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| Yasmina Nuny photographed by Adama Sesay |
How self-care transformed into radical care for others during the pandemic
By Yasmina Nuny
I have spent a good share of this year in collective mourning with the world because of the pandemic, the hypervisibility of racial violence, and at my local level, the swift decline of civic freedoms with the ascension of a repressive and illegitimate government. I, like many others, had not anticipated just how difficult the year was going to be. It was a new decade, I was entering a new environment with a new job, celebrating a new year around the sun. All these beginnings felt like opportunities to start again with a clean slate. Then the pandemic settled indecisively for the year; the world found itself confined with more time than ever to finally take a breath, and to lose it, in struggle, in shock and in rage. To mourn its loss. To reflect on what it means to breathe, to realize how unclean our slates have really been, then wake up the next day and go through it all again.
COVID-19 has had critical
consequences on the most vulnerable populations of the world; income and job insecurity,
safety in households, mental health experiences are not new phenomena, but with
the global slow down, we were forced to sit with these realities and question
why it took us getting to this place of global unwellness to address (or
pretend to?) the many ways we’ve failed marginalized groups. This kind of
reflection takes a toll, and if you belong to a marginalized group, then you
identify with the fatigue and sorrow. There has been a heavy emphasis this year
on rest and self-care among Black people. Self-care is not only necessary to
build up stamina to continue resistance, self-care for Black people in a world
designed to wear us down is
active resistance. Recently on Twitter someone asked “what
radicalized you?”, for me, it was self-care during the pandemic.
My self-care largely involves books.
I learn best from words on pages and it’s what made me a bibliophile. In my
teen years I revelled in YA novels, dystopia, romance, fantasy, the works. They
allowed me to escape into other worlds, more exciting worlds than my own. My
fiction reads since the beginning of my actual young adulthood were largely
composed of novels by black female/non-binary writers (think Chimamanda
Adichie, Akwaeke Emezi, Tsitsi Dangaremba, Brit Bennett etc.) – escapism, but
with a foot firmly anchored in the reality of their words.
Since March 2020, I supplement fiction
with texts from the black radicalist and womanist canons. I was tired of
accepting the world as it is but didn’t know how to begin imagining new ones. I
owed to myself to understand just how little the present conjuncture was
serving us and the conversation on defunding the police and abolition
jump-started my learning. In radical spaces I don’t have the same opportunity
for escape. In these spaces, I am forced to reckon with the world’s and my own
dysfunction. This work forces me to learn and unlearn and shed and accept and
transform from the inside out. Self-care is not always escapism; it is not
always pretty or Instagram-able. Meaningful self-care forces us to heal
and grow and become better than before for ourselves and then for others. To
want better for ourselves, and for others. The best part of this process was
learning that love should be political, that all that we do should come from a
place of love and to love all things should return.
As a person of faith, I know the
transformative power of love. Fairy tales often told us about the power of true
love, too, but I suppose we tend to put fairy-tales in the realm of the unreal
and with that, the power of love ends up falling through the cracks. It isn’t
that these new readings are what made
me believe in this power again, I don’t think I ever doubted it, but I did
doubt its teachability in such a self-interested world. But as with anything,
there is always a starting point. I learned not to underestimate new beginnings
or their timing just because they may not look like how we imagined them, nor
do they always come when we expect them and to actively and intentionally learn
about and seek love, we must unlearn everything that we are so sure we know
about it.
In a conversation with The Lit
Collective, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan discussed imagining
futures, justice and politics rooted in love. What stuck with me from the
snippet was if we are unable to imagine a better world for ourselves, then what
would we want this world to look like for someone that we love. It is an
important question to ask ourselves and for many of us forces us from the
positions of privilege that we inhabit. It also makes us think about what
‘better’ means for ourselves, our communities, and the global community. A
better world requires radical love. It requires us to love others as we love
ourselves and therefore want better for them. Better requires us to look at the
root of things that make things hard and transform it from there. Radical love
is transformative for the betterment of all. The time we have had on pause
during this pandemic has highlighted, or perhaps uncovered, the violence of our
societies and their structures and it has also given us the time to organize
and challenge them. The work we must do from there is root everything new in
love.
ABOUT YASMINA
Yasmina Nuny Silva is a Bissau-Guinean writer and poet with degrees in Political Economy and African Studies. She has articles published in EuroNews Living and Black Ballad, and has performed at events like Sofar Sounds and TEDx University of Birmingham. Her debut collection Anos Ku Ta Manda was published in 2019 with Verve Poetry Press.
Find out more about Yasmina on her website.
