"I Am a Woman's Rights"~ Sojourner Truth

Words are Important

 I'm pretty sure that was the basic (AF) thesis of all of my college admissions essays in 2004. Who says them and how they are said.  The order of phrasing and the phrases themselves. The language they are in or the languages they are not in. What particle of speech it is or what verb tense. What is left out and implied. What is redundant and unnecessarily complex. Words are playful and can be played with.  My March post was meant to be about womxnhood and fortitude, and the words of women. Specifically, the historic words of one woman: Sojourner Truth. When thinking in terms of the sex deemed historically weaker, (fairer), lacking, and illogical there are no shortage of words to describe how we muster in comparison to and betwixt the sexes. When I think of Truth, such words have little import. 

Words are Powerful


In the states, the census 2020 is asking us our sex instead of our gender, which is something. But still only asking us to choose between two sexes and not how we gender-identify. Which is less than something, statistically speaking. So in other words...words count. 

Words are Memorable 

But sometimes imagery makes the most impact. A picture is worth a thousand words.Show don’t tell. Seeing is believing. And other idioms (which itself is a great word-picture in both form and meaning). Truth, for instance, utilized her own image to help support her work as an itinerant preacher, abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Her calling cards, or “carte de visites” can be thought of as trading cards in the circles that fought, talked, and wrote for freedom. Considering that she herself had boldly “walked to freedom,” and that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 didn’t care where she felt free—using her own image on these cards was important, powerful, and memorable. Captioned, “I sell the shadow to support the substance,” I can’t help but think of how significant her word choice is: how it dances in the mind and rolls off the tongue. How English was not her first language growing up as a slave in Dutch New York, and how when she was sold at the age of nine to English speakers, they beat her for not understanding. And yet still, when she was called to The Spirit, she connected to people through English with Afro-Dutch inflection. How she wasn’t selling herself in the same way that pursuit of capital had sold her and her family into slavery; but, that she owned the copyright of her image and was free to do with the proceeds what she had to do to secure salvation for others. The caption also makes me think how “supporting substance” might be something we are reminded to do every time we look at and use a shiny new $10 bill...at some point this year…maybe…

Words are Forgettable


We misquote Truth all the time. The words Sojourner Truth spoke in front of the Women’s Rights Convention on May 28th, 1851 in Akron Ohio. “Ain’t I a Woman” with its pleas towards the fortitude rather than the frailty of the feminine’s pursuit of freedom is accurate. But the delivery isn’t quite right. Truth more closely said: “I am a Woman’s Rights” which I love for its agency. Some 12 years later for The New York Independent,  it was a white suffragette, Frances Dana George, who recast Sojourner as a mother of thirteen (instead of five) with southern turns of phrase. So in the throws of Civil War, the words were repurposed and reworded (edited if we’re being generous) and came-off as ill-spoken English rather than merely Afro-Dutch. I can hardly type “speech” because although she was gaining renown in the 1850s, Truth was not officially invited to speak at this particular convention. A closer summation of Truth’s words came from her friend and fellow attendee Rev. Marius Robinson, written for The Anti-Slavery Bugle roughly a month after Truth spoke. You can compare the texts at The Sojourner Truth Project.

Words aren’t Enough

Sometimes they are reductive. It means that the words can not convey. Conveyance of meaning is their primary purpose. Their sole objective. But then, I kind of understand where the words are coming from: it’s possible to have multiple meanings, to be nuanced, to function in space and time without fulfilling what you were built to do. As someone who has identified as a girl, and then not yet a woman (thank you Britney Spears), and then as a woman and sometimes a they, I get that choosing words to describe yourself can be counterproductive. Apropo to what you’ve been described as all of your life, when you get the chance to assert (for) yourself, what is it that you will say? A girl born on a Monday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, a Thursday, a Friday, a Saturday, a Sunday. Some words are rigid and inflexible. Like the days of the week are finite. But somehow we still fit as many characteristics into those days as we can: flexible and rigid at the same time.

One story consistently told. The last of three girls, thought for certain to be the long-hoped-for son, but a favorite baby-last none-the-less.  The pain in the chest at puberty, that for sure had to be tiny heart attacks because how could something that is constantly alluded to as a budding/ a flowering actually be the embodiment of discomfort? The seemingly constant painful shedding of internal content, always seemingly out of context and always at some inopportune time? The banally diagnosed assertion that this cycle as painful as it has always been may or may not have its intended outcome ever be attainable. PCOS? And if I cannot convey, hold, make meaning inside—then what has it all been for? What is my meaning? For the first time came an understanding that you are much more than your sex or your gender. Although words could hardly contain me for other’s content.  

Words are infectious


March has been rough. But things have been rough for a lot of people for a long time. Even before Covid 19’s assault on the world started last year, this has been true. I had not yet posted a Women’s History Month rumination, because I could tell that the end of March would feel significantly different than how the month began. That things would be dramatically altered for many. But what I couldn’t see was that even though the change was inevitable, that there is never a bad time to reflect and share stories; to uplift and use our words to spread joy. Even when it feels like we can’t find the right words to illustrate all of our meaning. As things ramp up and level off, we have to remember that we are as strong as the words we choose to describe ourselves, each other, and these moments for the future stories we tell. 

~ Ohemaa Serwaa

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