So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth

by Aracelis Girmay (Editor)

In this brave and devastatingly beautiful anthology, the illustrious poet and editor Aracelis Girmay gathers complex and intimate pieces that illuminate the nuances of personal and collective histories, analyses, practices, and choices surrounding pregnancy.

Featuring the brilliant voices of writers such as Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Patricia Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, and more, this book is a lighthouse—a tool and companion—for those navigating pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, birth, loss, grief, and love.

In So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth, pieces range from essays to poems to interviews, with a broad entanglement of various themes, from many different perspectives including Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, and more. At a time when people are becoming more and more limited in their choices surrounding pregnancy and abortion, this record is increasingly urgent and indispensable.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Feminism, Essays

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2023

About the author

Aracelis Girmay is an American poet. Her poems trace the connections of transformation and loss across cities and bodies.

In 2011 Girmay was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. A Cave Canem Fellow and an Acentos board member, she led youth and community writing workshops.

Reviews

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anthologies by women of color >>>>>>

A profound collection of personal experiences with pregnancy, miscarriage/stillborns/loss, abortion, and birth. I loved the range of experiences included in the book. Some of my favorites were:

• Then They Came for Our Wombs - Sandra Guzman:
This one will always stay with me. This was the opening story following the introduction. It began as a recount of her familial history and then dove into the reproductive injustice done to Native and Black Puerto Rican women during the 17 year clinical trials for birth control led by Margaret Sanger (white supremacist and eugenicist who started Planned Parenthood (they’ve denounced her)). Many amazing medical advances have historically began as experiments on Black and Brown bodies without our consent and people wonder why our communities don’t trust the healthcare system??

• A Conversation between Naima Green and Suhaly Bautista-Carolina

• What We Don’t Say by Mariahadessa Ekere Talkie

• A Dollar and A Dream by Keeonna Harris
A writer and abolitionist, she has had 5 children with her husband who is incarcerated (how?!)

• Water Clock by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

• I Am in a Room. I Am on a Rock. by Ruth Irupé Sanabria

• Born Ibeji by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor (the mother of Malik “Phife Dawg” Taylor from A Tribe Called Quest)

• Pity by Seema Reza

• Constant Kiss of Contractions by Mahogany L. Browne

• Life Signs by Andrée Greene

• On the Origins of O. by Nelly Rosario

• 1994 by Vanessa Mártir

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful anthology that explores the breadth and depth of experiences of women of colour with pregnancy, loss, abortion, birth, and motherhood.

My minor complaint is that there are two ways of organising collections with multiple authors/contributors, putting the bios at the end and putting them either after the title or at the end of each piece. This anthology did the former and I wish it had done the latter. I would have liked to learn more about each author and their work immediately after reading each piece, rather than having to try to remember who had written what at the end, especially as the contributor bios were organised alphabetically rather than in the order of the pieces.

But regardless, this is a profound, impactful anthology. A few of the pieces that particularly moved me were "we participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves" by Jennifer S. Cheng, "Wanting a Child Makes No Goddamn Sense" by Tiphanie Yanique, "Ode to Kale" by Hope Wabuke, and "When My Son Came to Me" by Angie Cruz.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here we light the shadowy places to recall what every born human must know in the quiet of muscle memory, in the skin’s thrill when touched by spirit— To know our way is to walk with feet bare in damp soil, to smell the coming rain, to feel electricity before the storm, to ride its center once in it; our way is to be all nerve endings, always on heightened sensory alert, a feeling deep inside the belly of the unknown, an apprehension almost out of reach. This is inside secret and prayer. This is testify and let loose, kitchen talk and the back porch when the lightning bugs are out and the heat thick as thighs touching. This is low laughter or loud, and there is no shame in it. This is love. Let it be known.

Even the joyful stories are touched with sadness because that is what institutional and systemic racism does, it poisons the way people of color have to walk through and experience the world. Not always, their light shines through, and I can tell you of white families experiencing similar tragedies including not being heard, but their race was not a factor, making it different. This is my calling and my professional area and each rang true and each taught me something, reclaiming their birthing and mothering power, absolutely powerful and stunning anthology.

Everything falls through a hole of my making like light. Today I watched an interview in which a director said that her least favorite myth about motherhood is that it is uninteresting—that the details of domestic life are boring. Motherhood is epic, she said. Especially the first child, she said, is revolutionary. My first public words about your birth were, It is such a wilderness. Followed by I am trying to process how the world has shifted. If I had been more honest, I would have used the word undone. I would have said, dissolution. Suddenly there is the knowledge of a parallel reality that had been transpiring invisibly across the world all this time. Suddenly I know that one of the most ubiquitous experiences in the history of humanity is also one of the most unspoken. Jennifer S. Cheng

So, then the opposite of want might be satiated. The opposite of want might be simply being. It is not so unusual to think that a fetus is the same thing as God. To a woman who wants that baby, an unborn baby is a divine thing. And so, praying to that baby is a way to talk to God. It is a way to talk to something that is not yet. Something that is not of this world and so is greater than this world. This is not about when life begins. What I am talking about is completely untied to life. This is before and beyond life. A pregnant woman knows that the not-life inside of her is actually still mostly spirit. And so is still mostly God. I know many pregnant women who talk to their enwombed babies with their minds. These women are praying. Tiphanie Yanique

