Until I read Hood Wellness: Tales of Communal Care from People Who Drowned on Dry Land, “wellness” was a concept simultaneously bland and poisonous. The price tag on all things wellness related created a world in which wellness itself — as in the state of being “well” — was unobtainable for most of us. And while certainly access to health care is tied up in race, class, and gender, the gatekeeping of wellness is a pure fiction, cooked up by an industry bent on distracting us from the potential and power in our own self and community healing while they reach into our pockets. In Hood Wellness, Tamela Gordon (or Tami as she refers to herself in this book)topples these fictions around wellness. From the rubble, she builds up a new narrative around self and community care.
I have to admit that, at first, I struggled with this book. Or I thought I was struggling with this book. What I was actually struggling was to break out of the ideas around “wellness” that the industry had planted in my head: white monoracial, largely healthy and able-bodied (mostly) women as the center and keepers of knowledge around what it means to be “well.” It didn’t take long for Tami to break me out of that mental prison. The book opens with her in bed in the middle of what ends up being an unsatisfying experience. (For her anyway. Scott seems to be getting his needs met and then some.) In this section titled Care and Body, Tami keeps the focus on her own body and then on the bodies of other marginalized writers who she’s invited to share their stories. These bodies are not white, not wealthy, and not healthy nor able bodied. And, yet, these voices guide us all to a sense of wellness that is clearly not predicated in being in a certain type of body and income bracket.
In this section, Tami also leads us through her own Eat, Pray, Love experience. She manages to share the same life lessons (and more) in one chapter which takes place over the course of a single day in which she never strays further than her own neighborhood. Elizabeth Gilbert needed a year, three countries, and three hundred plus pages to get to the same place. In other words, Tamela Gordon read, lived, and rewrote Eat Pray Love so that I didn’t have to. That, alone, is worth the cost of the book and then some.
The sections of history in Hood Wellness were powerful. Tami writes about often overlooked historical figures including those in the Movement for Civil Rights, Hollywood film (and the “mammy trope”), and the ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) movement. The way in which she takes an individual story (such as her own experience of being made to play a mammy role in a high school play) and contextualizes it in history (she tells us about Hattie McDaniels and other actresses) is nothing short of alchemy. Pain into meaning. Whereas white wellness creates a narrative that it arose from the sea in a giant pristine clamshell, Hood Wellness claims history and context.
Since I read The Salt Eaters earlier this year, I’ve been drawn again and again to one of Toni Cade Bambara’s often quoted lines from that text: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well? … Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”
Just because I’m drawn to this text, however, doesn’t mean that I understand it. But I was reminded of and given a deeper understanding of what Bambara was getting at in the afterword of Hood Wellness, written by Dr. Tyffani Monford Dent.
“There is this misconception that healing is pretty. That it is made up of orchestra strings, lit candles, and happy endings that happen before the credits roll. Healing is just the opposite. It is hard. It can make one feel as if their soul is being crushed and that we might as well just stay within our unhealthy existence, because at least that difficulty is known. As Tamela reminds us, healing is ugly work. It requires getting down into the depths of our experiences and our souls and seeing all that is there — and trying to make sense of some things that make no sense. Yet, healing is cleansing.”
I’m grateful to Tami for already having done so much of the work for us, especially those of us who live in marginalized bodies, ignored, made invisible, and objectified in mainstream wellness. I’m grateful that in Hood Wellness, she made sense of so much that doesn’t make sense.
When I finished Hood Wellness, I had no interest in going out an buying some shiny, new product or signing up for a program. What was I interested in doing: listening to and reading more stories from people whose stories haven’t been welcome in mainstream (white) wellness spaces. And to get to telling my own.
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