The Awakened Woman

by Tererai Trent

  While asking the questions allows us to tune into our intuitive self and for our forgotten dreams to resurface, sacred writing wills us to sift what has been dug up and put it to paper. Sacred writing is soulful; it opens your eyes to what your soul has been searching for all these years. I say sacred writing because you are about to name your sacred dreams.

  Before I do my soul writing, I clean the space and make sure there is no clutter around me. When I’m in this mood, I love to take a shower and wear a nice dress that makes me feel like a goddess. I call to my ancestors and give a prayer to the powerful universe—which is my name for God. Now the world belongs to me and the pen gives me the power to invoke what’s within. If this ritual resonates with you, take the time to prepare the space and yourself.

  Now you are ready to write your sacred dreams, the answer to how you will turn the hunger in your heart into a practice for personal and communal healing. As Mary Oliver asks, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

  What is it you plan to do to feed that Great Hunger in you?

  Be wise with the words that you choose to name your vision, as those words give shape and definition to your sacred dreams. I wrote my dreams in a list; others write theirs as one goal: “to help women heal from abuse,” for example, or “to protect clean water in my community.” Sometimes it’s more of a feeling: “to nurture connection” perhaps, or “to make creative pursuits more central in my life and my community.” Remember to include the sacred with the personal, for it is an honor to be of service to the greater good. As my mother would say, “The focus should not be about our greatness; rather, it should be about serving others.” This is what defines our success. This is what makes our individual dreams sacred.

  You are preparing the fertile ground for the manifestation of your dreams. Let the power of your thoughts become a sacred space to experience possibilities because your imagination is boundless.

  Planting Your Dreams

  Once satisfied with your written dreams, find a place to bury them. Perhaps your garden, or a flower bed that hangs on your balcony, or in a favorite park. Find a hoe or any garden tool sharp enough to prod the earth. Dig in the soil. Dig with the confidence of a farmer about to sow a harvestable seed, believing rain and sunshine will come and nurture the seed.

  Armed with the “farmer’s conviction,” make sure the hole is good enough to support your dreams. Pause. Reflect. Listen to the sounds around you; the resonances of birdsong, the creaking of tree branches, the rustling of the grass, and the sound of the wind and its breeze as it passes your skin. Feel the warmth of the sun or the bite of the air on a cold day. Send a prayer to the universe. Bury your sacred dreams. Envision them growing until they are manifest.

  Dear sisters, hold on to that vision until it engrosses you and it becomes you. Visit the place where you buried your dreams as often as you can, as often as you need to. Think of your dreams throughout your day. Imagine them taking root; imagine their resilience in the bleak times of cold or snow and their fecundity in the growing season. Let the vision of those dreams engross you.

  Become one with them. Feel the cathartic oomph of their presence in the world, giving you an electrical charge that remains with you as the vision takes over your life. For me, it was this very electrical energy that sustained me, charging me to see and experience the tangibility and achievability of the vision for my sacred dreams.

  Others will begin to see the change in you, the transformation for greatness, like an iron rod being polished for great things to come, dear sister, you will shine with confidence. This intentional rootedness will give you the strength to remember your lost dreams, and to awaken your whole self. What is written and preserved with intent becomes ingrained in your thoughts. An ingrained thought becomes a deep-rooted belief. Strongly held beliefs can ground you and help you to achieve your dreams.

  4

  BE YOUR OWN STORYTELLER: CREATING NEW PATHWAYS

  Until the lionesses have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.

  —AFRICAN PROVERB, AS REIMAGINED BY TERERAI TRENT

  In my culture we say, “If you are indifferent at the meat-sharing gathering, you end up with dry bones.” Well, women have borne the brunt of history’s indifference because most history books were written by men from the male perspective and often ignore the presence of women or position them as minor players or invisible objects. More often than not, women have ended up with dry bones.

  Even today, the world tells many stories about women, both in narrative form (as in, “women can be either successful or happy,” or “women can be either beautiful or strong”) and in the form of quantitative data, where a slew of studies reveal women’s absence in much of today’s public culture in the United States. While women make up 51 percent of the US population, for example, they comprise only about 18.5 percent of congressional seats and 20 percent of US senators, a number that has been almost stagnant since the 1990s.1

  Women are unrepresented in business, where they occupy merely 9 percent of top management positions,2 and in journalism and popular culture as well. As Julie Burton writes in the foreword to “The Status of Women in the U.S. Media 2015,” a report from the Women’s Media Center, women “are assigned to report stories at a substantially lower rate than men. In evening broadcast news, women are on-camera 32 percent of the time; in print news, women report 37 percent of the stories; on the Internet, women write 42 percent of the news; and on the wires, women garner only 38 percent of the bylines.”3

  The status of women in film and television, according to the Women’s Media Center, might best be summed up as dismal but with potential: “White men hold the power, [says] Darnell Hunt, director of UCLA’s Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.” At the same time, “We are seeing the beginnings of great change” in the industry, adding that, “Power doesn’t voluntarily give itself up.”4 Stacy L. Smith agrees. “The numbers are not changing,” she says of gender and racial parity both before and behind the camera. “However, awareness is at an all-time high.”5

  Taking a good hard look at these social and statistical narratives is informative, but we cannot stop there, for they tell only one side of the story. When we remain frozen in statistics or stuck as supporting characters in someone else’s story, we remain silent and forgotten. In this we risk being forever kept in a secondary role—we risk seeing the problem and not the potential. If power isn’t willingly given up, then we must claim it in words and deeds.

