Episode 1

Anna Anderson and Riley Grace Huggins discuss two texts, "Rest is Resistance" by Tusha Hersey and "In Search of Our Mother's Garden" by Alice Walker. They interview Taylor Hood Carroll about her workshop, "My Black Joy is Black Activism," which explores how art functions as activism and the role of black joy in resilience. Hersey's book argues that rest is a form of resistance against grind culture, capitalism, and white supremacy. She believes that rest is a human right and explores the connection between rest, creativity, and liberation. Walker's essay connects the idea of a room of one's own with the experiences of black women throughout history, highlighting the importance of artistic expression and finding joy in the face of oppression. Both texts emphasize the need for rest, joy, and artistic expression as forms of resistance and resilience. This is Anna Anderson, and this is Riley Grace Huggins, and welcome to our podcast. Today we're going to be discussing two different texts. One is Rest is Resistance by Tusha Hersey, and the other is In Search of Our Mother's Garden by Alex Walker. So we're going to give a brief overview of each text, and then that will lead into a larger conversation with Taylor Hood Carroll. So we're going to interview Taylor mostly about her workshop, My Black Joy is Black Activism. Her workshop brought together artists from the TWA community to discuss how art functions as activism, and how black joy contributes to a larger expression of resilience. So her workshop had a lot of people in attendance that were encouraged to think about what black joy means to them, regardless of their individual racial or ethnic backgrounds, it was open to everyone, and we all created art that reflects our vision of black joy. Taylor started the workshop with a presentation about her own artistic inspirations and critical works that investigate the power of expression, and then she gave us some examples of existing depictions of black joy in art, and from there we were all invited to create our own artistic expressions. So I was not part of the workshop, but when I heard about it, it sounded really interesting, and it reminded me of some of the work that Tusha Hersey is doing. Tusha Hersey is a writer, theologian, activist, and artist, and her studies are rooted in theology, black liberation theology, and women's thought. And in her first book, Rest is Resistance, Tusha Hersey argues that rest is a form of resistance against what she calls grind culture, against capitalism and white supremacy. She says that rest is an effective tool for black people and those impacted by systems of oppression to reclaim rest that was stolen from their ancestors who may have been enslaved people. She says in Rest is Resistance that rest is not a luxury, rest is not a privilege, rest is a human right that is divine. She says that she was inspired towards this philosophy of rest as resistance during her years as a graduate student in seminary while she was also working an on-campus job and raising her child. She began finding places to nap on campus on her short breaks, treating rest as a spiritual practice, finding moments of clarity and connection that she now calls sacred pauses. Her work challenges grind culture, a social system that treats people like machines and ignores their humanity and inherent worth and sacredness. She argues that this culture is a direct result of white supremacy and capitalism, stemming from slavery and dehumanization. A couple quotes on that. She says that we have been trained to ignore our bodies. Rest is a reclamation. Exhaustion is not a status symbol. That quote was really interesting to me because I think that we have this hustle culture that we should all be working ourselves to exhaustion. But I don't know, I think what she's saying there is really poignant that it's not really like, it's kind of embarrassing if you're working yourself to the dust and you can't take care of yourself because you're continuing to give back to the system that's going to keep exhausting you. Right, like this idea that money is time and so if you have no time it means you have tons of money because you're directly exchanging one for the other and we know realistically that's not how it works. A lot of people are putting in a lot of time and getting back very little money. This world where it seems like the more tired you are the more successful you are. Yeah, when that's really not the case and it's not healthy for us to do that. She talks about how grind culture is violent and manipulative and normalizes us to push our bodies to the brink of destruction. There are constant cases of people exhausting themselves and not being able to continue going to work or making themselves sick over their productivity. We have this productivity culture and influencers who are sharing tips on how to be productive but really what Hershey argues for is rest instead of that and says that rest is important because it connects us to our intuition, creativity and dreams. She says that dreaming and imagination are essential tools for liberation and says that her own practices of rest allow her to access ancestral knowledge and feeling. There's a lot of points in the book where she refers to her own grandmother who she would see taking time to daydream and stare at a window. She says she never really understood that when she was young but as she grew older and started developing this philosophy she realized that her grandma was kind of a genius for taking one small moment back in such a busy day of caring for her large family, caring for herself to just sit and let her mind rest. That inspired her to think about her ancestors before her grandmother too who had been enslaved. She was recognizing this intergenerational trauma that she was healing from because of slavery and systemic oppression. She talks about how rest would have been systematically