International Women’s Day: How are we to celebrate?

With each passing year, the global community is reminded that there are things for which we can make room to celebrate. And rightly so; what is life without our appreciation for memories, old and new? A life without reaching out, holding hands, sharing space to laugh and grieve? Life without being present within our souls which are themselves indebted to their formative pasts? Life without looking back? Is it possible to sit down and celebrate in grace without examining where grace comes from, and what shapes it? Not a day goes by that I, not only as a woman but as a person, a part of this “global collective,” this “earthly community”, move through my monotonous yet relatively privileged routine without the guilt of knowing and not knowing more. And also shame —shame of not “being there”; shame of being able to observe, interrogate, do “research,” to write in a location far removed from the women to whom I dedicate most of my thoughts, and whom I truly believe are most deserving of the privileges of being celebrated. Is it not some sort of betrayal, then, to be able to say “Happy International Women’s Day” in a very violent world? A world where the meaning of violence has transcended corporeal harm and injury and encompasses assaults on identity, belonging, ideas, and memories? In this way, it is no longer possible to celebrate or even think of celebrating without negating; it is no longer possible today to address celebration without some resistance. And yet, does this not create the perfect momentum to recalibrate our ideas of a celebratory day beyond the shackles of commercialization and calendar-bound obligations? International Women’s Day, set forth by German socialist Clara Zetkin in her struggle alongside and in solidarity with working-class women, can only be recognized in full when it considers the repulsive truths to which women are both witnesses and subjects, an approach that, if left unchecked, may produce the fetishized double-bind that prevents women from being seen, heard, and interpreted outside of their suffering, their ‘collective wounds’; for empowerment cannot be understood through the narratives of “resilience” in the face of adversity—itself a structural chaos—but the ways women have, in creative, radical, loving, angry, unclean ways, gone beyond it, and by doing so, utilized their lived experiences, their archives, to reimagine a more beautiful world for her selves. This should be our focus. Celebration is confrontation, and through confrontation – through naming what and what is not grace, what confines and liberates, what feels and appears like a male or colonial gaze, can we slowly and subtly gather the sticks and stones in our diversity that say “No” to the homogenous categorization of being “women” to build the radical infrastructure of care, a “revolutionary love”, as bell hooks defined it, through which we may realize a world that feels a little more like home. Building a collective, angry home, not as “women”  but women walking the earth.

Lola Olufemi holds our hands when she writes:

I hold, like those before me, that experiments can and do fail. I am trying to make an argument for the otherwise. Not otherwise as in>>>>>over here!!!!>>>>>come find me, or a small black dot that recedes as I approach. Not that thing that is obscured and needs to be unobscured. Not a smudge, or an absence, or an entity to be owned or conquered. The future is no one’s property; no need to shackle it. Not otherwise as in, the political horizon awaits; otherwise as in, a firm embrace of the unknowable; the unknowable as in, a well of infinity I want us to fall down together.

(Excerpt from Experiments in Imagining Otherwise)