Chapter 4: Toute Bagai: Resistance and Reclaiming

This chapter explores the intersections of Black womanhood, sisterhood, and scholarship through the lens of endarkened and indigenous frameworks. I interrogate the ways in which my race, gender, and motherhood influence the content and context of my work and how a series of candid conversations with found sisters shaped personal and professional growth. This chapter symbolizes self-embrace and a roar of resistance to the oppressive nature of academia that seeks to reshape the Other in its image. This sister circle created space through which I could re-conceptualize struggle and resistance in ways that affirm and extend my ways of knowing and being. Conversations became central to my mental health, the affirmation of my mental wealth, and my vision of persistence and survivance as a Black woman-mother-scholar. This exploration is not a culmination of this reflective work, but an awakening to its resonance within my current and ancestral lived realities.