denied to enslaved people and that black bodies were exploited for labor. It was an act of resistance and reclamation for her to take rest in the place of her ancestors so that she could stop that cycle of white supremacy and capitalism. Absolutely. I feel like that really ties into one of the essays from Alice Walker's book. In the essay that the book is named after, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, she talks a lot about persistence, like you're saying. What you mentioned about sacred pauses, that immediately I was like, oh my gosh, that's exactly what Alice Walker is talking about. She references Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own, but she goes into what do we do when a room of our own isn't available? We don't have that space set aside for us. We don't have that privilege of I have a lock and a key and this is my own specific space. She uses Phyllis Wheatley, the poet who was an enslaved woman living in the 17th century, and she uses her as an example. I read some of Wheatley's poems as an undergrad in my American Lit class. Me too. Alice Walker talks about in a different essay how black artists weren't included in her education at all. She was in college in the 1960s, and so she had to go on this journey of her own to discover these artists. They weren't ever presented to her, and it made me think, what would my life look like if I hadn't been introduced to these texts? I don't know if I would have gone and sought them all out on my own. But either way, this is the book that she has, connecting Virginia Woolf's idea of a room of one's own to Phyllis Wheatley, whose body and any room she went into was owned by someone else. Walker says, quote, Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phyllis, that any woman born with a great gift in the 16th century, insert 18th century, insert black woman, insert born or made a slave, these inserts are Walker's, would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, insert saint, feared and mocked at, for it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts, add chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one's body to someone else, submission to an alien religion, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. There's a really big risk in not having access to artistic expression, like not having the ability to demonstrate who you really are and just be able to create art, not being able to rest, not having those sacred pauses, having every moment of your life owned and dictated and controlled by someone else, not having space to recharge, not being able to experience joy. So for me, like in our modern world, it made me think, like, okay, how do we find a place for rest and joy in the chaos of everything else? Our everyday life isn't always set up for us to be able to just easily do that, whether it's like our own unique traumas or hardships or things that we endure, talking about activism, like where we're being called to engage in these things all of the time. What do we do when it feels like there isn't a room for us? And I feel like Alice Walker's answer to that question is what ties into her mother's garden. So she talks about how her mom was constantly working. She had multiple children. She was working in the fields with her husband. And so it seemed like she always had something she had to be doing. And Walker wondered, like, where did my mom find time for herself? And the answer was in her garden. So this quote, she talks about her mom and her garden. She says, I noticed that it is only when my mother is working in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible, except as creator, hand and eye. She is involved in work her soul must have, ordering the universe and the image of her personal conception of beauty. Her face as she prepares the art that is her gift is a legacy of respect she leaves to me for all that illuminates and cherishes life. She has handed down respect for the possibilities and the will to grasp them. For her, so hindered and intruded upon in so many ways, being an artist has still been a daily part of her life. This ability to hold on, even in very simple ways, is work black women have done for a very long time. And so I feel like that ties into Hersey's point about this being a cultural heritage, like an ancestral thing that's passed down this endurance and ability to find beauty and cultivate beauty in places where like beauty is illegal kind of situation, you know, like you're not allowed to be engaging in those things, but we're going to anyway. Yeah, definitely. And Hersey talks about imagining her own ancestors who were enslaved in a field and wondering how they would have had that time to find that rest for themselves, knowing that they really wouldn't have. But even just one moment of allowing themselves to daydream while they were working and toiling could have envisioned the future that she eventually inherited, that she is not enslaved and that her people were freed. And that she talks about how dreaming and rest are sort of portal to the future. And that when we take time to honor our rest practices, and honor that form of resistance and liberation that we can envision futures where we're not suffering from capitalism or from oppressive systems. And so when we take time to actively cultivate a rest practice, what we're also doing is taking time to envision a future without things that we need rest from. And I think that the things that you're saying about in her mother's garden really resonate with that. She talks too about how rest takes many forms. It's not just sleeping. She talks about detoxing from social media can be a form of rest for her. Do you want to talk more about your experience? Yeah, which is honestly, that's a lot of what I tied into detoxing from social media was because I listened to her to talk about it. I was like, wow, this is really profound. But again, it's