Jessica Horn: Re-membering the body, remembering delight
Photographer: Mikaela Westerholm
Let’s talk about us- Let’s talk about who we come from, about the kind of world we want to live in and leave for future generations, the communities we want to build and how to do that. Let’s talk about kindness and compassion, freedom and gentleness, about struggle, the struggle for power and how to challenge it, let’s talk about change about getting into trouble, about justice and fairness. Let’s talk about creativity and creating beauty. about the body, about creating safe spaces for the body and spaces for the body to heal - let’s talk about us.
I’m not usually a fan of reeling off people’s accomplishments, it can be counter-productive particularly as I want to move away from attaching personal value to someone's qualifications or achievements, you know this idea that you have more value if you have the right education or come from the right background and less if you don’t fulfil this constructed criteria. But in light of what we’re going to talk about today, I think knowing a little bit about the background of today’s guest will help frame some of the complex issues we discuss.
So, with that in mind, let me tell you about Jessica Horn. An alumna of Smith College (the alma mater of Gloria Steinem, Sylvia Plath and Otelia Cromwell, the first black woman to receive a doctorate from Yale) Jessica is a women’s rights/gender equality expert, writer, academic, activist and poet. She is Director of Programmes at the African Women's Development Fund, has visited 54 countries, lived in 8 on 4 different continents, including Fiji, Lesotho, Pakistan and the States amongst others. She’s a polymath - I know we bandy that word about a lot these days, but hidden in the meaning, namely ‘someone who knows a lot about many different subjects’ is a curiosity. And underneath that curiosity is a deep compassion and I believe that it is that compassion that drives her desire for justice and fairness for people, for women, for African women.
We talk about activism, African feminism, poetry, motherhood, her love of beauty and how it impacts her need to create and of course, we talk about music.
IG: @thetempleofherskin & @stillsherises
Twitter: @stillsherises
Content: Writing - The Haunting, Ode To A Year That Hurt, Thoughts on Radical Care in African Feminist Praxis