  Let me tell you this: there is much to be gained from becoming the heroines of our own stories. When we collectively tell our stories, we reveal the richness in that diversity and we create a beautiful cross-pollination of lessons to teach and strengthen each other. Our stories need to be told, by us, so that we can heal any residual pain from our past and create our bold new future—individually for ourselves and together as a human village.

  Many great writers and poets have written about the power of storytelling: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story,”6 wrote author, folklorist, and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston. Author, conservationist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams writes about learning from the Diné, or Navajo, that “voice finds its greatest amplification through story.”7 “[M]any more in number are those stories which are not written on paper, but are written on the bodies and minds of women,”8 wrote poet Amrita Pritam. These and so many other great thinkers speak a profound truth: we need to tell our stories for our own health and well-being. We need to tell stories, so that we harness the power of our voices, and we need our bodies and our minds to demand an audience in the world. Because whether it knows it or not, the world needs our stories for healing and creating, as much as we need the world to hear us.

  Recording your sacred dreams is powerful and liberating. It allows you to tell your story about your life, empowering you to reach out and touch a future of your own making.

  A w
orld of possibilities emerged once I clarified and visualized what I wanted my life to be. Like an architect, I redesigned my life to reflect the future I wanted, and I believed that my dreams were doable in large part because I no longer suffered the agony of carrying an untold story within. My new narrative influenced my life profoundly, and it also influenced my children and generations still to come.

  But the act of burying my dreams alone would not have been enough to sustain me. I needed also to keep speaking them. And I spoke them constantly. My mother would tell me that whenever I talked about my dreams, I sounded like a woman possessed. We’d both laugh, but we knew the truth of her statement: the ongoing act of speaking and writing my dreams was a promise I continued to make—to end the cycle of hardship in my family. I spoke my dreams with pride because I knew that with my words I created someone bigger than who I was in the moment. This is the power of naming your truth: you set an intention, you make a promise, and you make your dreams start to take shape in the world.

  I come from a long line of storytellers, and so do you, even if that part of your history has been forgotten or hidden—after all, it was the hunters and not the lionesses who wrote so much of human history. But I have witnessed the heart and soul of an oft-forgotten oral tradition in which many women told stories that wove communities together, reverberated beyond the walls of the room in which they told them, and illuminated unforgettable and actionable global healing. Let me share my heritage of storytellers so that you might remember, seek out, or imagine your own.

  Cross-legged and barefoot around the fire, I heard stories that had been passed from my great-grandmother Sekai to my grandmother Rufu to my mother Shamiso: stories of how they had survived in poverty, stories of enduring a world ruled by men, stories of their strengths and healing. At times sad, these were stories of women trying to narrate and redefine their lives, women refusing to be victims and declaring themselves part of the solution. These women were not only storytellers, they were also medicine healers, traditional midwives, and village psychologists.

  One story of my grandmother’s remains particularly vivid in my mind. After a long day away from home, my grandmother arrived late in the evening after supper and found the village women sitting around the fire. We knew she had tended a hard labor. In the weeks before delivery, the pregnant woman was very thin and sickly, though her stomach was huge. Without knowing how big the child she carried was, no one knew what to expect. My grandmother predicted it was going to be a long labor. We waited to hear news of the delivery.

  Limping slowly toward the open fire, my grandmother looked tired and resigned. We knew something terrible must have happened, because her walk was familiar: either my grandmother lost a baby or the mother—or both. “Then why didn’t we hear the mourning call?” we murmured quietly among the group. My grandmother heaved her weight down as she joined the circle of women.

  The silence was palpable. My grandmother sighed twice before someone offered her water. “Aiwa, ndipei mukombe wechingoto kana pane chakasara, nditonhedze pfungwa”—“No, please give me the leftover beer to cool off my soul!” No one dared ask what had happened. This story was hers to tell when she was ready to tell it. My mother hurriedly went inside the hut and brought the beer in a mukombe—a gourd. Taking one big gulp, she wiped her mouth, and then settled into her body. My grandmother hardly drank and when she did, we all knew she was troubled. We could see my grandmother was visibly shaken and worse, as she was growing old, her eyes started to fail her and her hands would shake uncontrollably.

  All eyes were on my grandmother, but her eyes were set on the red embers of the fire, her body now completely still. “I have lost the twins,” she declared. “This should not have happened. The mother was frail and Nyadenga—the Creator—saved her, otherwise, I would be telling a different story here.” Her words were met with silence.

