Reimagining Sacrifice Through an African Feminist Diaspora

What if our grandmothers’ sacrifices were not about submission, but about survival and resistance? When we reframe the legacy of Black women’s ‘sacrifice’ across the African diaspora, from Africa to the Americas and to the Caribbean, it becomes strategic refusal and creative world-making that invites us to see how feminism travels across borders and generations.

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...