Elizabeth speaks to social critic, feminist theorist and poet Minna Salami. 12/01/2022

Minna is a social critic, feminist theorist and poet, and she’s founder of the blog, MsAfropolitan. She’s the author most recently of ‘Sensuous knowledge: a black feminist approach for everyone’. 

She speaks about her childhood in Nigeria and Finland, her experiences with racism, her deep feminist identity, and what a more holistic approach to knowledge might look like.

Elizabeth
Hello, and welcome to The Sacred. I am your host, Elizabeth Oldfield, and this is a podcast in which we try and go a bit more personal than your standard ideas podcast, though you should still learn a lot. Our hope is to get to the people – the complicated, multifaceted human beings – behind the positions in our public conversations by starting off with an enormous question about what they hold sacred, what are their deepest values? What are they trying to live for? Our guests come from a wide range of backgrounds, perspectives and professions. And you should hear, before long, someone quite different from yourself. In an age when it’s easy to only listen to people like us, or who we already like, or even people we already sense like people like us, that’s a lot of likes, you know what I mean! All the while seething at those idiots over there, and letting ourselves often be formed into very them–and–us, in–and– out group thinking, we believe in the quiet magic of listening with curiosity, and openness. I have found it just very enriching. And I have grown loads by seeking out voices that I wouldn’t necessarily come across or people I don’t already know, or even people whom I instinctively don’t want to listen to, or particularly not want to talk to. I am reminded again and again that everyone is more interesting than they first appear. As always, please rate and review the podcast, it really does warm my heart. It helps with algorithms. And my favourite thing is when someone lets me know that you’ve used an episode to open up a conversation with a friend. So please do get in touch either via Twitter @sacred_podcast.

In this episode, you’ll hear a conversation I had with Minna Salami. Minna is a social critic, feminist theorist and poet, and she’s founder of the blog, MsAfropolitan. She’s the author most recently of ‘Sensuous knowledge: a black feminist approach for everyone’. We spoke about her childhood in Nigeria and Finland, her experiences with racism, her deep feminist identity, and what a more holistic approach to knowledge might look like. I really hope you enjoy listening.

Minna, I am going to ask you what is sacred to you. It’s not your every day, on the bus kind of question that we get asked. So the hope is that it helps dust off bits of our thinking that we might not have a chance to use all the time. But people have different reactions to the word sacred, positive and negative. So firstly, kind of how did the question sit with you? How did it feel?

Minna
I loved it, I love to think about what is sacred to me, I think, you know, especially in times where there’s so much – our attention is so fleeting, and there’s so much consumerism, and you know, just feeling like you’re all over the place quite easily in our times. The notion of the sacred instantly brings you to a more still place. For me, the word is a poetic word before it is a religious one, or a spiritual one, perhaps because of that stillness that it evokes. When I read poetry, it’s something that always makes me still, it brings me to the present moment very starkly. And so the word sacred doing that makes me associate it with the poetic.

Elizabeth
So tell me what bubbles up for you about what is sacred to you, principles or values that you have at least tried to hold to in your life?

Minna
Well, I have a motto in my life that I can’t quite remember when I started to use it as a kind of lodestar. But it is actually going back to poetry. So it’s a riff on the poem, ‘Conscientious objector’ by Edna St. Vincent Millay. And she says in that poem, ‘I will die, but that is all that I will do for death’. And it’s the line that I find so beautiful and powerful. And I guess at some point, when I was reading that poem, this phrase came to my mind, which is, ‘I will live but that is all that I will do for patriarchy’. And I mention that because I guess what is sacred to me is living a feminist life, which I can share more about later. But living a life in which there is an integrity with the values that I uphold, and in which I am committed to not complying with the oppression of women that happens in patriarchy. So that motto is sacred to me, actually, it’s something that, you know, it so neatly expresses the things that I hold valuable.

Elizabeth
There’s something there about integrity. And I guess the title of the poem, conscientious objection that’s the sort of refusal of a system that you don’t believe in, consistently,

Minna
Consistently. And I think also, another way to think about it – it goes back to another one of our feminist foremothers Virginia Woolf and where she describes the need for women to have a room of one’s own. She was speaking about that, both in terms of space and in terms of economy, so to have, to pursue having enough of a financial situation in which you can create space for yourself to think, and to think as a woman.

Elizabeth
I’m trying to kind of develop the habit of asking how these sacred values have shaped your life decisions. Can you think of an example of that, maybe you’ve been at a fork in the road, life could have gone one way or another, and that principle has guided you?

Minna
Certainly, it has meant that I’ve had to make choices that I – that sometimes required my breaking from convention. In fact, quite often, I would say that, one way I could speak about my life is that I’ve very much defied what it was meant to be. But to give a concrete example, I was working for many years in the marketing industries, I had a successful career, I’d worked in Sweden, in New York, and then in London. I didn’t have the motto that I’ve shared with you about not living for patriarchy at the time yet, but I was a feminist and I was already sort of in pursuit of living a feminist life. And there were so many things about that kind of lifestyle that clashed with those values. I’m not saying that working in, you know, the corporate world or in the creative industries, as I did, is necessarily unfeminist. But for me, the kind of the corporate culture, the constantly working over hours and working in organisations which were typically led by men, and led in very particularly masculine ways, just felt like I can’t do this without crushing my soul. And so I quite spontaneously decided that I was going to quit my job. Actually, during a kind of heated conversation with my boss at the time, in which I felt like I was being treated in sexist ways. And I guess I’d been mulling about it over a period of time, but I hadn’t made any kind of conclusive decision, and then I, I spontaneously quit. And that was one very defining moment for me in terms of living a feminist life in a way that is sacred to me.

