Belinda Waller-Peterson, Womb Work: Healing Narratives as Reparative Praxis in Black Women’s Literature (South Carolina: Clemson University Press, 2024) 156 pp. $130 Hb. ISBN: 9781638040644
This book is deservedly on the BSLS 2024 Book Prize shortlist. It is impressive in a number of ways and it feels politically urgent. The series it is published in is ‘the first university press series devoted to the African American literary tradition’ and the topic is both personally and politically topical for the author herself. We are told that Belinda Waller-Peterson originally trained as a nurse before becoming a full-time English graduate student (xii). The stories that the book deals with are often harrowing, both fictional and from real life, and the author acknowledges the ‘emotional labour’ that is required to be able to read and analyse them. Just how personal the topic is becomes clear from the first page when the author reveals that becoming pregnant she was diagnosed with preeclampsia, a life-threatening illness and one of many pregnancy complications that Black women suffer from far more than white women. One of the many astounding features of this book is it documents stories told of Black women’s reproductive problems from slavery till today.
Waller-Peterson’s book encourages readers to ‘find themselves and their personal stories’ reflected in the Black women’s writing that she discusses. Her critical position is ‘rooted’ in her own ‘illness narrative as a Black woman at a higher risk of maternal mortality’ (p. 3). Each chapter is preceded by a mixed-media collage created by Waller-Peterson in black and white reproduction when perhaps they may have been in colour originally. Each collage was inspired by the works examined in Womb Work and they offer an additional and intriguing reading of the texts. These texts range from novels to poetry, memoirs, and short stories, all written between 1980 and 1998. But they deal with topics that go back further in time, stories set in Plantation era America as well as in the modern day. They offer representations of reproductive health and are presented as reparative narratives that reclaim the site of the womb to create a space for healing.
The introduction surveys some of the key writings on ‘the history of medical racism that informed advancements in the field of obstetrics and gynaecology’ and which ‘continues to discredit Black women as reliable interpreters and narrators of their bodies’ (p. 5). There are some truly appalling facts presented here: James Marion Sims, apparently still lauded with the title ‘father of gynaecology’ experimented on enslaved Black women without anaesthetic to further knowledge of pregnancy-related complications. Contemporary accounts abound with further horrific stories told by Black women today regardless of their education or socio-economic status. The title of the book, ‘womb work’ refers to the act of writing and reading reparatively: this act can enable readers to ‘create new definitions of self’ that help to access individual and collective healing practices (p. 6). It is rare to find a book that is bold enough to offer itself as intervening in a personal, political, or other kind of issue, and offering hope.
The slave autobiography is a genre adopted by some of the writers Waller-Peterson deals with in the book: such as the ‘neo-slave narratives’ of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (p. 13). Enslaved Black women’s wombs were utilised by slave-owners to increase their property. Waller-Peterson argues that ‘The shift from victimization to resistance is possible when Black women writers pen stories about enslaved Black women who empower themselves and other women at the site of the womb’ (p. 13). The stories discussed consider Black women as fully-realised individuals who are subjects rather than objects that have a life beyond the acts of violence they suffer. There is a focus on agency and on ‘Black women’s humanity, self-actualization, and self-love within the context of lived experience’ (p. 14).
The introduction sets out the methodological approaches for Womb Work, which sits comfortably within the field of ‘health humanities’. The theorists Waller-Peterson has found particularly useful include Arthur Kleinman, Arthur Frank, Kathleen Conway, Claudia Tate, and Ann Jurecic and their works span a timeframe from 1989 to 2012. Womb Work finds especially helpful ideas such as the ‘wounded storyteller’ from Frank as well as Tate’s application of psychanalytical notions of desire to African American literature. The first chapter focuses on Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters (1980) read alongside Sisters of the Yam by bell hooks (1994), the second on Toni Morrison’s Paradise (1998), the third on Lucille Clifton’s 1991 poems, and the final chapter on Dessa Rose (1986). Taken as a whole, Womb Work uses ‘a reparative reading practice to excavate stories about womb-related illnesses’.
Having never heard of Lucille Clifton previously, I found the chapter devoted to her most convincing. Her life story is heart-breaking: her mother had epilepsy and died an early death. She also wrote poems but burned them, unsupported by her partner, Clifton’s father, who sexually abused Clifton as a child. Clifton’s namesake, her great grandmother Lucy, was the first Black women to be hanged legally in Virginia after she shot the married white father of her child. As Waller-Peterson puts it, ‘Clifton’s poetry engages directly with these and other personal issues as she writes to repair the harm inflicted on her and her mother’ (p. 79). She writes expressly with the desire to heal. Waller-Peterson makes the point that Clifton is not nearly as well known as she should be and that very little has been written about her critically. The need for more to know and appreciate her work is certainly convincing. Clifton writes ‘Poem to my uterus’, ‘poem in praise of menstruation’, and ‘to my last period’; her voice is at turns amusing, ironic, and magnificent, situating the flow of menstrual blood within the universe’s cycles and life forces. I was surprised not to see much on poetic form as this element was intriguing but the attention to detail is often otherwise excellent in Waller-Peterson’s readings of the poems.
Womb Work is a timely, brave, and deeply compassionate contribution to both literary studies and health humanities. It insists on the importance of listening to Black women’s voices — on the page and in the world — and offers a model of criticism that is ethically engaged and emotionally resonant. Waller-Peterson’s work deserves to be widely read, taught, and celebrated.
Sharon Ruston, Lancaster University
