In Search of My Foremothers' Garden: The Combahee River Collective and Self-Naming

Collage of members of the Combahee River Collective and Black children gardening. Collage by Jaimee Swift.

By Kourtney Payne

In the final installment of our Special Blog Issue, “50 Years of Combahee”, writer Kourtney Payne reflects on the Combahee River Collective and the power of Black feminism praxis as self-naming.

“If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. ”
— Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” 1982
“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free. ”
— Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” 1985

What is within a name? For whom do we name ourselves as Black women? In 1850, Harriet Tubman led a raid that freed nearly 800 enslaved people. While enslavement periods produced notions that we understand today as race and class, their impact on the conceptualization of gender is uniquely impactful. The interiority of Harriet Tubman and her redefinition of womanhood, leads to the raid and, ultimately, what follows over 100 years after. Tubman’s multiple acts of freedom, first herself, then other enslaved people, demonstrate her lack of letting situational environments dictate the spirit and actions of personhood, particularly womanhood. As Cheryl Clarke (1981) explores within her piece, “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance”, the social understanding of the condition of enslaved women was reminiscent of a lack of self-determination and agency. Clarke quotes, “...women are kept, maintained, and contained through terror, violence, and spray of semen.” (244). However, Tubman demonstrates, keenly, what I name in this piece as self-naming by redefining the boundaries of enslaved womanhood, modeling herself as a socio-political disturbance of coerced, docile womanhood.

The same stretching of boundaries and binaries of womanhood can be witnessed through the founding, naming, and execution of the Combahee River Collective. When Barbara Smith (2017), founding member of the collective, read the Combahee River Raid, she quoted, “...My perspective, and I think it was shared, was that let us not name ourselves after a person. Let’s name ourselves after an action. A political action. And that’s what we did. And not only a political action but a political action for liberation” (Taylor 30-31). Not only was the naming of the Combahee River Collective significant, but its redefinition of Black women’s activism to include the experiences queer bodies expanded the binaries of Black feminism as a concept, as well as personal praxis of Black feminists, globally - 50 years later.

“Not only was the naming of the Combahee River Collective significant, but its redefinition of Black women’s activism to include the experiences queer bodies expanded the binaries of Black feminism as a concept, as well as personal praxis of Black feminists, globally - 50 years later.”

This article, “In Search of My Foremothers’ Garden” — which is an ode to Alice Walker’s seminal collection of essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden: Womanist Prose (1983)–maps how the Black queer women of the collective utilized their discernment with the intersectional identities of Blackness, queerness, and womanhood to curate social justice and Black liberation. While an effort to dismantle their communities was charged, the Black queer women of the collective held steadfast in their desire to solidify their name, which I refer to in this piece as self-naming. Self-naming combines creativity, lived experience, and liberatory manifestations vis-a-vis an aspirational identity to name marginalized identities despite societies' notions of said identities. Additionally, I conceptualize self-naming as a multi-generational tool of grounded identification that Black queer women engage in. Focusing on the naming history of the collective, I explore how historical Black female (and femme) figures exemplify the intimate connection between race, gender, and sexuality.

The founding members of the Combahee River Collective saw their identities as “multi-jeopardy” reflections of social, racial, gendered, and sexual discrimination. New visions of Black female sexuality and Black feminist activism differentiate the collective from other various organizing collectives. The central vision of the collective was naming itself in history as a “...distinct political and intellectual space” (Cespedes, et al. 378) for Black women’s political, social, and spiritual healing (Cespedes, et al. 378).. The main political and social activism goal of the collective was to “critique hegemonic feminism’s limited fixation with gender as the prime oppression for women.” (378) Moya Bailey’s 2008 naming of the complex experience of Black womanhood, misogynoir, was not circulating in academic media during the collective’s prime activism period, therefore the women of the collective were charged with bringing awareness to the lack of narratives of Black women’s interior experiences.

Additionally, the collective understood that their positionality as Black lesbians offered another frame of intersectional oppression within the combined oppressions of racism, homophobia, and sexism. The literary and community-based methods utilized to communicate their beliefs are just as important as the ideas they expressed, as the methods ground the academic discipline of Black women’s studies. More importantly, the collective publishing as a group and individual publishing of its members introduced readers to a contemporary deep inquiry of identity politics as an academic and social lens of subjectivity rather than objectivity.

“Utilizing ancestral knowledge, the collective return their personal politics to a liberatory, healthy love of “self-naming” their experiences as embodied within identity politics and attributing their radicalism, in a positive context, to the source of their self-regard: their Black queer womanhood.”

These above-mentioned objectives were most notably stated and accomplished when publishing their 1977 Combahee River Collective Statement. The statement can be understood as one of the most influential documents for a young Black feminist to read. It intrinsically questions the situational racism, sexism, and homophobia that was present in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Most importantly, the statement centers on Black queer women’s first-hand experiences with their race, gender, and sexuality as a methodology of liberatory visions. As Cespedes, Rae Evans, and Monteiro (2018) note in “The Combahee River Collective Forty Years Later: Social Healing within a Black Feminist Classroom,” the epistemological process of the Black queer women of the Combahee River Collective was centered and grounded by honoring identity as a space of exploration, rather than definition. They quote, “The CRCS (Combahee River Collective Statement) is the first to frame identity politics or the political positions of social groups through an intersectional lens, incorporating an examination of the multilayered texture of Black women’s lives at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, politicizing a shared structural position.” (Cespedes et al. 378).  

