Embodied Cultural Sensitivity, Birth, and Feminism

“We will be saved throgh the articulation of what we have forgotten.”

— Stephanie Mines

Nothing restores embodied cultural sensitivity more than a woman claiming her right to have her baby and be with her baby or babies if she births multiples, immediately after birth, and to receive the placenta that unites them in their commitment to life. This is true even if there is a stillbirth.

Women claiming how they want to carry, deliver, and be with their babies, how the placenta is handled, and whether or not their sons are circumcised, is the essence of embodied cultural sensitivity. How women advocate for the bodies of their stillborn babies, and honor them, is included here.

When women sacrifice these birthrights, often because they are unaware of the necessity to advocate for them, they diminish their personal identities, the identities of their offspring, and the entire collective consciousness about identity. Such institutionalized mechanization of birth is active, persistent colonization of the very center of all beings.

Such disinheritance has long been standardized practice. Crone Speak intends to be a vehicle for the decolonization of pregnancy and birth. Such education could be considered the byline of the Crone. Wise Women Elders have the duty to stand up to this affront.

As an embryologist and neuroscientist collecting data, I have compiled information about the prenatal lives and births of thousands of people of all genders. This includes people from diverse cultures, both English and non-English speakers, on a broad ethnic and demographic spectrum. The majority say that their mothers have little to report on their pregnancies, labor and birth experiences. This is the colonization of memory.

Having birthed my children at home, without medical interference, I can say that it was and is unforgettable. I can replay these experiences moment by moment, even to this day, and I do so on my children’s birthdays. Pregnancy and birth are rituals of becoming, for mother and child. Yet, my mother claims to remember nothing at all about my birth and there are no photographs of her when she was pregnant. The hegemonic ruling that brings shame to the raw, uninhibited sensuality of pregnancy and birth, alters memory and subdues the rite of passage that unites mother and child in a dyadic love dance, I herein declare, is now over.

Was it accurate for my mother to say she remembers nothing of my birth? My lineage is land-based. My grandmother was delivered by her mother in the fields of Eastern Europe. When she gave birth to my mother in a tenement in the Bronx, that entire history was with her. My mother inhabited the womb of a woman schooled in the natural world; a woman who survived by virtue of the elements and the God she implored.

But my mother was also schooled in the dominant culture. She succumbed without question because she was informed that she had to adapt. She was influenced to be ashamed of the broken English and babushka attire of my grandmother. The dominant culture insisted that my mother, along with the mothers of many of those I interviewed, have amnesia for their lineages upon lineages of embodied, somatic truth. This is ubiquitous. Punishing indigenous people for speaking their native tongue, beating indigenous practices out of the bodies of children, these traumas reverberate and steal power from the people of the land.

Embodied Cultural Sensitivity translates as women remembering who we really are. We are the life bringers. In Te Reo Māori, the womb is whare tangata, the house of the people. In Māori tikanga, or cultural practice, as in many other Indigenous practices, the placenta is returned to the earth. The fissures in the relationships between women, children, and the land, leak poison. No more. Our memories are returning. This reclamation, I believe, is at the heart of feminism. It is also, I posit, at the heart of climate activism. When women know themselves as whare tangata, the home of the people, they will not allow the earth to be desecrated.

Crone Speak (www.stephaniemines.substack.com) declares an end to the fracking of women and children. Honoring the diverse cultures that enshrine the life-giving processes of women is a way to remember. We have actually not forgotten, not completely. The memories are there and Crone Speak intends to arouse them so that they come out of hiding. Just as the healing vortex will ultimately devour the trauma vortex, so will the memory of who we are overtake the amnesia of agency. As Patti Smith’s iconic song reiterates, the people have the power. That song is resurfacing now because the time has come for it to be heard with the volume turned up. Patti Smith herself comes to us now in her crone form for this purpose.

Embodied Cultural Sensitivity honors our stories of reclamation and centers the crone voice as leader. Crones elicit the wisdom in all who listen to them. We speak in order to evoke creativity, action and transformation. There is no small talk in Crone Speak, no chit-chat, no gossip, no fawning, pandering, or minimizing.

Each time we, as crones, encourage women to honor birth, we are simultaneously rebirthing ourselves. Every gesture of reclamation, initiated by the crone, strengthens the timeless sisterhood, nourishing it, just as good food nourishes the brains of babies in the third trimester as they prepare to emerge. Crones are nourished by Embodied Cultural Sensitivity. It is food. Our global cultures of elderhood are all related, all united in the intention to rise now in the name of the earth. When crones rise, racism declines.

Crone leadership is the way forward because it is the unified field of consciousness. All crones, in all cultures, meet at this juncture where the fracked fissures of femininity are soldered by our singular embrace of wisdom and unconditional endorsement for the children of the future.