I have called myself a feminist for as long as I have called myself a writer-that is, since the age of twelve. Indeed, before I fully understood the implications of my racial identity, I knew all too well what it meant to be a girl in this world. In my home, being female meant I was often overlooked and sometimes underfed. At school, my femaleness meant teachers expected and relied upon my passivity and ready acquiescence – a girl was not supposed to cause trouble; girls did their work, and got along.

By the time I reached the ninth grade, I had had enough. Perhaps I have my pituitary gland to thank, but I suddenly began to outgrow everything-my clothes, my friends, and all the old roles I had so easily slipped into before. At home and at school, I began to ask "Why?" Like an irrepressible two year old, I questioned everything and challenged everyone. Finally, my history teacher, Mr. G, grew weary of my constant defiance. One day he turned from the blackboard and asked sarcastically, "What are you? Some kind of women's libber?" To his surprise, I was silent. I had no idea what that meant. To my surprise, he took the time to explain it to me. "That's a feminist," he said in a surly tone. "Someone who thinks women are equal to men." From that day on, I proudly identified myself as a feminist.

Two years later, I took another class with Mr. G. We spent a year studying US History, but when we finally reached the 1960s, he skipped the entire Civil Rights Movement. I protested and Mr. G’s response this time surprised me once again. He assigned me the task of teaching my peers about civil rights. I had less than a week to prepare and, in one 45-minute presentation, we covered that entire tumultuous era. Despite praise from my classmates and teacher, I left school that day with a crushing sense of my own inadequacy. I returned, however, with a fierce determination to make present the aspects of my identity that were conspicuously absent from the school curriculum. I became known not only as a feminist, but as something of a racial militant – a relative term, considering the fact that I was one of only a handful of black students at my suburban Toronto high school.

Two decades later, I look back on those pivotal years with mixed feelings but no real regret. Despite his pedagogical shortcomings, I credit my history teacher – a white Canadian man – with introducing me to the concept of feminism. I’m grateful to him for that rather elementary definition, because it offered me two things: 1) a new name by which to identify myself, and 2) the assurance that there were other women out there who felt the same way I did. I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t alone. By the time I finished college, I was, however, still lacking a community. Most of the feminists I met on campus were white women. A few black women I met after graduation seemed to share my politics, but most chose not to identify with a movement they believed to be racist, elitist, and man-hating. It was enough simply to be a black woman, they argued, and therefore they eschewed any label, including “womanist.”

It wasn’t until I left Toronto to attend graduate school in New York City that I found a community of black feminists who were truly and fully themselves – not black in one moment and feminist in the next, nor strident about their nationalist beliefs but secretive about their feminist politics. Around these artists, activists, and intellectuals I didn’t have to not talk about race when discussing women’s issues, nor did I have to put gender second when talking about problems of race. It was a new and miraculous experience for me. In New York I dove into the roiling pool of identity politics, and buoyed myself by embracing the fact of my own multiplicity: all at once I was a black woman, I was mixed race, I was American (in the sense of belonging to the Americas – Canada, the Caribbean, the United States), I was a student and a teacher, an artist and a scholar. And in the city, there were endless opportunities to participate in communities that shared (or at the very least, respected) the multiple facets of my identity.

For a young black Canadian woman raised in a public educational system that barely acknowledged my existence, the chance to live and study in New York City was more than a privilege – in a way, it was quite literally the making of me. For the first time I attended classes where I was not the minority. I worked closely with black women professors – the first I had encountered in my life. I immersed myself in material where black women occupied the centre – not the margins. I learned language that enabled me to describe my own experience living at the intersection of my multiple identities.

Since leaving graduate school, I find that I have mostly retained my knack for academic writing while losing to some degree the intellectual certainty that once buttressed my work. As a PhD candidate, I spent most of my 20s working towards the completion of my dissertation. Titled, “The Terror of Trees and Streets,” my thesis focused on representations of lynching and rape in the writing of African American women. Although writing (academic or otherwise) is a solitary pursuit, while in graduate school I never really felt alone. At NYU I was surrounded by other black feminists; we supported and encouraged one another, and our individual projects overlapped enough for me to feel certain that I was part of a collective. Together, we were doing something important, and it never occurred to me that we might fail. How could we? We were young, highly educated visionaries. We knew what was wrong with the world, and believed we had all the tools needed to fix it.

