Where Our Knowing Resides
A Conversation Between Bettina Judd and Ajanae Dawkins
Bettina Judd is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and performer whose research focus is on Black women’s creative production and our use of visual art, literature, and music to develop feminist thought. She is the author of patient, a collection of poems that tackles the history of medical experimentation on Black women. In the following interview, we discuss her newest book, Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought. Bettina Judd’s work is rare in the way it moves with precision and devotion. She is a necessary voice, examining Black womens interiors against history and within a rich theoretical landscape.
I had the privilege of corresponding with Bettina Judd through email in early December.
Ajanae Dawkins: One of my favorite things about your book is that it asks us as readers to enter into the labor of feelin’ with you. It asks us to think rigorously about the work and lives of Black women, to empathize with you as a writer, and to re-encounter our own intimate knowledge. How do you hope to see your theory manifest in the lives of your readers?
Bettina Judd: Yes, I am asking folks to do the labor of feelin’ with me. And in asking for that, I think of myself as centering ways of knowledge building that Black women have been cultivating. We talk alot about "voices'' when it comes to creative production (i.e. "Here's a list of authors of color to read in 2023!") which leads us into discussions about representation that are sometimes quite limited. When I experience creative work by Black women, I do not interpret it as saying, "Please hear me." If anything, it's something more like, "You feel me?" So I am not here to write a thing that says, "Hey, listen to these voices and what they represent." I see myself as sitting down with the work and being in relation with it: "You feel me?" Yeah, I do.
I hope people can read the perspective shift in that kind of encounter. I am not the scholar telling the reader how to interpret Lucille Clifton's poetry, for example. I'm not even here to tell you to read her--though you absolutely should. I'm here to take Clifton for her word when she keeps telling me different versions of the fall of man. I'm not interested in what John Milton's Paradise Lost has to say as a means of prefacing Clifton. I'm interested in what Clifton, a Baptist-raised but non-religious poet, a Black woman whose poem "won't you celebrate with me" not only became a signature for herself, but for many Black women, has to say about the origins of human suffering and this thing called joy!
She kept writing about the fall across at least three books. That should be a sign to pay attention. So I did. In paying attention to that, I can understand why "won't you celebrate with me" is a poem that means so much to so many folks--particularly Black women. It's a poem that we feel. We feel her declaration, "come celebrate/ with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/ and has failed." We know the timbre of everything behind those lines even if we do not know the particularities of the process that resulted in her writing them. So I suppose the answer to your question is that I'd like for readers to find ways of encountering Black women's creative production and sit with how and why they rock with it, why they feel it--to be in relation with the work.
Dawkins: In this book, you talk about Lucille Clifton’s relationship to joy and faith. May I ask you about your own engagement with faith, (the) spirit, or any form of practice that helped steward and usher this book into the world? Alternatively, what voices were present as you moved through the labor of this book?
Judd: Spirit is deeply important to me. It is intertwined with my intellectual and artistic life. Artistic practice is certainly core to my connection to spirit. This book project has been more than a decade in the making in one form or another, and if I didn't have song to anchor me, to change my energy, I would have had to have stopped this work or it would have killed me. Song here is both sacred and secular but I was raised to believe that I was Baptist in non-denominational but quite pentecostal leaning churches in Southern California so my practice of song as a medicinal, soul shaking thing is rooted in that. I also come from a long line of educators in my maternal line that I wanted to honor: my great-grandmother who was refused an education because she was darker than her sister but taught Black children in her community how to read, my grandmother who was a mathematician and a poet, and my mother who taught math for many years. My grandmother passed away in 2016, but she read an early draft of this book. She and my mother who is still with me have been an important anchor for me as guides here and beyond. On very earthly levels, I have a connection to a faith community in Washington, DC--Covenant Baptist UCC. I found them when I was in graduate school through another queer Black grad student, and Covenant spoke to me as a community because these folks were actually professors and students of theology, activists, and active in the Ward 8 community. At this time the pastors were Christine and Dennis Wiley and actually, some of the seeds of the chapter on vocal practice were in conversation with Pastor Wiley's sermon on Aretha Franklin's "Spirit in the Dark." I think I could only be a part of a church that is so engaging on multiple tiers. My personal spiritual life is quite strong; community, however, has its place.
Dawkins: In multiple places in this book, you invoke the idea of sacredness, especially in reference to sexuality. How do we know when something has moved from the mundane to being sacred? Is it something we steward or can control?
Judd: In the frame of the book, the mundane, the secular, and the sacred are non-exclusive entities. The chapter on vocal practice argues that singing is a deliberate practice to work a sacred sexual energy through song. To engage in this practice isn't to control it. Perhaps steward is a word that is more apt. Practice is the word I like to use because it speaks quite literally to the practice one has to do to become technically proficient, but it also has a connotation of ritual as well. I think these are both useful ways of thinking about singing for its transformational power. I use a quote from Bernice Johnson Reagon that I love for this. In her interview with Bill Moyers she talked about how the point of freedom songs is not just the content of the song, but the power that erupts when folks start singing. It changes the condition of the body, it changes the air. I think that this is true for a church house, a march, a nightclub, or in the company of a lover. To sing is to literally change the vibration of the thing that gives us life--breath. It shifts the nervous system. It can excite. That is a powerful thing that we all engage with or experience on some level.
Dawkins: I am so invested in your methodology of anger and your examination of its uses and limitations. The entire time I read your chapter on anger, I thought about a prayer I once heard from a Black woman requesting, “God, please sustain my anger.” I am curious about what sustains your anger?
Judd: I like that prayer. It's so smart. I hear it as: Please don't let me be complacent. Remind me that there is important work to be done here. Chills. I imagine hopes and prayers sustain my anger, too. In the book I talk about my mother's ritual to sustain her anger as a young student activist. I think it was exactly that kind of energy: Do not let me get comfortable in whatever safety I have allowed myself to imagine that I have. As I've moved into my own professional life, I can appreciate the importance of this prayer. I have a lot to be grateful for, to be happy about, to sit back and not complain about. But there is always something to be angry about if you listen or watch long enough. It's so loud at this point that it overshadows any delusions I might have of safety. So when I think about sustenance and anger, I'm truly thinking about how I can hold all of this and not destroy myself. I really like Mariame Kaba's declaration that "hope is a discipline." Which is really the thing that makes anger more useful than destructive. Hope is a kind of conduit and insolation for anger's volatility. I have to believe that no matter how small, movement toward justice, toward a peaceful life, toward harmony with the earth is possible. I have to work at it, practice it, which is hard and humbling work.