Self Healing: A way to cope

 Ramiyah Bell

Dr. Harris 

English 2016

2 December 2024


  Self Healing: A way to cope 


Self-healing is a concept that most if not all people know and use to cope with many things, but the concept of self-healing can be different as a whole for many people. For example, self-healing for some can be the learning of oneself and learning to love oneself, for others, it can be the act of coping with trauma that one faces. Self-healing in the aspect of Afrofuturism is coping with trauma, racism, and other events that have happened in life. Afrofuturism combines elements of science and technology to take past events and incorporate them into the future in regaining the cultures of African and African American people and letting them retain their identities. Self-healing for Black people is used in a positive light and gives people a sense of happiness knowing they can regain what was once forgotten or forced to change and imagine what it would look like in future events that can happen in life. Self-healing for black people “can reinterpret what blackness could have been, and what it could look like in the future, where it isn’t a hindrance or trait to be diminished or extinguished…it unlocks discussion surrounding the political implications that science and technology have on us at every level.” (Crentsil) Afrofuturism can be used to reclaim black history and show all aspects of it.



Black culture and history unfortunately have been watered down and shortened only to explain what is fit to society and the severity of the situations to be nonexistent. This can also be used as the term Natal Alienation which includes an individual now being estranged from knowledge of their social heritage and forced to forget and regret their histories. Most fiction novels centered around black history or culture are colonizing and contain xenophobic behavior. One of many fiction novels that interpret all aspects of black history and culture is ‘Wild Seed’ by Octavia E. Butler which contains elements of power, slavery, and gender role issues. While ‘Wild Seed' uses many aspects of Afrofuturism, one of many that sticks out the most is the self-healing role that plays a huge part in the role of one of the main characters. Self-healing can also be used as a gateway for medicine and healing one's body and others. Anyanwu could use self-healing to change her body, learn the diseases, and injuries she could endure, and run tests on herself that could help her understand the healing process. The story states, “Every change she made in her body had to be understood and visualized. She could not simply wish to be well if she was sick or injured. She could be killed as easily as anyone else if her body was damaged in some way she could not understand quickly enough to repair. Thus, she had spent much of her long life learning the diseases, disorders, and injuries that she could suffer-learning them often inflicting mild versions of them on herself, then slowly, painfully, by trial and error, coming to understand exactly what was wrong and how to impress healing.” (Butler 58)  She could also use the same test that she used on herself to help create medicine that could be used to heal the ones around her. With Afrofuturism, it gives Black people “the room to express the alienation that they have endured as a result of colonialism,  slavery, segregation, and racism.” (Crentsil) 


Self-healing can be used as an expression through many things including hair. For many black women, their hair is seen as unkept or ‘nappy’; which gives a negative aspect to black women all around the world. The negative aspects have been rooted in the symptomatic “oppression experienced by the belief in the ideals of white supremacy.” (Gaspard) The presence of white supremacy is not the only issue that comes with the image of black hair, the image black women give themselves and how they influence their emotions toward themselves plays a huge role too. As Black women “our bodies and our hair have experienced systemic oppressions that have caused us to experience physical and emotional pain and psychological.” (Gaspard) So, of course, there will be some black women who believe that their hair is a problem or an issue. However, Afrofuturism allows black women to see themselves as powerful and gives them the freedom to expand ideas that have never been seen before. Through Afrofuturism and the help of science, the knowledge of black women’s hair is finally being explained and represented accurately. There are laws and movements now that protect black women and see them as equal no matter what their hair looks like. The CROWN Act, or Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair was “created in 2019 by Dove and the CROWN coalition in partnership with the State Senator Holly J. Mitchell of California, to ensure protection against discrimination based on race-based hairstyles by extending statutory protection to texture and protective styles such as braids, locs, twist, and knots in the workplace and public schools.” Afrofuturism lets black women create a future that they want to believe.




Afrofuturism is an escape from a society that Black people have been programmed to live by colonization and white supremacy. The genre allows for the reinterpretation of black culture and makes it into what they imagine it to be and brings a positive outlook on the traumas that Black people have experienced. Self-healing is a major aspect of Afrofuturism because of the different perspectives it can be used for and the freedom that Black people have to reclaim their identities and take what they know or what they don’t know and transform it and make it better for the future. Afrofuturism “as an artistic aesthetic bridges literature, music, visual arts, film, and dance. As a mode of self-healing and self-liberation, it’s the use of imagination that is most significant because it helps people transform their circumstances. Imagining oneself in the future creates agency and it's significant because historically people of African descent were not always incorporated into many of the storylines about the future.”

       

 











Works Cited

https://libguides.pratt.edu/afrofuturism

https://www.psychohairapy.org/blog/healing-hair-trauma-with-afrofuturism

https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2021/03/22/how-afrofuturism-can-be-used-as-a-tool-for-black-liberation/

https://www.thecrownact.com/

Butler Octavia ‘Wild Seed’, 1980 July

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