“Bearing something ordinary as light”: Anti-disciplinary Knowledge and the Cosmology of Black Birthing in Aracelis Girmay’s “The Black Maria”
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2024
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Haverford College. Department of English
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Haverford users only
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Abstract
A cosmology of birthing becomes a powerful idiom and force for Girmay, both in “the black maria” and in her 2020 essay, “From Woe to Wonder.” My thesis explores the intricate frameworks within Aracelis Girmay’s “the black maria,” a cosmological reading of black birthing as an insurgent ground for experimental gender and motherhood, alongside an examination of a ‘gestational temporality,’ the act of being born and reborn as a creative practice of resistance in an anti-black world. In this thesis, I read Girmay’s works in dialogue with Hortense Spillers’s foundational understanding of ungendering and atomization in the Middle Passage, as well as Katherine McKittrick’s anti-disciplinary reading of black creative knowledge making. The cosmological framework allows Girmay to resist the disciplines of knowledge that confine black bodies, generating her own knowledge practice through a poem that considers elements of narrative, astronomy, and physiology together. The creative practice of Girmay’s poem is a project that is both ante- disciplinary, existing before disciplines at the inception of our universe, and anti-disciplinary, resisting the violent disciplining of knowledge. The concept of a gestational temporality resists violence in a similar way. Girmay understands that the project of preparing a black child for an anti-black world does not end in the biological processes of gestation, but continues throughout the child’s life, as the child is constantly returning to the metaphorical space of the womb as a source of care, power and insurgence.