My Dear Friend,
You know I love music. So, on the occasion of your recent heartbreak, it is my honor to present you with this playlist. This playlist operationalizes bell hooks’ Sisters of the Yam, as a manual for collective Black healing and self-recovery. Sisters of the Yam is progenitor to hooks’ four-book meditation on love and relationships. In it, she shares “the secrets of healing:” ancestral magic we must enact to “make ourselves ready to enter more fully into community.” For hooks, our emotional health, impinged upon by interlocking systems of anti-Blackness and gender marginalization, has the potential to transform the world. ‘How to mend a broken heart,’ ‘how to make the hurt go away’ - these are worthwhile questions for sustaining our connected lives. She instructs us to take seriously the business of our wholeness. It is toward this aim that I trace my curatorial process and testimony therein.
It is crucial to first acknowledge we are learning to love in a hostile context. As hooks declares, “Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, black people do not get enough love.” We are not taught to extend it to ourselves or other Black people. Within the context of domination, Black women and queer people are socialized to see our inner worlds as worth less. Referencing Nikki Giovanni’s “Woman Poem”, hooks establishes that we are reared “to be caretakers, to deny our inner needs” and descend into “self-hate [that] can make us turn against those who are caring toward us.” We are taught to push away the communion required to make a loving world possible. To decline it before we can be denied it. We have been defined by our capacity to repress our emotions, as is advantageous in the present system of oppression. How do we heal our attachment wounds in preparation for the next world? It was as children that we first whispered, ‘am I worthy of love?’ and the sky shouted back gibberish. As adults, how do we find coherent ways of receiving love?
“The art and practice of loving begins with our capacity to recognize and affirm ourselves.”
We will have to feel our way through. Many of us have divorced from the patterns of self-abandonment modeled by even the best-meaning of our foremothers. In their place we are yet planting self-actualizing practices for accepting and honoring true love. As we learn from Lucille Clifton, we’re making this shit up with fistfuls of clay: modeling and remodeling ourselves from scratch. In several of the songs selected for this playlist, you will hear laments about being unable to see oneself and be seen by others in turn. Through love, we learn ourselves, not as static structures but as dynamic beings. You are refined by your love. It must come from yourself at least as often as it may come from those outside of you. “Practicing the art of loving is one way” we get in touch with our essence; it “empowers [us] to see more clearly and act justly.” It leads us in forging identities we can live well within.
“We are not raised to believe that living well is our birthright. Yes it is… Accepting that we are entitled to live well, we feel empowered to make changes, to break old patterns.”
It took me eight months to finalize this playlist. Early iterations were primarily resentful and spiteful, emotions which while powerful motivators, made me feel embarrassed by my soft heart. I have historically given in excess of what I’ve received in courtships. I have been naive and doting. I avoided the playlist for months, ashamed of my own tenderness, but I don’t aspire to harden. To curate an appropriately healing playlist, hooks led me in cracking open my anger to express more holistic compassion toward myself, past partners, and all other parties implicated. Perhaps then the title is a relic of a more narrow view on the potentials of heartbreak. Forgive me for shoving forward with it in tow. Treat these songs as each illuminating an emotion activated by grief: anger, ambivalence, bitterness, despair, and hope. These songs stir the magic to coach you through your emotional process.
This may be a slow and restful process. There’s lots of content online describing how to bounce back with a ‘revenge body’ and other techniques of vengeful self-investment. While I respect these methods of alchemizing loss, often into degrees and new projects, I would like to see us detach from our instincts of hyper-achievement. We do not inherently have to work hard to experience change. You do not have to earn the next season of your life. hooks is critical of our relationship to work, which has been characterized by overextension, awaiting recognition that is reluctant to come. If we follow after Ama Ata Aidoo, “work is love made visible,” and so must be approached with intention. To heal your broken heart, you must do the work of rewriting the systems of valuation that rule your life. Contrary to indoctrination, you are valuable just as you are. Take the time to learn this unconditionally for yourself.
Get to know your love for yourself. How does it feel when you anticipate your own needs, honor your own desires? Surprise yourself with adoration. To diffuse limerence, make your own glimmers to which to cling. For some, this takes the form of self-love notes and affirmations. Take yourself on dates and have flowers delivered to your door. I have taken to hiding small sweets in my jackets. The sensation you want to inspire is akin to listening to an old playlist and being impressed by your past self. Independently access your sense of wonder. Find for yourself something that makes you marvel. An internal fount of divinity. A spur to worship you can fold and feel in your pocket.
Create routines that protect yourself from exploitation. Ritually prioritize your health and wellbeing over productivity. Before answering the demands of any others, what does your body need from you? To eat, to hydrate, move, take your medication. To orgasm. Whatever is within your orb of control has been entrusted to you as custodian of an irreplaceable vessel - take your care seriously. For hooks and many of the songs invoked in this playlist, heartbreak is as natural as the sun’s rise through the heavens, rainfall or the restless tides populated drop by drop. Accordingly, I have made major progress moving through tough emotions when nursed by the natural world. This has involved visits to conservatories, gardens, fields, aquariums, but also sitting for hours on my back porch. I recommend growing something from a seed. I recommend crying under a tree when possible. There the birds remind you that your crying songs are components of our inheritance as conscious creatures.
Queuing a long ass Erykah Badu number is generally where I get booted off aux, but I included Out My Mind, Just in Time as the playlist’s thesis. Through variation and repetition, Badu emphatically navigates the spacescape of her subconscious after a break-up. Retelling its story, she assesses her mental infrastructure for romantic relationships. She diagnoses her martyring love and distills its antidote: assuming a leading role in her own life. Through this song, she acknowledges herself. She sees herself more clearly, integrating some of her shadow. You can visualize her as body-doubled in the dark room of heartbreak. The illusion of sitting with herself breaks open her mind. Outside of her mind’s walls (its expectations, rhythms and assumptions), she can evolve. This time, just in time, she rewires her internal world.
Wherever your loss leads, hold yourself with kindness. You have accompanied yourself for a long time. It’s time to make your inner world a place you can love. I’m not of the belief you can self-love your way out of a desire for romance. Hooks cautions against this, stating that "to live fully, black women can no longer deny our need to know love.” But I do think we owe ourselves greater commitment to our solitude, as equal to companionship. Quoting Audre Lorde, hooks urges us to situate our self-actualization as a central struggle. Addressing our woundedness is integral to deconstructing society so “we can live in a world that affirms the dignity and presence of [all] black [person]hood.” Treating your Black life as lovely and worthwhile has felt consequences for our collective reality.
No one else determines the value of your heart. Please prize it for yourself.
Signed,
Mary J. Blige.
hooks, bell. (1993). Sisters of the yam: Black women and self-recovery. South End Press, Boston.
Muñoz, José Esteban. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
1 In my writing, ‘we’ refers to a subject collective of Black women and Black queer people structurally positioned and socialized as Black and gender-marginalized in the belly of the US imperial complex at this late hour of capitalism. Living and bearing the consequences of interlocking systems of oppression in the form of staggering disparities in most measurable health outcomes.
2 This playlist deploys ‘disidentification,’ a practice by which minoritized populations recycle cultural works for our own purposes. I encourage listening to this playlist ‘against the grain’ to unlock each song’s queer potentials. For instance, Aretha Franklin’s ‘Ain’t No Way’ is historically understood to have been written by her sister Carolyn Franklin after a lesbian break-up. Black queer relationships contain contradictions, many of them internalized from predominant cultures of racial cis-heteropatriarchy. We can find ourselves in any music.