Dear Spirit—God—Ancestors, thank you for my life, for all of the love and nurturing that I have had access to, for my many blessings, for your unconditional love. I come to this prayer and ask with a grateful and open heart. I pray for a future in which I have children both born to me and not, that they more than anything know love, that they feel seen and heard, that they know the alchemy of their skin in ways I didn’t quite understand growing up, that they know freedom, that they know power. I pray that my children have access to the things that they need even when I don’t even know they need them. I pray for a village of open, warm, whole people to cover my children—encircle them—with tools for living, growing, and loving. I pray that they never know my struggles, the struggles of my mother or her mother or her mother, firsthand, but that they know and honor our stories. I pray for patience and sweetness and resiliency and fight. I call these things already so. Amen. Shaina P. Jones

This story does not have an ending, I am unfolding as a mother, as a writer, as a friend, as a wife, as a daughter, and as an individual every moment. There are things that no woman tells another about motherhood. I will tell you this: I died. It was not childbirth. My labors were long and hard and beautiful. I have given birth twice, once to a screaming soul who shattered my idealistic visions of motherhood and the second time to an infant so ancient she didn’t utter a sound as she was lifted by the midwife from the water of the birthing tub, she just started at us. Both times my heart was cracked, shattered really, and there would be no repairing it. The love that stretched and tore and suckled and broke my sleep was one so profound that nothing could have prepared me for it. Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie

There is so much to be said about my relationship to labor, to feminized labor, to domestic labor, to emotional labor. The United Farm and Commercial Workers union meetings I went to with my mother as a toddler; my uncles, driving eighteen-wheelers across the country; my indentured great-grandparents picking cotton in Torreon; my tios and cousins, picking apples in Washington, spinach and strawberries in California; the cooking and cleaning I did at twelve, the bleach I poured into sinks to earn outings to the mall; the midnight feedings so my mom could sleep; the free childcare that bound me to the house on weekends; the full-time jobs I held at sixteen; being hired as a maid for my white high school boyfriend’s rich family, me cleaning his toilet in front of him for seven dollars an hour; the two eight-hour shifts I worked on my feet five days a week throughout my twenties, food service from 4:45 A.M. to 1:30 P.M., then retail from 3:30 P.M. to midnight; my repossessed car when I lost my job, and the fifty-dollar Wal-Mart bike I bought to replace it; the worker’s comp claims; the promotions I got for working twice as hard, for being deferential and excellent, but always at the lowest pay grade; the cooking and cleaning I did to earn your father’s commitment, a new recipe every night; the miles I ran and sit-ups I did and weights I lifted and lingerie I bought to earn his desire; everything I said yes to, offered, did for free to prove I deserved kindness, love, to prove I belonged. I have always been in labor. I am still in labor. Angélica Villarreal

[Leah Rachel von Essen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth is an anthology edited by Aracelis Girmay, featuring poetry, art, and nonfiction. It tells a wide, wide range of stories, encompassing the full scope of reproductive justice and care, from miscarriage to abortion to birth to motherhood. It includes pieces by lesser known voices as well as better-known authors such as Tiphanie Yanique, Patricia Smith, Angie Cruz, Mahogany L. Browne, and more.

The stories told here are emotional, brutal, soothing. They talk about everything from the sterilization of Puerto Rican mothers to creating communities around IVF to the over-medicalization of labor and what alternative, non-medical birthing could look like. New kinds of motherhood are put onto paper. Ruth Irupé Sanabria talks about how PTSD influenced her reproductive experiences; Patricia Smith talks about how the silence and refusal to talk womanhood or sex warped her coming of age. Women write of abortion experiences, some normal, some necessary, some traumatic. One girl is able to connect to a friend in college who pays for her abortion and connects her to his mother, who, without judgment or condemnation, tells her what she can expect and what her own experience was like. The stories are full of so many different viewpoints, traumas, insights, and riches. It's well-worth the read, for its chronicling of women of color's voices in a world where they're so minimized and silenced, and for its insights into the complicated webs of pregnancy and motherhood.

General CW for racism, infant death, sexual assault, medical trauma/dismissal, misogynoir, sterilization, emotional/physical abuse, grief, miscarriage. Also sexual assault depicted on-page in "The Water Clock" and an intense warning for "Pity" by Seema Reza for its graphic abortion/loss/infant death depiction.

[huai · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you aracelis girmay and all the kind people who contributed to this work. .... this is communion and healing but also fortification, "supernovas illuminating city sidewalks." Making known what was previously both hypervisible and invisible, so we can know a bit of the monstrous and divine secrets of creation, especially from writers of color in a time when our wombs are both sites of expanded policing and horizons into collective futurity. Brave mothers gathering in circles in love and militant vulnerability. I keep coming back to the last lines in Jennifer S. Chang's piece, "Does it make me a bad mother to admit I wanted someone to speak of devastation? To say there has been much devastation, yet, and also - I continue moving toward you."

[mina!! · Rating 4 out of 5]

such a beautiful collection and so many powerful and heartfelt stories. women are so important i love them. and this book especially for highlighting women of color! so powerful