THE DIFFICULTY OF BLACK WOMEN (A RESPONSE)
By Rizvana Bradley
what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life.
—Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory”
IN AN ESSAY on the uncompromising brilliance of Toni Morrison’s oeuvre, published just months before the passing of this inimitable writer, Namwali Serpell observes: “There are many ways to be ‘difficult’ in this world: stubborn, demanding, inconvenient, complex, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is where they overlap.” Black women have always been difficult for the world, which relentlessly demands their labors, but disdains the exorbitance their labors bring forth.
This singular bearing of black feminine labor also palpitates through Simone Leigh’s practice. One of the most admirable dimensions of Leigh’s work is its commitment to the difficulty of black women. Such commitment manifests not only in Leigh’s artwork, but also in her convening of intramural encounters that refuse to countenance the customary partitioning of intellectual and creative labor. Indeed, Leigh has been applauded by American Artist as “able to materially manifest the concerns of black studies and also build community” in and through this commitment to the eclectic practices of black feminist study. Leigh recognizes that black feminist art thinks, and that black feminist thought is necessarily an art of survival. ( … )