going back to that system of like constant churn of information and having this influx of like an infinite scroll that we might take that as like, oh, this is, you know, we're numbing our brain a little bit to the rest of the day. But that's again back in this like feedback loop of everything has to be happening all the time. And she said that she turns her phone off at like 8pm and she's unavailable and she takes time to like delete the apps entirely. But she says that like based on the systems that we live in, social media was built to fit that system and that we should also be mindful of like where we're putting our energy in social media and other places that we cultivate rest practice. She talks about daydreaming a lot, just staring at a window, reading a book or just slowing down, practicing yoga, doing things like that. It doesn't have to be just sleep. And so I remember that was one of my first issues that I had with her work was like, oh, I hate naps. Like I don't really think that I'm going to get into this lady and her nap ministry. But yes, she does run the nap ministry, which is a organization that uses naps, performance art and workshops to engage people in rest as a form of social justice. So some of these works have included art installations, public nap experiences and sermons at Hershey Gibbs. And these public nap experiences are typically organized with yoga mats and throw blankets and floor cushions and ambient music and guided meditations at Hershey leads. And it's interesting to see all of these people showing up to just take time to just rest together. She talks about how important it is that this is something that we do collectively and not just individually, because in order to fight back against those systems of oppression, we have to resist together. Absolutely. Yeah. Alice Walker's written a lot earlier, but getting into that like resistance doesn't have to look the way that you think it's supposed to. It can actually be more effective if it's surprising and doesn't fit those prescribed avenues that people are kind of instructed to expect, like a bunch of people napping in one space, like being disruptive in their own rest. Alice Walker talks about how resistance is usually when it comes to art, especially it's like the unglamorous but worthwhile duties is what she calls it. She talks about what does it mean to be an activist artist. And she says it's really about doing things that are not glamorous, like the work that has to be done for the art to even mean anything in the first place. And her example is, quote, the real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff, with raising a reading level from second grade to third, with simplifying history and writing it down or reciting it for the old folks, with helping illiterates fill out food stamps, for they must eat revolution or not. The dull, frustrating work with our people is the work of the black revolutionary artist. It means most of all staying close enough to them to be there wherever they need you. But the work of the black artist is also to create and preserve what was created before him. You were talking about the collective aspect, like this isn't something that's done in a vacuum or done in isolation. We need our communities to be able to recharge and to be able to share these things with them. We're not making art just for our own sake. We can't make social change alone. Like that's literally social. It doesn't work. When things do feel isolating, there's something that we can do about it, but it doesn't have to be that kind of experience. Definitely. I think even just this conversation, you had this idea and I was like, oh, that reminds me of this work that I'm reading. Then being able to have this conversation itself is also a form of that collective work. It definitely leans on a lot of mutual aid principles tending to the collective. Like you said, we don't exist in a vacuum. Any work that we're doing, we need to remember why it is that we're doing that and what it is that we're doing that for and who we want to do that with so that we can cultivate those practices in that way. How do you think that Taylor's work ties into all of this? Oh my gosh. I'm so excited to talk to her. There's the easy, obvious answer that she recommended this book. It definitely ties into this. First thing that comes to mind is honestly, during her presentation, she had a slide set and she was talking about her, I don't know if it was her grandmother or her great grandmother. That was her model of black joy and her model of art. This is how this woman lived her life and so this is how I am trying to continue to emulate these things and bring these things into my life. I really feel like that comes to light in Alice Walker's work. Not just that the title essay includes her mother, but one of the essays is about modeling in an artist's life. That's where she talks about her experience in college and not having black voices included in any academic spaces. Then she goes on to explain that there needs to be an existing cultural record that you can build off of. It's kind of our responsibility to carry that forward, to imagine new futures like Hersey is talking about, but also just holding in mind that we're not the first people to walk this earth. We didn't just get birthed into the world and start from page zero. I feel like Taylor's workshop really did an amazing job organically. I didn't realize it until I read the book, but that was kind of what she was doing. Saying, here's where I'm coming from. Here's my vision. I'm going to share it with all of you, and then I'm going to invite you all to collectively create your own. It was maybe 20 people all in a room working on art and having conversations and talking and creating in a space that she created for us. She kind of invited us to all come together and talk and think about these things. I had previously