Then my degree neared completion and my tight-knit community started to unravel. Some of us altogether rejected life within the academy; others accepted tenure-track positions at small colleges far away from New York. Still others tried to navigate a treacherous, alternate route, keeping one foot in the academy and another in the arts/activist community. And this is where I currently find myself: not alone, but adrift in a world that has all the structure of the sea. I still teach, but I am underemployed; I still write, but I am largely unpublished. I know that I am still a feminist, but confess that I am not always certain of my mental stability. Some days I really do feel “crazy” – doubtful of my future as an author, guilty about shunning the academy after earning an advanced degree from a top university. I still incorporate my feminist politics in my teaching, but in an after-school program with a dozen teenage girls, my politics don’t always resonate. When I ask the girls to name women they admire, they invariably answer: Beyoncé. My seventeen year old sister has built a virtual shrine to the late entertainer, Aaliyah. I bite my tongue whenever I view this odd memorial, but in my mind I’m thinking: she’s dead. And then I realize that many of the women I most admire are also deceased – June Jordan, Nina Simone, Audre Lorde. If being alive is part of the criteria for a female role model today, then who would I have my younger sister admire?

Without hesitation I can name several black feminist scholars, yet these brilliant women are strangers to my students; they are important cultural critics, but their critiques don’t generally reach teenage ears. Indeed, since leaving the academy I, too, feel as though I have fallen outside of the intellectual loop. And I wonder, can I still be a feminist without belonging to an institution? Am I really a feminist if I refuse to participate in the culture that so desperately needs to be critiqued? I’m an introvert, and so not much of a joiner; I don’t belong to any feminist organizations, and am satisfied with gleaning information second-hand from friends who rally, march, or subscribe to feminist listservs. I also admit without shame that I don’t subscribe to Essence, Honey, or any other magazine marketed specifically at black women. I don’t watch “Girlfriends” or any of the sitcoms that feature black actors and claim to speak to “our” experience. I don’t have cable and so I am spared the visual and spiritual assault of explicit music videos that constitute most of the programming on BET (Black Entertainment Television). I have stopped listening to music on the radio and buy second-hand CDs of women artists I once admired but who have since sold themselves to Coca-Cola and other corporate entities.

I never intended to lead this kind of life. I simply could no longer tolerate the noise – the distraction of all that is deemed popular, relevant, and real, but which does so little to enrich the mind, nurture the spirit, or bring about transformation. “It’s just entertainment,” my older sister says before advising me to “lighten up.” But there is weight to each of these “bits of fluff,” and cumulatively they threaten to smother the small hope I have left for alternate representations of black women’s experiences. The black female characters on “Girlfriends” are nothing like the women in my life. It is rare for women like “us” ever to appear on television, or in movies, in best-selling books, or magazines. Of course, we are all busy writing/filming/performing ourselves into existence, but in the current market, our stories are not in high demand. I therefore determined my best course was simply to disengage, even at the risk of losing my own social relevance as a black feminist critic.

The result of this decision, however, is a growing feeling of isolation. Occasionally I look at my completed manuscripts, gathering dust on the shelf, and wonder what I am doing wrong. In desperate need of consolation, I recently went back to my dissertation and revisited one of the black woman authors featured therein. In her remarkable 1925 essay, “On Being Young – a Woman – and Colored,” Marita Bonner describes the anguish of having one’s dreams are shattered by the social restraints of age, gender, and race. Though the young woman initially understands her desires and believes they can be realized, she soon learns that duty to her racial community, and the racism and sexism of the larger society, will not allow her to fulfill her dreams. The essay ends with this curious advice:

Of course, I could not read this passage without instantly recalling Audre Lorde’s profound admonition: “Your silence will not protect you” (41). Yet I have no intention whatsoever of surrendering my voice completely and want to insist upon the distinction between being “quiet” and being silent. I do wonder sometimes if perhaps black women might benefit from a small dose of discretion. We live in what can easily be called an age of testimony. The girls I work with have grown up watching black women (of varying character) regularly appearing on television talk shows (of varying caliber) to disclose the intimate details of their lives. Never before have black women had such access to media forums, and never before has the public been so receptive to disclosures made by black women about their lives. Yet I sometimes worry that black girls will grow to womanhood without respect for modesty and/or a healthy sense of shame. I see black girls being reckless on the subway or rowdy in the classroom and I want to urge them to be quiet – even as I worry that writing like mine will forever stay on my dusty shelf, too “quiet” to compete in a raucous market dominated by the novels of Zane and the plays of Tyler Perry.

