Mourning My Inner[blackgirl]child

Poetry. African & African American Studies. Women’s Studies. MOURNING MY INNER[BLACKGIRL]CHILD is an unabashed exposure of girlhood fragility, ancestral grieving, and embodied remembering. In her excavation of multiple pasts and multiple selves, reelaviolette botts-ward journeys through intimate encounters with her mother(s), her home, her body, and her precarity. As she mourns her deepest wounds, reelaviolette lays bare the im/possibilities of Black girlhood, slippages of Black motherhood, and matrilineal legacies of abuse. In telling her story, she tells so many of our own. reelaviolette’s poetry invites Black women deeper into our healing and centers the little girl within herself who has a sacred word for the world.