Liccle But Tallawa - Choosing To Challenge by Diahanne Rhiney
I live by Maya Angelou’s saying, ‘You have to know where you’ve come from to know where you’re going’. As Island Girls, our layered stories and complex individual identities are key to our narrative. They are also key to our experience in the world, and how we negotiate its peaks and troughs. It’s all about the ‘I’ word: Intersectionality. It’s the many branches we sit on of race, gender, and age that intertextually complicate the experience of black women of Caribbean descent.
International Women’s Day is here again; it’s our annual global moment to celebrate the social, economic, cultural, and political accomplishments of women. This year, the theme is #ChoosetoChallenge, with a call to action for us to all step up and challenge inequity. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But as black women, a quick Google search on Intersectionality reveals the many different battles we are living, from healthcare, to mental health, the workplace, education and more. So how on earth do we as Caribbean women challenge inequity when we are actually living it?
For me, it starts with us. As intersectional women it’s high time we realised that we win when we help other women get ahead. According to a study published in the journal Development and Learning in Organisations, 70% of female executives feel they have been bullied by women in their office and that it has stunted their professional progression as a result. So, when we quote statistics about women being held back in the workplace, some of that responsibility lies with us as women. That is the last place our battle should be. When one of us succeeds, we all succeed… if we do it right.
‘Ah Nuh Once Monkey, Wa Wife’ (translation: remember to take care of the people who support you because you will need them to continue supporting you in times of need.)
I was raised to be proud of my Jamaican and Kittitian heritage. I was also raised to be proud of my gender, my blackness, my uniqueness, independence, and individuality. Crucially, I was raised with an ‘it takes a village’ mindset and watching my late mothers’ life-long practice of helping her community and supporting women, definitely shaped who I am today. So, for me, IWD is not just about hashtags and meme’s, it’s about strengthening myself from within, and the women around me are a major part of that.
My grandmother was a proud Kittitian woman. The stories she told about St Kitts, the life she had lived after migrating to England, raising children, bereavement. Gran taught me what resilience was. After my grandad died suddenly in an accident when I was five, I watched her in awe as she continued nursing, being the rock of the family and her courage was remarkable. The legacy she has left behind is a giant one, not a day goes by when I don’t quote things she said or see myself in her sense of humour and dynamism. She really was liccle but tallawa.
Losing my mum and then losing Gran really emphasized the importance of womanhood and sisterhood for me. Their anecdotes, life lessons, unforgettable quotes, stories all stopped when they died and whilst I have the memories, they are no longer here for me to ask questions or gain live perspective. I’ve spent much of my life creating global sisterhoods of women who share, inspire, celebrate, and empower each-other and in so many ways my passion stems from both my mum and grandma, what they stood for, and the things I miss about them most. Without them, I seek my inspiration, empowerment, and guidance from the community of global women around me. Diahanne Rhiney, excerpt from the book: All About Me
We need to be the change we want to see to truly Choose To Challenge the status quo. My mission as a woman is to empower other women to connect with each other to make the world a better place. One of my favourite metaphors for this is sea otters, they hold on to each other while sleeping to keep from drifting away from one another so they can sleep without worry of floating out to open ocean. I have a vision of us all working together to build a global community of women, who will help one another succeed, and mentor girls climbing the ladder. Women helping women can be a real movement, but it begins with us. This is a movement beyond the singular, as individuals we are ripples, together we create a wave. When we collaborate with good intention, the magic happens.
I believe we owe respect, cohesion, and support for each other to our daughters, nieces and grandchildren. So many of us were raised by incredibly strong women, whom we admire and affirm, let’s pledge to keep it going ! I want to raise and lift a generation of strong, confident, successful girls and the way to achieve that is to teach them to firstly embrace and empower themselves, and each other, authentically. It will not change …unless we change it.
Therefore, I ask you to Choose to Challenge intersectionality from the inside outward. I constantly Choose to Challenge myself, to always champion other women, even when at times it’s challenging! Internal challenges, mental challenges, health challenges, work challenges; our intersections mean we cannot bring down the system overnight! But by standing as one, we can make a start. This IWD, we need to do more than be part of the ‘talking shop’ (afterall, what is one day?), we need to make meaningful connections, share with other women, listen to their experiences and stories, empower them; embrace them. We need to amplify the work which Island Girls Rock and so many other grass-roots organizations work tirelessly to achieve - to build a global community of women who stand as one unit and say, ‘no more,we got this!’
As Island Girls, we may be relatively small in numbers, but together our spirit is TALLAWA.