I suppose ultimately what I want my students to understand is what Michele Wallace has keenly observed – that increased “media visibility” is no “substitute for black female economic and political power” (53), and the admittance of black women into certain public arenas has not significantly altered our status in a racist and sexist capitalist society. Additionally, though select black women currently are very much in the public eye (Condoleeza Rice, for example, or Oprah), the problems of invisibility and hypervisibility remain. Increased exposure to the myopic mainstream gaze does not ensure that black women will be seen fully or any differently than they have in the past: that is, through a lens clouded by myths and stereotypes which emerged in slavery and have since persisted and evolved. Figures like the big-bosomed, smart-talking mammy are more popular than ever, particularly when the character is played derisively by a black man (Tyler Perry being the most recent example), emphasizing the mammy’s aggressive masculine attributes.

Yet I have been dismayed to see incarnations of the mammy figure appearing even in the work of black women playwrights. The addition of “Enid” to Trey Anthony’s wonderful play, Da Kink in My Hair, left me yearning for the original script. The American import – an elderly, pie-baking, ample-bodied black woman from Buffalo – had the audience roaring with laughter. When the lights went up for intermission, I surveyed the mostly white, mostly white-haired patrons and wondered if Anthony’s work could have sustained its long run at Toronto’s Princess of Wales theatre without resorting to such a comfortable, commercially-viable caricature. “Enid” (who closes the first half by heading up a shuffling dance routine) left a bad taste in my mouth, despite the powerful performances of the other black female actors. Nonetheless, I applaud Anthony for beating the odds and getting her work on stage at several different venues; the success of this one play will hopefully ensure that future plays by black women in Canada will garner more serious attention from theatre owners and theatre goers.

It’s a potentially crazy-making endeavor – trying to create “quiet” work that can be heard over booming laugh tracks; yearning for exposure but shying away from a public gaze that sees black women in limited and limiting ways. The “new” visibility of black women has been hailed by many, and yet this current presence tends to obscure and oppose the historical tradition of black women fighting not for money, fame, and the spotlight, but for respect, dignity, and recognition of the value of our minds and the sanctity of our bodies. The black women I admire fought (and continue to fight) for real transformation – they understood that power wasn’t just about getting a foot in the door, real power meant getting inside so that you could dismantle and then rebuild the entire house. I want to be one of those women. And I’m realizing that in order to reach the girls I work with right now, I might not be able to be “quiet” all the time.

These days, whenever I find myself retreating, I try to remember those black women who threw themselves into the fray. Their names may not be known in every household, but at the very least they reached me. And so when I begin to feel adrift in the sea, I anchor myself in the stars. According to Michele Wallace, the galactic black hole is analogous to black feminist creativity since it exists as both an entity and “a process – as a progression that appears differently, or not at all, from various perspectives” (55). Wallace contends that “[w]hat most people see of the black woman is a void, a black hole that appears empty, not full. The outsider sees black feminist creativity as a dark hole from which nothing worthwhile can emerge and in which everything is forced to assume the zero volume of nothingness, the invisibility, that results from the intense pressure of race, class, and sex” (55).

The reality, of course, is that countless black women around the world are finding endlessly original ways of resisting this invisibility, and embracing black feminist creativity does not automatically mean disappearing into a lonely void. Black feminist artists, activists, and academics affirm their existence every day, struggling (often without credit) to be heard above the din, and seen despite the glare of spotlights fixed on more pleasing or provocative personalities. I find Wallace’s analogy particularly reassuring, because it reminds me once again that I am not crazy, and I am not alone. There is structure to space; it is not just a random jumble of stars and planets. And though it may not feel like it when you’re being tossed from wave to wave, there is also structure to the sea. This means that even though I am not bound to the academy or any other institution, there is nonetheless some kind of underlying structure to my life. My individual voice may at times seem unlikely ever to be heard, but I trust that there are other black women writers out there who will ensure that a feminist vision of the world survives. If my singular voice is not loud enough, it will nonetheless join with all the others in a chorus powerful enough to rock the world.