Earlier this year I read How We Get Free Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor). The CRC was one of the seminal Black radical feminist associations in the 60s-70s in the US that paved the way towards intersectional feminism in the West. Barbara Smith, one of the founding members of the collective, recalled how she initiated a series of retreats around the US for Black women to convene for a couple of days. The goal of these retreats was to meet members in the flesh, create a space to work out issues and develop political strategies. The interesting part was that these retreats were held in houses that were lent to them, for free, by professors and other wealthy people that formed part of their extended network. It was a way for their ‘allies’ to lend their privilege to women who didn’t necessarily have the ressources to access a home with all the facilities needed to welcome 10+ women.
I have been raving about this book and manifesto since I’ve read it to anybody who still dares to ask me what my current favourite book is. It planted a seed in my mind - shouldn’t we organise a retreat for Brown/SouthAsian women in Paris? I have already experienced firsthand the power of collective strategising and deconstruction via my Spicy Devis community - wouldn’t it be neat to extend it to a wider group?
The idea was to create a test group, made up of Brown women with whom we were already pretty familiar with. While brainstorming ideas, the main question that came up was this: where would we organise the retreat?
Crickets. Loud, deafening crickets.
I mentally checked off the women in the group and realized that none of them had a house, let alone a country house, that we could borrow. I mentally checked off my close circle of friends in my mind and realized that most of them didn’t own (or, rather, their family did not own) a “résidence secondaire” (secondary home). We shared a message to our +5K online community, asking them to help us find a benefactor willing to lend us their home for a couple of nights. Our call to help was seen by +1K viewers on Instagram, the most we’ve ever had since we’ve created our account, and we received two suggestions that didn’t work out because of timing issues and two women who reached out with donations.
Making the retreat free, or as cheap as possible, was a goal because we did not want to put a financial burden or entry barrier to this retreat. It made little sense to us to create a space where money determined who could have a seat at the table. In the end, we unfortunately had to ask the participants, who had the means to, to contribute to the retreat. Some of us also asked our partners to put some coins into the money pot.
When I was a student at university, my ambition was to graduate and get a job that would allow me to buy food at the supermarket and pick dishes from a menu without looking at the price tag. Big girl, big dreams, right? Money might not buy happiness but it gives you the the freedom of choice, and I was sick of having a limited set of options. I wanted to be able to buy fancy pastries or flowers on a whim, to treat my friends to a proper bottle of wine when they invited me over to dinner - simple pleasures that, for a long time, seemed out of my reach.
Today I am taking the time to break down my privileges as a transfuge de classe (“class defector”/“transclass”), while feeling the bleak injustice of having to act meek in racist AirBnb owners’ DMs and getting doors slammed in our brown faces. It feels even bleaker when you read the news and see bored billionaires orbiting aggrandised projections of their girth into space, or when you read that the father of the 18 year old paid +$23million for a ticket into Evil Egghead’s dick ship.
If my life expectancy was, say, 70 years old, I would need to earn around $330K per year from the year of my birth to the year of my death to amass $23 million. And that colossal amount of money represents the disposable income set aside for a 5 minute celestial escapade. I won’t even get into the fortunes of billionaires because I am mentally unable to wrap my head around the extent of their wealth and the fact that it was built on exploiting the working class and tax loopholes.
I might be mixing up different wavelengths and metrics of privileges but it’s hard for me to digest such display of wealth when we spent weeks, if not months, trying to find a place to host a retreat that is supposed to give space and freedom to women who don’t have the luxury of convening and thinking solely about themselves for a day or two. When I see the phallic dreams of unfettered capitalism becoming reality, while other basic smaller dreams like buying groceries without agonising over the final receipt are not even within reach of a sizeable number of people on earth, I just want to flip my table and eat the rich. Even if it means eating myself.