“How one conceives of home is deeply personal. As the poet T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘Home is where one starts from.'” Anita Hill, in Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home
The Clearing is how we have named our “home page.” It is the place we are starting from–one definition of home. But why “The Clearing?” Novelist and critic Toni Morrison defines the Clearing in her novel, Beloved . If you are not familiar with the novel, you may follow the link for an excerpt of a scene in the film. In it, the formidable Beah Richards portrays Baby Suggs-Holy, summoning the members of her community to The Clearing–a space in the woods where Black people gather to express, in ritual, their humanity. In the novel, Morrison enlarges the denotative meaning of a Clearing. It is the powerful memory of a space created by Black people–in this instance, a Black woman–to command the love and tears of her people. A place where they can summon their strength, their creativity, their love of family. In laughter and dance they clear away the detritus of oppression and rejoice in their humanity. It is the sharing and witness of one another’s laughter, and tears, that heal them and make them ready for whatever they must do to make a home. In the novel, the Clearing is a literal space. And home is not a house but a construction of Self that is defined by our capacity to love ourselves and one another.
Our blog is named after this historical memory of the ways that our predecessors determined to find or create spaces amenable to their self actualization; how they created community; how, in times of extreme political and social backlash, they forged and articulated powerful and effective ideas and engaged, together, in strategic action. Is this nostalgia? This history is often treated nostalgically. In fact, history provides a documented record of specific ways that disfranchised persons changed society by changing society’s idea of itself. In other words, they changed critical thought. They wrote a new ethics of being and behavior. This includes suffrage (for black men and black and white women), women’s property rights, women asserting (and continuing to assert) ownership of their bodies, public schools (the right to learn), marriage rights (to choose one’s partner and be recognized by the state), and other ground-shifting departures from what had been social norms.
The Clearing is our discursive reminder that times of disfranchisement are also times when we must create our own language of discourse and power, and create space for these. This blog is not a literal space in a literal wood. Rather, it is an opportunity to claim one’s imagination and put it to use.
How does our presence in The Clearing light the way out of the forest and to home? As Dr. Michelle Hite often reminds her students, Trayvon Martin was just trying to get home. Many people wondered, what should Trayvon have done differently to get himself home? A question for the Clearing is: what did society need to do so that Trayvon could have gone on home?
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