Book Junkiez

The cicadas were noisy where my grandmother’s white, metal Maytag wringer washer stood in the grassy backyard next to the kitchen’s screen door beside the thriving vegetable garden. On the front porch, I watched with my child eyes, the moment a slim, young blond woman wearing a yellow cotton dress rumbled toward us in a shiny and substantial car. She parked it on the red dirt driveway next to my grandparents’ wooden house on Peach Street, which was on the other side of the railroad tracks, near the big tobacco barn up the paved road. The young lady stood in front of the house and my grandmother, in her blue housedress, seemed much older as she approached from the backyard where the wringer washer was. She was carrying a wicker laundry basket filled with pressed and neatly stacked linens. The young woman handed my grandmother a dollar with an audible, “Thank you, Sarah,” addressing her by her first name as she took the ample basket from outstretched arms. She didn’t look my way. My grandmother’s honey-brown fingers folded the worn dollar bill handed to her from the lady’s freckled hands in half, with a look on her face that appeared to disapprove of the moment and the woman. I hadn’t seen that interaction or look before.

The following chapter explores the intersections of belonging, othering, its connection to trauma, and my own narrative of the internal struggle of identifying self-worth as a woman of color—and, more specifically, as a Black identifying woman in the world and in the creative art therapy profession of drama therapy. These thematic intersections are all aligned to self-esteem and how others perceive us as women in our social and professional spheres. The intersections affect how we stride on the planet and our overall health. The following exploration bade me to act as a bricoleur, collecting and implementing the odds and ends—fragments of the historical narratives that visit me; creating a collage of images, implementing snippets of stories in order to form a larger landscape of understanding—both for the reader and myself; a free-form approach inviting me to scribe the lived stories that function as examples of our collective vulnerability. Only when I pause, noting and re-collecting the useful threads and seeds, like an invested mama bird building her secure nest through writing, does the story I want to share come through. It is in the collecting, forming, and then sharing of stories from which deep understanding for self and others can occur. 

As a parallel process, I share how a creative arts therapeutic action of creating a narrative-based assemblage construction called the Poetic Home exercise can offer personal insight about such things related to self-identity and trauma. Insight exists in the social constructionism approach, in the courageous encounter where the process of making meaning with others leads to self-actualization. 

When I ponder the very pregnant and universal topic of self-worth, there are two distinct landscapes embedded in bygone eras that come to mind. This chapter began with the first, a scribed memory of my eight-year-old self experiencing an interaction that illustrates the tone of time, place, and relationship where much of my initial conscious awareness about the circumstances of belonging, self-worth, and othering started. This narrative inquiry praxis looks forward, backward, and considers chronology, place, and the relational through an emic perspective—an auto-ethnographic unpacking that situates lived data in story form for an empathic as well as intellectual understanding.

The upcoming narrative landscapes feature my grandfathers within those bygone eras; both men were worlds apart from each other and yet so precise in the way they strode the planet upon which they thrived—at least when I met them. Afuape (2011) mentions the importance of reclaiming memory, arguing that as a result of the attack on memory that comes with abuse, violence, and oppression, people who experience emotional distress and psychosocial difficulties often experience life as single-storied, predominantly featuring hopelessness and despair. Therefore, reclaiming memory, as I do in the following pages, is a liberatory act and an important part of resisting these felt abuses of power—that may be recent to me or may have occurred generations ago to my ancestors. I am not absolute in knowing how the fragments of my sharing will affect the reader or myself. Nor do I claim the ensuing storied pieces complete the materials for a whole narrative of an entire lifetime. Reclaiming storied and variegated fragments through a bricolage practice (Denzin and Lincoln 2008) of story making and writing here serves as the healing process of tending, mending, and witnessing in the role of the griot, defined as the respected West African narrator of oral traditions, poetry, history, and genealogy, which I hold from my ancestors—a significant interactional aspect of the drama therapist and social constructionist position I embody.