an arrogant litany of braggadociosness about how successful we have been, or a heart-piercing recitation of how hard it is. No, this is a time for genuine lament, where we name the realities of our situations with as much accuracy and precision as we can so that our lamentations help us see that what is before us can be managed, if not transformed. Self-care, we do this communally—together. We seek, together, faith-filled ways to work it out, to care for ourselves.