thought, okay, how do I get through this idea of activism fatigue? I want to do all these things. I want to help all these causes. Things are on fire all the time. Then she approached me saying, hey, I'm doing this workshop. I was like, Taylor, that's exactly what I've been looking for. Your workshop is the answer to this question. Black joy or rest is resistance or however we want to frame it, that's the solution to this feeling of everything's falling apart all the time and there's nothing I can do. It's coming together with other people who probably feel that way and asking, okay, but what can we do in this moment? Even if what we can do in this moment is just support each other and make each other feel seen and heard and encouraged and we matter. We're all alive in the same space kind of thing. I don't know if that really answers the question, but that's my feeling. Definitely. I was going to get into that too about how this idea had sort of come up joining two works. We wanted to talk about how art, rest, and joy can be used to prevent protest fatigue and activism burnout, that experiences like protest fatigue and burnout are prevalent in intersectional spaces, especially in times of resistance against the current presidential administration and its policies. We live in a time that's really exhausting. I don't know if you felt it, but I definitely felt it. There's just this sort of air of exhaustion and burnout and desensitization to the things that have been going on and it's hard to stay on the grind of activism all the time. In order to continue doing that healthily, we need to take care of ourselves and nourish ourselves so that we're giving back to others with what we can. We talked about how these two works really feed into that. I'm excited to talk to Taylor too and see what thought she has to say about that. One of Walker's essays, it's called Saving the Life that is Your Own, the Importance of Models in the Artist's Life. That kind of ties into Taylor bringing up her family and how she kind of came. She very clearly stated for us as her audience, this is how I came to this idea. I realized in our class about indigenous world literature, something I really value is people being explicit about how they came to the knowledge that they have. I know there's this idea of citation practices and making sure people know where this information is coming from, but I think presenting your process of thinking is also really helpful. It kind of creates a bond where the people you're talking to are like, oh, I think that way too. You got these connections and these conclusions. I can kind of follow that same path and get there. I digress. I wanted to talk about this one quote from that essay and get your thoughts, because I thought it was really interesting. I personally feel like the biggest social justice, civil rights movement thing happening in our generation, or at least in recent memory, is the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. There was slash has been a lot of rhetoric that like, oh, this is divided. Yeah, all lives matter. Why are you singling out this group? You know what I'm talking about. I feel like Walker has a really powerful way to respond to that kind of criticism, like this idea of this is a group that's trying to encourage solidarity, but the criticism is that we're trying to divide. Her quote is, recently I read at a college and was asked by one of the audience what I considered the major difference between the literature written by black and by white Americans. I had not spent a lot of time considering this question, since it is not the difference between them that interests me, but rather the way black writers and white writers seem to be writing one immense story, the same story for the most part, with different parts of this immense story coming from a multitude of different perspectives. Until this is generally recognized, literature will always be broken into bits, black and white, and there will always be questions wanting neat answers such as this. I just really want to focus on what I feel like is kind of a discussion of solidarity, like how do we find the bonds rather than the differences, and maybe that's the place where we rest, is like that mutual encouragement and persistence. So I was just like, I want to know what Riley thinks about this. Definitely, thinking about those systems of oppression that we live in, there are very different experiences often between black people and white people, and it will take all of us to work together to tear down those systems and rebuild a better way of life, and definitely that solidarity is so important. This isn't you versus me, this is we all have this problem, and it just, it harms all of us. Definitely, and in different ways too, and I think it's so interesting that Hersey is a contemporary writer, and that Walker was writing a little bit longer ago, but both these writers are talking about issues that are still really relevant today, like you're bringing up, and these are really applicable, not only just to people of color and their work, but other works of activism, like I can think of a million ways this can apply to the queer community too. Absolutely, yeah, I think both of these writers are encouraging us to look at what comes before us and continue bringing that forward with us, and then that's what we're doing right now, and it's like that's what the listener is going to be doing, you know, it's just like a continuation of ideas. I think it's like being inspired by the past, or pulling from the past, and keeping your eyes fixed on the future and what you're trying to build can help nourish you in the present. I think it's helpful that we can provide topics like art and rest as just different tools for activists and thinkers and scholars to have in their pocket as they're starting to feel a little bit burnt out or a little tempered up next time. Thank you.