I’m sick again. It’s an exhaustion that although is familiar by now, I am still not used to. I try to remember when I first started feeling like this – I press my mind to go back into the past: How long have I been feeling like this? I know it started with the traumatic experience of losing a child and a relationship, which, although was not healthy for me, was clearly a lesson that If I had never gotten before, the Universe would make sure that I got it now.  It was here the unraveling began to take place.

Slow down, Lesley-Ann, you’re going way too fast. As usual.

Okay. I’m sick again. I’m late with a deadline for an article. But I haven’t had any time to focus on it, between working full time and ensuring I get a little rest.

Ask anyone about Lesley-Ann Brown in the 90s and you’ll probably get, “Lesley-Ann! She’s the life of the party!” I could drink anyone under the table. And I prided myself in my liberal approach to relationships. But although I lived in the greatest city in the world, I knew that I had to get out.

If I didn’t, it could be a matter of life or death. I didn’t realize the journey my higher self was commanding me to take. But I listened, and in 1999, left my job in publishing, industry parties, network of writer friends in Brooklyn and moved to Copenhagen, Denmark with a guy I had only known for six months and three months pregnant.

Slow down, Lesley-Ann, you’re going way too fast. As usual!

My exhaustion began after my fourth pregnancy ended. I have only child. Do the math.

I realized that my alcohol consumption, although socially acceptable, was doing more damage than good. I wasn’t allowing myself to feel anything. What was I running from? Well, it doesn’t matter, ‘cause if you live long enough, that shit will catch you, and force you to deal with it. 

Thank the Universe.

I was in a fog. I jumped at the slightest noise. I had anxiety so severe,  I couldn’t even open my mailbox. What was wrong with me?

I couldn’t afford a therapist.  I did my research.  Now, I’m not advocating not seeing a therapist – at all. If you have the funds, go for it. I didn’t. What I learned was that what we often call mental health issues are issues of the spirit.  Like so many other Black women, Christianity didn’t do it for me, and I was very turned off by it through how many in my family practiced it.  But it didn’t mean that I wasn’t into spirit. But what did that look like for a Black woman, whose lineage is connected to enslaved Africans, European colonization and the violence that is handed down in that legacy?

Decolonial Daughter

It was within this time I was invited to a conference here in Copenhagen, it was around 2014—BE. BOP 2014, curated by Alanna Lockward and I started hearing the word “Decolonize”. I was intrigued. I had been aware of the concept of Sankofa for a while now, “go back to fetch what you need to go forward” – and it all came together. Although I had always known, even as a child, or especially as a child, that I had to honor my ancestors, I had forgotten in the turmoil of life, being so caught up in living in survival mode. But what was life beyond that?

I started writing Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son because I wanted to connect the dots between my own personal experiences with that of the larger, historical context of it all. Science says that trauma is passed down, in our DNA one generation to another. What stories do my DNA tell? What did I pass on to my son? What are the stories of my ancestors? How was this all connected to European colonization and my Black womanhood?

What can I use from the culture of the colonizer?

I wrote Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son not just for my son, but for all the children of the so-called west, so that there is balance to the lies that they are taught in school. As an educator, I felt it was my duty to offer another perspective, a “lion learns to write” sort of action, a decolonial practice, a practice that has taught me that it is not politics that will set us free, but a re-spiritualization process to counteract what my friend Food Justice Warrior Kelly Curry calls the “despiritualization” of our culture.

My primary concern right now is how do I remember i.e. put back together again, my lineage? My heritage? What can I use from the culture of the colonizer? How much of this have I internalized? My spiritual practice reminds me that all that I critique outwards, is inward. So, like the water, ebbing and flowing on the shores, so too my contemplation, like breath, inwards, outwards.

It is this journey I encourage us all to undertake – individually and collectively – and to reinstate the faith that our ancestors have always been with us, and that we are in fact, them.