My Country Needs Me

And if I were not here, I would have to be invented

Join us for tomorrow’s Seeda School study group: Recovering Black Feminist Legacies in the Athens of America at 6pm EST led by Cierra Peters on Zoom.

Hortense J. Spillers, graduate of Brandeis University, inside The Black Feminist Theory Collections at the Pembroke Center

“Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” “God’s Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”

— Hortense Spillers¹

Over the weekend I had the pleasure of finishing Tina M. Campt’s book, Listening to Images. In the first essay, Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity, she quotes Hortense Spillers saying, “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” Ever since ingesting this line it has woven itself deep inside my body and will not leave. It has nutritious value, in(form)ative in nature, it contains thousands of coding, software engineering, speculative fiction, worldbuilding, and biotechnology metaphors. Mining the storytelling potential of this quote feels like an invitation to study.

What’s top of mind is Hortense Spillers’s legacy in the “Athens of America” enroute from the south she recalls, “I departed my parents’ driveway in my little Buick Skylark, three months after MLK’s assassination, enroute to Boston and Brandeis.” Recovering Black Feminist Legacies in the Athens of America is an ongoing research project of fellow Seeda School learner Cierra Peters and tomorrow she will be leading us in a study group publicly sharing this research project for the first time. In Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe Spillers reflects, “...In order for me to speak a truer word concerning myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.” Through her research Cierra Peters is marveling at the inventiveness of Boston’s black feminist legacy.  Spanning centuries of worldbuilding blueprints she cites the grammar of possibility invoked by inventors such as, Elizabeth Freeman, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Angela Davis, Combahee River Collective and more.

“The grammar of black feminist futurity that I propose here is a grammar of possibility that moves beyond a simple definition of the future tense as what will be in the future. It moves beyond the future perfect tense of that which will have happened prior to a reference point in the future. It strives for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen. The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must.”

— Tina M. Campt²

Join us in tomorrow’s study group as we imagine, perform, and invent futures that haven’t yet happened but must. Inside this container for marveling at our collective inventiveness we will share a worldbuilding worksheet with the study group participants. Using black feminist legacy as seed data, this worksheet will invite us to speculate, draw, or write poetry in order to give form to our desires of the future, turning our attention away from the needs of our country and toward the needs of each other. 

Cover of worksheet to be shared among study group participants.

1. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81.

2. Campt, Tina M. “Quiet Soundings: The Grammar of Black Futurity.” Listening to Images, Duke University Press, Durham, C., 2017, p. 17.