Self-care and liberation
What is the role of art in challenging and undoing systemic oppression? And what does that have to do with self-care? Sundus Abdul Hadi is an artist, curator, and writer of Iraqi origin, working to explore these questions. Her book Take Care of Your Self: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation is part of a new series of narratives acknowledging the roots of the practice of self-care, and the role self-care plays in different marginalized communities. Abdul Hadi’s position is that art and self-care each have a transformative power to change the legacies of trauma that people in the margins of society face. She speaks about how artists of color “have been, for generations, actively engaged with this process of care and empowerment,” highlighting specific art exhibitions and movements that are revolutionary in their approach to these themes.
Liberation as One Option To Practice Self-Care
In Take Care of Your Self: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation, Sundus Abdul Hadi defines care as the opposite of violence, and advocates for using care as a tool to decolonize our communities. She acknowledges that taking care of the self becomes an act of survival for people who are targeted by Western culture. The role of art, in her words, is to “shift the narrative of struggle from trauma and violence to care and liberation.” In the world of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, we talk about dialectics as balancing multiple conflicting truths at once, and I think Abdul Hadi is advocating for a dialectical look at culture struggles here. She’s looking at both the glare of violence and systemic oppression and the shade of community and self-care. She implores us to accept that both exist, and to work on changing what systemic oppression and what commodified self-care look like.
Part of her exploration of self-care centers the voices of Black women like Audre Lorde, who have been doing the work of defining and exploring self-care within the framework of dismantling oppression. No book- or blog post!- about self-care would be complete without referencing Lorde’s famous quote, delivered while Lorde was fighting cancer and fighting for civil rights: “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
In the middle of her book there is a section called “The Living Room: Images and Words by the Artists.” It is composed of interview questions and color prints of the artists’ work, marrying the two concepts of self-care and challenging oppression. If you access a copy of her book, I recommend that when you get to this part you read as slowly as possible. Drink in the words!
The Role of Art in Self-Care
These quotes serve to give you a little teaser of the powerful thoughts she catalogs here:
Ahmad Naser-Eldein, a Palestinian photographer living in Montreal, is one of the artists she includes here. His art project “aims at decolonizing the representations of ‘The Palestinians’ and to underline the empowering uniqueness of every human, by enabling the viewer to see individuals underneath the stereotypical image of the freedom fighters.” When asked what self-care means to him, Naser-Eldein responded “On a personal level, part of self-care is not being apologetic about who I am, and about the different layers of my identity, culture, and political consciousness. It is all the work I do, aiming to develop self-love and confidence.”
Samira Idroos is an artist who creates embroidered prayer rugs to combine religious texts with pop culture symbology. To quote from her website, she “uses prayer rugs as a platform to study the boundaries of history, language, and materiality.” Abdul Hadi references Idroos’ work “Found In Transliteration,” a series featuring pixelated and abstracted images of common slogans. When asked about self-care, Idroos said “Self-care is the most important thing I can do. It’s prioritizing myself. Sometimes it comes in the form of physical activities or rituals to relax or calm myself. But I’ve realized it’s more of an everyday habit that has to form.”
How Self-Care and Liberation Intertwine
In a 2023 article published in the Johns Hopkins University Press, three researchers from the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work created a case study about how self-care and liberation go together. It’s entitled “Addressing Traumatizing Environments: A Case Study of the Showing up for Black Power, Liberation, and Healing Initiative.”
The authors of the article, Marcus Stanley, Samira Ali, and Masonia Traylor, focused on “reframing self-care from an individualistic responsibility to an institutionally supported, communal means of healing.” Their work challenges the dominant narrative around self-care: that self-care means maintaining external standards of being productive. The authors rightly called out that definition as White supremacist, as it elevates the ideals of productivity, urgency, and hard-working individualism while diminishing the importance of listening to the body’s cues, slowing down, and honoring collective rest.
Showing Up for Black Power, Liberation, and Healing
Their paper explores a business initiative called “Showing Up for Black Power, Liberation and Healing,” which involved different projects designed to support Black staff members. Of particular interest to me, nine of those projects focused specifically on intersectional spaces, including spaces for Black transgender and gender nonconforming individuals, Black cis-women, and Black queer communities.
One of the foundational acts of self-care that Stanley, Ali, and Traylor advocated for was critical consciousness-raising. Providing the opportunity for group education and reflection from other members of the Black community helped the staff members explore how they are conditioned to believe that they are not worthy of being cared for. Where did they get the idea that self-care is not a “worthy use of their time?” The program helped members explore how that concept stems from the work culture of White supremacy.
Simple Steps to Practice the Self-Care of Liberation
In mainstream White self-care practice, you get the advice to rest and take time off when needed, without any explanation of where the time and the financial means to afford this resting is supposed to come from. This program put the responsibility of figuring out how to hold space for rest and for self-care on the companies themselves, instead of on individual staff members. This is one example of how to keep self-care from becoming the responsibility of the individual, by building in opportunities for self-care in the collective environment.
One of the participants in the research shared how coming together as a collective to prioritize rest “helped us to feel reconnected with one another and to have tools for re-centering ourselves and finding balance,” rather than feeling like it was all on them as separate people to find the time for self-care. Participants explored the source of some of their stress within their social and historical context, and from there, different methods to distance themselves from some of the stress. Additionally, they reflected together on the role of systemic racism on how they experience work culture.
How did all of this land on the participants in their study? In their own words: “Some of us were never given the permission or felt worthy enough to take care of ourselves; some even said self-care made them feel like they were being selfish. When we first created this program, we didn’t imagine that equipping people with simple tools to practice self-care would invoke such strong emotions, and how important and healing it would be, to talk about those feelings, it was so beautiful.”
Viewed from this lens, taking time to prioritize self-care, mental health, and addressing our deeply rooted traumas are human rights. I’ll close out on some of the participants' words: “Liberation work is hard on a person’s mental wellbeing and it’s easy to get burned out and give up when it seems like your efforts are not rewarded with freedom and justice. Intentional self-care sessions should be a part of all social justice organizations, and we so look forward to our next one.” If you’d like to explore more options for how to practice self-care, you can check out this article on self-care basket ideas for radical self-care. Or, read more about how LGBTQ+ therapy with a liberation lens can make a difference in your mental health.