Category: Uncategorized

by  Joy Notoma

After I attended a virtual event hosted by Barnard College called Creation Is Everything You Do: Shange, The Sisterhood & Black Collectivity about the history of The Sisterhood, a community of Black women writers who met in the 70s founded by Alice Walker and June Jordan in New York City, Denmark-based Women Who Submit chapter member, Jeannetta Craigwell-Graham, who also attended, texted me: “We need that here. The sisterhood.” From there, we began imagining a workshop and retreat for other Black women writers who live in Europe. 

In the photo of members of The Sisterhood that circulates around the internet, they are gathered in front of a photo of Bessie Smith, a spot they chose for the photo because they wanted to honor her unapologetic creative spirit. According to scholar Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood was a place for Black women writers to reject the notion that there could only be one successful Black woman writer per generation. They recognized the need to support and uplift one another rather than falling into the traps of competitiveness and division. They met monthly, collected dues, and kept minutes. Further, they were more interested in creating a platform where they celebrated each other’s work than they were with trying to be accepted by white readers — they were each other’s most valuable audience. They edited and published one another and taught each other’s work in their courses. They also provided emotional and psychological  support when  members faced public backlash, like when Ntozake Shange’s chorepoem, “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf” was derided by audiences  who weren’t ready to see Black women’s vulnerability and power performed so unapologetically on Broadway.   

Black women writers in Europe live at an important intersection. Writing takes immense courage. No one should do it alone and living abroad sometimes means you have little to no community. When expats gather, it’s usually under the umbrella of meet ups that include transplants from numerous backgrounds, where the focus isn’t on the shared connections of  Black women who happen to be scattered among the crowd. While some luxury writing retreats for Black women exist, there are no workshop spaces specifically for Black women writers who live in Europe, as far as I can tell. With this undertaking, Jeannetta and I hope to offer a long weekend where writers can focus on their craft, have their pieces workshopped, and enjoy time together, strengthening the community, at an affordable cost. 

When I started the Europe chapter of Women Who Submit, I had a similar notion of a community of women writers coming together to support each other’s writing journeys. Even though I avoid assuming that I’ll make friends with other people who live abroad just on the basis of the shared experience of living in a foreign country (even if they are writers), I was inspired enough by the mission of Women Who Submit to believe that gathering writers from across Europe and the UK to start a virtual chapter of Women Who Submit would be an endeavour which aligned with my ideals. Now that I am nearly two years into leading the first international chapter of Women Who Submit with members in Romania, Germany, Portugal, The UK, The Netherlands, Denmark, France, Spain, and Austria, I can confidently say that supporting other women writers who have made lives in foreign lands and who understand the complicated emotional tangle of making a home and creating art far away from the familiar was indeed a good idea. The members were already accomplished and on their way to meeting their writing goals, but our Women Who Submit chapter provides encouragement to continue meeting those goals, and a container of accountability, a place where we can ask questions, celebrate acceptances and rejections, articulate our monthly goals, all of which helps the writing process in innumerable ways. I hope The Black Women Writers in Europe workshop-retreat will be similarly valuable. It’s a space we desperately need. 

Another reason that I’m passionate about gathering women writers who live abroad is because, as a Black American woman writer living in Europe, I am treading on the history of African Americans making waves in the literary landscape in this part of the world. James Baldwin lived and died in St. Paul-de-Vences, a small town which is just five hours from where I live in France. Audre Lorde first came to Germany in 1984 as a visiting scholar at the Free University of Berlin. She regularly visited Germany until 1992 and mentored Black women feminist writers in Berlin, which inspired the creation of ADEFRA in 1986 (which stands for Afro-German Women in German), a grassroots activist group of black feminist writers and artists that was the first of its kind and still exists today. There was also Jessie Fauset, novelist and co-editor with WEB DuBois of The Crisis, who was also the first editor to publish Langston Hughes. Fauset traveled in France and Algeria, taught French, and wrote fiction that interrogated colorism among African Americans. Richard Wright also spent significant time in Paris. These are only some of the most recognizable names. Besides writers, Black painters like Beauford Delaney and entertainers like Josephine Baker and Eartha Kitt made impressions on the cultural landscape of Europe which still exists today. Even for Black artists who never actually lived in Europe, the influence of their work and of Black American culture in the European consciousness is undeniable. It is impossible for me to not sense that history as I live and write here. I believe that the creative process is a spiritual communion with ancestors and all of the writer’s notions of the Divine. My ancestors include members of my family and artists whose work guides my life (spiritual ancestors), like Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Ntozake Shange, most of whom were members of The Sisterhood. I look at this undertaking as an honoring of the legacy of African American artists in Europe and the  legacy of our literary foremothers who gathered together in the name of art and sisterhood. Learn more about our upcoming inaugural gathering here.

Joy Notoma’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Epiphany, The Woodward Review, Longreads, and Ploughshares. She is a fellow of Roots.Wounds.Words  and Kimbilio, and an alum of Tin House and Hurston/Wright. She hosts Emerging Writers Community Podcast, a live podcast focused on the work of BIPOC emerging writers. She is writing a novel.