  “The mother labored long and hard, but both babies were stillborn,” she continued. “There was nothing I could do except to perform the burial ritual.” As was the custom, my grandmother, the midwife, and the female elders of the village buried the two infants by the watershed near the river. Even though my grandmother was old, she walked everybody through the birth process like a master preparing her students: how she had prepared the herbs to ease the birthing woman’s pain, massaged her belly to aid in the afterbirth, and consoled the family at the birth of not one but two profound losses.

  When she finished speaking, she paused and then spread her hands out for all to see. “These hands have delivered so many babies in my life and no birth has affected me like that of the stillborn.” The women’s eyes scanned my grandmother’s wrists and fingers, taking in every wrinkle on her well-worn hands that had touched so much life and death. “The poor woman was too old to carry the pregnancy,” she says. “Women, oh, women, but why . . .” She trails off. Her unfinished sentence haunts me to this day. For a long time I wanted to fill in that gap of her silence and didn’t know how.

  But then she continued with a hint of laughter, “And these eyes have seen so many private parts that it’s no wonder I’m blind, but my mind is sharp.” In that moment, her frailty and pain was shared with a healing laugh; we in the circle laughed and she joined in, laughing so hard she exposed her one remaining tooth, allowing us to see the beauty of her vulnerability, and hear her wisdom beyond age and poverty.

  In this, my grandmother became the author of her life story—she is not an illiterate, subordinate, oppressed weak old woman, but instead an experienced and compassionate healer, a humanitarian, a leader. That is how we remember her.

  Her story awakens many questions within us: What if my grandmother had been given an opportunity for an education? What if this mother had not been impoverished, had been educated, had reproductive autonomy? My grandmother’s story arouses a deep hunger in us, a desire to carry forward the work of this great woman. And so by telling this story with the incidence of the stillborn babies, she was also telling her life story. My grandmother gave voice to women’s desolation, her own sadness, her losses, her longings, and she also gained confidence through celebrating herself and having herself witnessed by others. This had a profound effect on the listeners.

  Once my grandmother had spoken, once she had opened the door to us in the circle, we could talk about the longing in our own stories. Now we listeners could work our way toward solutions—dreams of education, independence, and healing—to dive down deep into our own forgotten dreams, finding solidarity and encouragement there.

  As a child, while these stories framed and shaped my perspective in my limited village world, unknowingly, these stories strengthened and became part of my tenacity, my source of inspiration, and ultimately my healing because I knew I could also be a creator, a maker of my life no matter the circumstances. We all have the power to seek communities—friendships, poetry readings, book clubs, even social media groups—where imagination merges with voice to create a fertile soil for new possibilities to emerge.

  Creativity and Creation

  The world would have told a very different version of my grandmother’s story if she had not told it to us herself: to outsiders and foreigners who did not understand her way of life and her deep hunger, she was often seen as little more than a poor, illiterate woman, an uninformed “bush” healer, victim of a patriarchal social system. This is not the whole truth about my grandmother. It is a partial truth.

  If the story of her life continued to be told that way, her oppression would dominate and overshadow her power: my grandmother was a heroine to her community. She was not just a victim of a patriarchal and colonial environment, she was also a woman who thrived, a respected woman who transcended her circumstances, a wise woman full of grace and dignity.

  Like my grandmother, we do have the power to tell alternate stories, to tell authentic stories, to tell complex and messy stories, and to tell our own stories. Sacred sisters, this is about taking responsibility for who we are, engaging our minds and hearts in creativ
ity and storytelling that builds the very core of ourselves to our fullest potential, and to speak to our future selves the once painful aspects from which we’ve healed.

  Unlike the usual, linear way we set our life goals—school, then career, then marriage, then children, as one example—storytelling enables us to be imaginative and inspirational in our goals. It allows for revisions and make-believe, for unhindered creativity and mystery. When told in supportive outlets, such as with friends and mentors, or through blogging or writing, it allows others to revisit their own stories, to creatively craft a new self. Like our buried dreams, stories are little seeds we plant: who knows what will heal or grow once they begin to germinate?

  I once spoke with a woman named Ana who shared with me how storytelling helped her through a difficult time in her life. In her late thirties, Ana suddenly realized that she was actually a terrible fit for the profession she had spent so much time and energy seeking. She was unhappy, unfulfilled, and stuck. This young woman had spent many years training to be a psychologist. It had been her life’s goal since she was very young, and so right from college Ana went to graduate school, working very hard to be academically successful, taking on loans to make this goal possible, and even sacrificing her personal life for her studies. Yet she was confident and comforted in the knowledge that she was pursuing her dreams.

  Ana celebrated a joyful graduation day, but a few years later she knew by the terrible feeling in her chest that she was burned out, miserable, and that she needed a professional rebirth. A good amount of shame and fear accompanied this feeling: She had school debt! She had no idea where to go next! She was supposed to be responsible and settled by now! She had wasted so much time! She had been so confident that she was on the right path, how could she trust her intuition again?