Kim Cornelia Banton responds to
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
by
Saidiya Hartman
Untitled. Acrylic on canvas. This work sprung from reading Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I was transported by the stories that Hartman excavated – her effort to capture the heart of Black women and girls relegated to the footnotes of history, labeled by mere circumstance. Flowers yearning for their own purpose, blossoming in the ruin. It seemed to me that the audacity, the danger even, of a Black woman who dared to dream when the world sought to consume all of her magic, was a power that was inextinguishable. I imagined that power instead reaching through time, being reborn in new forms. I wanted to express the invincibility of that. Their stories, their truths, which we carry in ourselves – a part of our own power.
