Djamila Ribeiro: “I could have the knowledge and not have the courage. When you are a black woman, you have to have both.”

Djamila Taís Ribeiro dos Santos it’s Irani Benedita dos Santos, it’s Joaquim José Ribeiro dos Santos, it’s Dona Antonia, it’s Thulane, it’s Oxóssi. African philosophy says “I am because we are”, and Djamila is because they were and they are.

It is impossible to tell her trajectory without mentioning or hearing any of these names. If, today, she is a philosopher, writer, activist, coordinator of an editorial label, member of the Academia Paulista de Letras, all this is due to those who came before her and are always with her.

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“My father taught me to study, but my mother taught me to walk with my head held high. I am a daughter of Oxóssi and all of this constitutes me as a black woman”, says Djamila.

But, despite being one of the most powerful voices in the black feminism nowadays, it wasn’t always like that.

“I really enjoyed studying, but at the time, this was a place of discomfort for people. ‘What do you mean she – a black girl – wants to study?’ I was only able to transcend these things when, at the end of my adolescence, I started working at the Casa de Cultura da Mulher Negra in Santos”, she recalls.

“There, it was an important space for my self-esteem, to meet academic women and see that there was nothing wrong with me. In that space, I discovered and understood myself as a black woman,” she says.

The youngest of four children grew up within social movements, amidst political debates on behalf of her father, who was a docker in Porto de Santos (SP).

Although racial awareness was built early on at home, this did not make her immune to racism and all its violence.

“My father used to say that we were beautiful, that we had to be proud of who we are. But I went to school and I was absolutely discriminated against precisely because of who I was”, she points out.

It was in the school environment that she felt racism on her skin for the first time and, because of it, she grew up being the shy girl in the classroom, afraid to ask questions and who hid in the bathroom so as not to have to suffer the jokes of the boys at recess.

But Djamila Ribeiro was not created to stay behind the ring. “My mother taught me to face the world”, reveals the philosopher when talking about her mother’s hardness and rigidity, which today she understands as a fear of seeing her children be discriminated against.

All of this was a consequence of racism and a form of defense and survival that black people know very well.

In her most recent book, “Letters to my grandmother”, the writer makes a kind of reconnection with the maternal figure – which she did not understand, questioned the reasons for her hardness and even the reason for having been created to be different from her.

“I looked at what my mother did with contempt for a long time. But she always had this role of care. There was this person – who was her – who cooked my food, washed, ironed my uniform, combed my hair so I could go to school. Without my mother, I wouldn’t have made it either”, he points out.

The book reveres Dona Antonia, the grandmother who was the most affectionate figure in her life. Both Djamila’s grandmother and mother are already deceased, but they are still alive inside her.

“She was a very affectionate female figure, a lot of strength for me”, she recalls when recounting her vacation in Piracicaba with her matriarch.

Academic life and great turning point in life

“The cycle of domestic work was broken in my generation”. Daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter of domestic workers, Djamila Ribeiro managed to enter a public university, as a result of public policies, and this was the reason for breaking this cycle of exclusion in her family.

His academic career began in Journalism – a course he had to drop out of due to the death of his parents and, later, the pregnancy of his daughter Thulane. But he returned to the university benches in the Philosophy course.

“I was not raised to stay indoors. For me, it was important to own my life, ”she notes. Despite having to deal with her emotional imposters – guilt and psychological pressure for going back to school with a three-year-old daughter at the time, Djamila knows how important this moment was and the great turning point in her life.

“I thought: ‘this will be good for my daughter to have another maternity construct’. She was going to see her mother going after what she wanted. I am happy that I went and that many black women went to study later because they left in unequal places. And I am very grateful for having faced all these pressures that were not easy and for having gone to study”, says she, who graduated at the age of 32.

And it was her university dissertation that enabled her to become a writer and create an editorial label, where she publishes a series of black authors, with 25 writers already published.

“I wish people weren’t afraid of black feminism. But people still don’t understand what it is. Black feminism does not divide us. He works for intersectionality, for valuing all ideas and for an anti-racist society project. Black women saved me from the loneliness of being who I am and academic loneliness,” she explains.

Author of books such as “Who is afraid of black feminism?” and “Lugar de Fala”, Djamila Ribeiro knows today her importance as a black woman and the space she occupies, using this power very well to boost other black women.

“It is important for us to see black women in the places of power. I don’t want to see only black women in the news because they are being violated, ”she warns.

And, because she believes in the strength of the collective and feels humanized in these spaces, she created an institute – Espaço Feminismos Plurals – where she carries out a series of activities aimed at black women and/or women in situations of social vulnerability and where, as she says: “They can experience these moments in which they manage to be themselves, in which they can speak, in which they can feel welcomed”

And just as Djamila Ribeiro was welcomed by so many powerful black women: Luiza Bairros, Patrícia Hill Collins, Grada Kilomba, Alzira Rufino, Toni Morrison, Sueli Carneiro, Dona Antonia, Dona Irani… Djamila also continues to teach and welcome us.

Showing us, black women, that there is no way to think about Brazil without thinking about race, without thinking about gender, that we have a place to speak, that “we are because we are”, but that nobody needs to be afraid of black feminism anymore.