Author and anthropologist Ashanté M. Reese on using ritual to connect to your work

I read that you taught middle school in Atlanta before you enrolled at American University to get your PhD, and that led you to all the work you’re doing today. What was the impetus to get your PhD? Did those early years as a teacher influence your work?

Teaching middle school is the hardest job I’ve ever had—it probably will be the hardest job I will ever have. It taught me a lot about what being an educator really means. The actual teaching and what you’re delivering in the classroom—maybe 10 percent of that has to do with the knowledge transfer and more of it has to do with how you’re modeling how to be in the world, and how to support young people emotionally. I taught in a Title 1 school, so sometimes it was also figuring out how to make sure your young people had what they needed materially and financially.

I grew up in a rural area. In terms of living in cities, when I went to undergrad, that was the first time I lived in a city. So four years after that, I moved to Atlanta and I was really fascinated with how cities are organized. I was green in terms of really understanding how city design itself actually contributes to producing inequalities. And that’s where I really first started thinking about food inequities, honestly, because of the students that I taught.

I’ve always known that I wanted to write. I was a big fan of Zora Neale Hurston. I knew her as a writer. I knew that she had this experience of being trained as an anthropologist. And I maybe naively thought that something about anthropology helped her be a great writer.

That is literally how I chose anthropology… I wanted to read and write and research and do deep study. I had no goals of going into academia at all. At the time, I thought I would continue doing some more public work through maybe working for the CDC or other government or nonprofit organizations that did work in health. I took a few twists and turns from that.

When you get to the writing of your dissertation, what was the moment where you thought, “Okay, I’m going to be in academia?”

You would think there was a moment where I was like, “Yes, this is the path I’m choosing.” But truly it happened because while I was writing my dissertation, I had run out of funding. And the job that was offered to me was a fellowship at Rhodes College that involved some teaching while I wrote my dissertation, but was also a job that would convert into a tenure track job if I completed my dissertation and if I wanted to stay.

I had decided after the first semester that I was not going to stay at Rhodes College, whether I had a job or not. It was not a good fit for me. But while I was there, I was having a conversation with a friend about jobs and she’s like, “Okay, well, would you want to stay in academia?” And I was like, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m probably going to move back to DC.”

And she said, “Well, if you were going to stay in academia, are there conditions that would work for you? Would you ever teach at an HBCU, et cetera?” And I said, “The only HBCU I would teach at is Spelman College.” And a week later, there was a job posting for Spelman College for food studies.

I saw it and I said, “This is my job and this must be my path.” Everything about my pathway in academia has really shown me that if there really is something you’re supposed to do in the world—if there’s really [a] purpose or calling or whatever it is people want to name it—sometimes, for some people, I think the universe says, “I need to make this as easy as possible because you’re not going to do it otherwise.”

In your book, GATHER: Black Food, Nourishment, and the Art of Togetherness, you focus on how Black folks gather around food to create safety, joy, and connection. You also opened the book by introducing us to your grandmother who was a really important figure in your life. How do you approach blending your research with a personal lens of your own history and experiences?

That’s a recent turn for me in my writing, at least. Maybe not so much in my thinking, but certainly in my writing. Christina Sharpe, who is a theorist and a writer who I deeply admire, wrote a book called In The Wake: On Blackness and Being that was published in 2016. And in the book, she really articulates this concept of a “we” that I felt was really important. She basically made the argument that we as academics and writers actually need to write into the concept of a “we.” And she says a concept of a “we” that’s Black and global. I love that. And she talks about shared risk. And so when I take these concepts together, “we” and shared risk, one of the things that I think about as an academic, but also as a writer, is that I want people to trust me as a reliable narrator… Some of it was about the subject matter guiding me in terms of how I would show up.

But then the other part is going back to what you said about my grandmother. In our academic lineages, we do not always include these figures who are not academics. And my grandmother, in my opinion, was a great theorist. I wanted to put her and other people, but particularly her, on the page as part of my academic lineage, not just my personal lineage.

You invite readers to think about food justice and mutual aid. And also to reevaluate some stereotypes that non-Black readers might have about Black people and food. That work is also, I would imagine, complex and also vulnerable in its own way.

It’s so necessary too. My good friend and colleague Hannah Garth just wrote a book called Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement and she spent 10 plus years working with food justice organizations in LA, trying to get at what some of the assumptions are in those organizations… Her book is wonderful and it shows us that we all need to take a pause sometimes and think about, Why is there an assumption sometimes that people just don’t know how to cook healthy food? Or they don’t know how to eat healthy? Those are racist assumptions. Those are classist assumptions. Where are they coming from?

I’m thinking, too, about nourishment in relation to the creative life. How do you see nourishment and connection showing up within your creative life?

I have a writing group called The Quiet Quills.

I love that.

We mostly get together and write quietly, but we also have lunches together. We exchange work. We all have academic training and are people who are trying to unlearn some of the habits of that academic training to lean more into creativity. The Quiet Quills have been really important to me.

I am learning how to quilt. Part of the reason I’m learning how to quilt is because my grandmother taught me how to sew and my great aunt used to run a quilting guild and it was amazing. I have all these images of these beautiful quilts that she and the other women made. I see quilting as a way of stitching myself more closely to my own lineage.

Oftentimes, I want a material practice to help me work through things that I am thinking about or feeling around about. I love hosting and cooking, so that shows up as a part of my creative life… I am a lifelong journaler. I have a 30-year journal collection.

My best thinking happens on long walks. I’m lucky to live in a city that has a lake in the middle of the city with 12 miles of trail around it. I walk many hours a week around the trail.

I know you mentioned in the book and in other places the importance of rituals. So I was wondering if you had writing-specific or maybe even research-specific rituals? It sounds like walking is one and journaling is another. Are there any others?

When I am getting stuck… I write by hand until I feel unstuck and then I transcribe all of that onto the computer and I keep doing that. I’ll be typing again until I feel stuck, and then I go back to my legal pad and start writing by hand again. I still feel like writing by hand feels like the truest version of anything I want to say.

A lot of my research rituals are deeply connected to whatever I’m writing. I’m writing a book about sugar and Sugar Land, Texas, which was the birthplace of prison agriculture in Texas. And sugar was instrumental to that and to launching the Imperial Sugar Company. And so for that project, I do a lot of altar work actually honoring the named and unnamed people who worked during the convict lease system to establish the sugar industry in Texas. As part of the altar work, I bake and then I put offerings to the mostly men and boys who had done this labor in the same way that we might make offerings to our ancestors.

Part of the reason I do that is because part of the question that I’m meditating on, in the book, is “what is owed and to whom?” … I do that as a way of working with sugar as a material object. But also to, even in my small way, try to reinscribe these men and boys into this legacy that is also theirs.

Ashanté M. Reese recommends:

Multi-hour walks with no particular destination in mind

Village Weavers by Myriam Chancy. So heartbreakingly good!

WNBA Community on Threads!

The audiobook for Kennedy Ryan’s Score. The narration is excellent!

Impromptu day trips with friends…make the plans as you go along. So good for reconnecting with wonder

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Eva Recinos.

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