Through Lesedi's Lens

On this episode, I discuss how classic and contemporary Black women storytellers embody a truth and depth in their work that deserves to be understood and studied and how freedom was and still is an ever-present theme for these women. Using authors discussed in the Harvard Divinity School class titled, “Black Women, Black Church, and Self-Narratives” taught by Dr. Nyasha Junior, I will also invite the work of Radha Blank, writer-producer-director-star of “The Forty-Year-Old Version.” Storytelling for Black women is about exclaiming our existence. It’s about saying we're here and we matter. More than anything it’s a means of survival; a fight to preserve tradition and culture as this is essential to the human spirit. Hosted, Produced and Edited by: Lesedi Graveline Music by: Mozado Graphic by: Olivia Vernon, University of Virginia Sources: “The Forty-Year-Old Version” (Netflix) Braxton, Joanne M. “Autobiography and African American Women’s Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 128-149. Foster, Frances Smith, and Davis, Larose. “Early African American Women’s Literature.” The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 15–31. Soloski, Alexis. “A Writer-Director-Star Breaks Through. It Only Took a Lifetime.” New York Times, 8 Oct 2020.

The pandemic has exposed structural inequities that have existed long before 2020 and illuminated the reality of human beings' interdependence and the multilayered ecologies that bind us to one another. For Professors Diane Moore and Terry Tempest Williams of Harvard Divinity School it meant conceiving a course called “The Climate of Unknowing: A Portal into Beauty, Terror and the Moral Imagination.” On this episode, I am joined by fellow HDS classmate, Amy Greulich, and we discuss why humans are not neutral bodies, the implications of the hypervisibility of Black death, and what creating intimacy and being in community virtually meant for us. LESEDI GRAVELINE - (She/hers) Host, Producer, and Editor, Harvard Divinity School AMY GREULICH - (She/hers) Guest speaker, Harvard Divinity School, Master of Divinity 2021 degree candidate. Living on Noepe (Martha’s Vineyard), Wampanoag land. Music By: Mozado Graphic By: Olivia Vernon, University of Virginia Sources Referenced: Professors Diane Moore and Terry Tempest Williams. Teaching Fellow Sage Moses. Course: Climate of Unknowing: A Portal Into Beauty, Terror, and the Moral Imagination; Pendle Hill Retreat Center in Wallingford, PA; Cultural Violence by Johan Galtung; Ricardo Levins Morales Art Studio; MPD150: A People’s Project Evaluating Policing; Dr. Kim Tallbear’s “A Sharpening of the Already Present: An Indigenous Materialist Reading of Settler Apocalypse 2020;” Dr. Sarah Lewis “How Definitive Image of Pandemic Could Help Explain Tragedy”; Resmaa Menakem’s “My Grandmother’s Hands;” Maine Wabanaki-State Child Welfare Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report; Central Park birdwatching incident; Elaine Scarry’s “Thinking in an Emergency.”