The readily available images of a matriarch who forgoes her personal passions and stays at home to take care of the family echo the silence of the inner world of many women. The sacrifice of women is often encoded as caretaking without being recognized as underpaid or unpaid labour. In my own lived experience, tracing the sacrifice of my ancestors in Nigeria to interpret my current experience born and living in diaspora, I question just how much the reliance on women’s labour essentializes sacrifice, and to what extent the spatial configuration of my access to feminism prompts me towards deconstructing how we understand sacrifice.

Perhaps the most apt place to begin to describe the feminisms engaged by Black, Caribbean, and Indigenous women around the world is to describe the home I grew up in: where my grandmothers were revered, my hands were actioned and my spirit contested. In the spring my mother would garden. I grew out of the phase for a few years but the yearning to smell lilacs in the garden a few years ago brought me back. In the summer, we would play outside all day, bathe, and then use baby powder for a cool night’s rest. Sleeping, in the fall, the recited memory verses entered our dreaming—still waters and cups overflowed. And in the winter, we woke up on Sunday mornings, greased faces, hair and tulle-d socks to cleanse our sins.

I did not realize until now, that space we created. I felt a passive participant in my role to follow rules. I stretched it out for sure. Banged up against the contradictions and tired of the lint on my use, I often thought ‘my grandmother’s sacrifice was not for me to play with.’ Growing up, I learn that I am a product of grandmothers who would do anything for their children. Framed dutifully, their lives were recounted through the sacrifices they made for their children (my parents) to be who and where they are now. Honouring the past put my future in rigid perspective. This ancestral veneration reminded me constantly that my access to choice is directly correlated to their lack thereof. Due to their physical distance away from me, their sacrifice felt so far removed and yet the pressure of upholding their legacy made it feel equally close.

Holding on to their memory, I am learning of what we share. That I too face the (albeit wildly different) dilemma of what to ‘give up’. The thing about sacrifice is that it exists in a particular time and place, making it unique to the one whom sacrifices and yet can layer time and place upon one another—united in a shared universal experience of loss. It is in this convergence of contradictions that I reanimate my grandmother’s sacrifice, choosing not to essentialize it as valourized ‘womanly behaviour’. Instead to find a shared experience to create a conjuncture of time and place that affirms their agency.

My reanimation is shaped by my access to the dissemination of feminist theory in Western media and post-secondary education. Living in ‘Canada’, I am in direct relationship to the ongoing legacies of imperialism and colonialism. As it were, I am also in the midst of resources that previous generations may not have had access to. I am not in favour of martyrdom, of believing one must commit a slow death through overworking, of sacrificing oneself. That belief, however, is both a unique awareness and special privilege I experience because I live in ‘Canada’, a place still benefiting from imperialism and maintaining violent colonial structures. I have learned about the atrocities this place has planned and executed to kill, erase, and remove indigenous populations for ‘Canada’ to exist as a political entity. I live in a place that expands my conception of what sacrifice is, what impossible conditions are, and what it means to daily consider these contradictions. How does this transform the memory of my grandmother’s sacrifice? It opens up space for contemplation about the meaning of diaspora and what solidarity can be formed through transnational feminism. It repositions my understanding of African feminisms as an ongoing legacy that is different but not severed from my experience in diaspora.

But across ethnicities, in conversations with my friends, on screen, in culture, the sacrifice that undergirds ‘womanhood’ has been transformed and actioned upon in feminist movements. If I am to view the continuity of African feminisms in its movement across the world, see its engagement by Caribbean, Indigenous and Black feminists, I can use my positionality (even if I must stretch and pull contradictions to do so) to understand sacrifice without prescribing it as gendered labour.