Amena Brown on Getting All the Way Free

Description:

Nine years is a long time between visits. When Amena Brown was last on the show in 2017, she was a spoken word poet booked solid inside white evangelicalism, doing one poem at a time between worship songs and quietly wondering how much longer she could keep walking back in. She came back to tell Jen what happened next.

This conversation traces the whole arc: the green rooms where she was told her grief was divisive, the healing circle where a Black woman looked her dead in the face and said you have to get out, the three months of panic attacks that followed, and the call from Tracee Ellis Ross that showed her a bigger world was possible. It is a story about leaving before you have a new boat built.

Then there is the book. Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl started as a poetry collection and became something wilder, funnier, and more free. Amena talks about Black Girl as a verb, the essay she cried writing, her list of qualifying reasons for a Black Woman Day Off, and why the audiobook has a live Black girl audience hollering back. Bring your cheekbones. They are going to be sore.

Thought-provoking Quotes:

• You can't keep re-entering that space. Every time you re-enter, it re-traumatizes you. (Amena Brown, quoting the leader of a Black women's healing circle)
• Whatever a Black girl does is Black girling. If I'm a Black girl who likes to fry chicken, then that's Black girling. If I'm a Black girl who likes to play the cello, that is Black girling. (Amena Brown)
• Save nothing for the swim home. (Jen Hatmaker, quoting literary agent Margaret Riley King)
• I love about Cardi B that she gives me permission to be mad as hell. (Amena Brown)
• Joy is a part of how we survive, it's a part of how we resist. (Amena Brown)

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl by Amena Brown (Tiny Reparations Books)
• How to Fix a Broken Record by Amena Brown
• Awake by Jen Hatmaker
• Bookshop.org, plus your local indie and Black-owned bookstores and your library
• The Together Live tour with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach
• PATTERN Beauty and Tracee Ellis Ross
• Lemonade by Beyonce
• New Blue Sun by Andre 3000
• Austin Channing Brown, Jeff Chu, and Sarah Bessey

Guest's Links:

Website - https://www.amenabrown.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/amenabee/
Podcast - https://www.amenabrown.com/her-with-amena-brown

Connect with Jen!
Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/
Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/
Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
Jen's YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker

The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.