From “Too Womanish, Girl!” to Clever Womanish Woman

Abstract

This Blackgirl autoethnography has empowered me to do the ‘homework of self-construction’ and to capture embodied personal experiences as a form of cultural situated knowledge that begins ‘at home’ in the bodies we live within and the social circumstances we live through. It ‘tells secrets’ and ‘reveals lives’ through the prism of my own history, told from the ‘Womanish’ standpoint of a British African Caribbean woman. I examine the interwoven strands of racialised embodiment and the tensions of ‘otherness’ related to experiences of gendered racism and classism and the ways this has impacted on my identity and sense of belonging as a ‘clever Black girl’ in Grenada and England. It reveals ways of knowing that challenge normative discourses, creating a space for listening to and understanding an ‘other’s’ lived experience and offering the transformative potential of moving away from processes of ‘othering’ towards a universalist place of common humanity.