Despite their often isolated and heavily scrutinized liberatory visions, the collective identifies as a group that refuses apathy and embraces community in liberation movements. The spirit to center these traits within their activism comes directly from their honoring of ancestral lineage. Their discernment of theoretical and practical Black feminism is a combination of both self-naming and ancestral practice, mirroring Alice Walker’s discussion of telling our “mother’s story” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. Drawing from Walker’s discussions, the collective highlights the physical impacts of the non-value placed upon their livelihoods by particularly calling attention to “cruel, sometimes murderous, treatment” (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977). Black women receive within social, economic, and political contexts. In the creation of the organizational group, its actions with community members, and between one another, there is a clear demonstration of asking questions such as: What human oppressions did my foremothers feel? How do I revisit their narratives?

They took to writing and documenting these experiences, notably Audre Lorde’s documentation of her mother’s immigration experiences from Carriacou in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) because they understood that the archive tells the story while the body keeps the score. Mirroredly, Walker discusses a groundedness in ancestral knowledge within the creation of her Black feminist writing, quoting, “...I have absorbed not only the stories [of her mother] themselves, but something of the manner in which she [her mother] spoke, something of the urgency that involves the knowledge that her stories-like her life-must be recorded. It is probably for this reason that so much of what I have written is about characters whose counterparts in real life are so much older than I am” (Walker, p. 407). Thus, the collective name themselves not only archivists of their foremother’s experiences but storytellers of their names as Black queer women.

“Thus, the collective name themselves not only archivists of their foremother’s experiences but storytellers of their names as Black queer women.”

Opening the statement, the collective intentionally lists the Black women that came before them. They quote, “there have always been Black women activists—some known, like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frances E. W. Harper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Mary Church Terrell, and thousands upon thousands unknown” (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977). Frequently, when the Black queer women of the collective felt the weight of their identities, they would turn to the Black feminists who came before them to redefine the name of their experiences and, ultimately, their identities. The women discuss their belief in this reframing keenly echoing, “contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters.” (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977). Thus, I propose that the “self-naming” the collective engages in is a multi-generational tool of resurgence and survival. Utilizing ancestral knowledge, the collective return their personal politics to a liberatory, healthy love of “self-naming” their experiences as embodied within identity politics and attributing their radicalism, in a positive context, to the source of their self-regard: their Black queer womanhood.

“The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives” (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977). The collective makes clear that their belief in humanity directly stems from their experiences as Black queer women. Their combined identities of Blackness, womanhood, and queerness reflect the incapabilities and instability of post-colonial oppressions such as racism, homophobia, and sexism, which reflects the oftentimes untrue narratives at the root of their multi-jeopardy oppressions. I believe, as provided instinctually by the collective’s statement, there is a belief that there is too much to lose. As Michelle Wallace writes in “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood” (1982): “We exist as women who are Black who are feminists, each stranded for the moment, working independently because there is not yet an environment in this society remotely congenial to our struggle—because, being on the bottom, we would have to do what no one else has done: we would have to fight the world.”

While the collective denotes Wallace’s perspective as partially pessimistic, placing the responsibility of global liberation on the back of Black feminists, Wallace’s visions reflect the situational struggle in living, engaging, and viewing American life from a Black feminist perspective. Acknowledging this, the collective states, “we might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977).

The collective desire for liberation amongst the collective is a direct depiction of self-naming as derived and witnessed from the lived experiences of Black queer women. The collective attributes their ability to redefine their identities in a sustainable place for liberation to reflect their deep, ancestral connection with the many Black feminists centered on Black female sexual liberation that came before them. Combined with the study groups, self-care initiatives, and writing retreats that birthed writings such as “The Combahee River Collective Statement”, the collective allowed for a theorization of a world that is free, beginning, characteristically, with Black queer women.

Works Cited

About the author: Kourtney Payne (she/her) considers herself a student of Black, southern lineage. Her research examines Black feminist ecologies from the lens of Black women’s inner-narratives, using literary analysis of poetry, memoirs, and oral histories from Black queer women produced in a post-Hurricane Katrina context. Kourtney asserts these narratives as creative survival methods in the wake of environmental disasters, which produce Black feminist knowledge critiquing systemic structures adversely impacting the survival of Black communities. Keeping this notion in mind, Kourtney’s research is an ode to the significant contributions made by Black womanist and queer theorists, such as June Jordan and Audre Lorde, to Black liberation. 

Before attending Emory, Kourtney earned her B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology with a concentration in Public Health from Spelman College. At Spelman, she received multiple academic awards, including being inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha Kappa Delta, and departmental honors from the Spelman College Sociology and Anthropology Department. Alongside her academic endeavors, Kourtney loves to journal, garden, and read.

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