October 9, 2020Penda SmithHow We Became City Girls

“I am a fourth-year First Wave student pursuing a degree in neurobiology with the hopes of attending medical school and researching black infant mortality. I left my home in the Bronx to join the First Wave program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. I traded in my favorite soul food restaurants in Harlem, my family at Urban Word NYC, Monday nights at Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe for the dull, seasonless streets of Madison, Wisconsin, because my education was fully funded. However, leaving my home has emerged themes of my relationship with my mother, my childhood, my positionality as a black womyn within my writing. My writing speaks to and is for black people. In academia and even slam spaces, there is often an underlying push to get writers of color, especially black writers, to consider the white gaze in their work. However, my writing is what helps to think, critique, honor, and condemn the world as I see it. My writing demands my vulnerability in speaking about my mother, how I have come to terms with my sexuality, and overall, how I navigate being a black womyn in an anti-black world. This means that I will communicate in words I and my friends, siblings, and folks I grew up with understand, while simultaneously making my work inaccessible to white people. This is a sacrifice I understand and am content with. Today, I am a research scientist determined to challenge the epidemic of black infant mortality. I am a storyteller determined to write away depression. I am a pessimist on the days when my depression is too heavy to write. I am a daughter determined to love my mother while confronting the traumas of my childhood with my therapist. I am a lover learning love after being a survivor of sexual assault. I am patient, honest, and vulnerable when I am, but not when I cannot be. Together, these all contribute to and make me the writer that I am today.”