Elizabeth
Before we pick up those really interesting threads, I want to just wind back to the start and get a sense of where you’ve come from, the soil that the plant, the beautiful bush or tree that is Minna Salami grew in. Particularly, were there any formative ideas around in your childhood, political, philosophical, religious, that you think are significant for who you are today?

Minna
Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in Lagos in Nigeria, which is a very cosmopolitan city. There’s about 15 million people who live in Lagos, probably more these days. And you know, it’s people from all around the world, especially the African continent but also importantly, Nigeria itself is an amalgamation of different kingdoms and ethnicities by the British during colonialism. Lagos being the capital city is one to which everybody kind of migrates. So that’s the like, the large framework of the environment that I grew up in. Within that I then grew up in a traditional kind of family compound of the Europe ethnic group, which is where my heritage comes from. And what that means is that, you know, it’s different to the kind of Western nuclear family type of abodes. So it’s a, it’s a big house in which several kinds of nuclear families live and share a lot of practices. So my parents and I lived there, and then two of my aunties and their children, and my grandmother lived with us intermittently. There were, you know, lots of workers. So a lot of people basically all of the time, and this family compound was an interfaith one. Even my own nuclear family was – my father’s Muslim. My mother was Protestant. My father’s Nigerian and my mother is from Finland. My parents met in Germany, and so they met as students and they spoke German to each other and to me, but I would respond in Finnish to my mother and English to my father. So I’m sharing all this to say that it was a household in which there were so many different perspectives around me, and everybody was very religious except for my mother. But I was, from a very young age, I was encouraged to kind of decide for myself what I was going to believe in spiritually, philosophically, my parents were pan Africanist. My mother had a lot of feminist literature around

Elizabeth
Unpack pan Africanist for me. I’m sorry, I don’t fully know the words.

Minna
Yeah. So pan Africanism is a socio political movement that gains a lot of strength during the struggles for independence in the 1960s. And so it’s a, it’s the kind of coming together of different African nations. Because African nations as we know them today were colonial inventions. And so it’s the kind of belief in that the more united we are as Africans, the stronger we will be able to resist colonialism. And at the time, when pan Africanism emerges, the African countries are still literally colonies. Today, pan Africanism is still fighting against neocolonialism, and you know, land grabbing and exploitation of different sorts. So that was a kind of key theme in my growing up, in our household, we always had people coming around, you know, there was a lot of discussion, like activists and thinkers, and also just, you know, family and friends. So this was in the 1980s. And Lagos and Nigeria broadly at the time was a NEO colonial state. So we gained independence in 1960s. So it was just like 20 years old as an independent state. And it was also a very patriarchal culture, like everywhere in the world. But you know, each culture has its own sort of ways of being patriarchal. And so I had this kind of juxtaposition between the conversations that were happening within my family, the structure of the family compound, which was very African in a sense. And then, in the external world, there was this Neo colonial and patriarchal culture that was shaping my education and that I observed shaped society at large. And I think that that kind of juxtaposition and that tension is something that has shaped my life till this day. That’s the kind of kernel for who I am and the things that I’m passionate about, but also the things that I’m resisting.

Elizabeth
Yeah, gosh, it couldn’t help but be formative. This is a very personal question, but how did your mom’s feminism find its place? How did she find her place in that kind of society?

Minna
For my mom who was Finish, moving to Nigeria was her way of nonconforming. You know, of course, there were things there that she found challenging, which I think she would have found challenging anywhere in the world, you know, just seeing any kind of inequality. But yeah, for her to have left – she was from a town in Finland, a very small, narrow minded, you know, wonderful place that I feel a strong sense of belonging to, but a narrow minded place with myopic views, to be in a city of you know, 15 million people from all around the world with a completely different worldviews was very much of a feminist move on her part.

Elizabeth
Did you go back and forth between Lagos and Finland?

Minna
So I grew up in Lagos until I was a teenager. But I did visit Finland very frequently. So I have, you know, like strong ties to Finland already from childhood. But then I moved to Sweden to complicate things further. My mother and I moved, my dad stayed behind because he is so patriotic that I don’t think he would entertain the thought of leaving Nigeria, but my mother and I moved to Sweden temporarily because there was a dictatorship in Nigeria. And it was really bad. You know, there were riots all the time. In my school, almost on a daily basis, there were attacks. And so since we had the privilege of a Western passport, we decided, my parents decided that we would move to Sweden, I was very upset about it. I was just at that age when you’re, you know, everything is so exciting. And I had great friends and I had a crush on someone. And it was like, No!

Elizabeth
Life is over!

Minna
Yeah. But yeah, so we so I then spent 10 years in Sweden. So I have lived in Scandinavia for almost as long as I lived in Africa. So being Scandinavian African, that that does feel quite precious in a sense that I’ve been able, I’ve been lucky to experience the two.

Elizabeth
Yeah, that must have been hard for your dad. And, and you guys being apart.

Minna
Yeah, it was very, very difficult. My dad would come and visit Sweden as often as possible, and vice versa. But because of the dictatorship and the political situation, which continued to worsen, it wasn’t the easiest thing. And it was very difficult for me to adapt to Sweden. I love Sweden, it’s home for me. But the first two years were really difficult. There was – I experienced a lot of racial prejudice. I was bullied, I couldn’t make friends. I didn’t speak the language. So it was really, really challenging in that sense, as well.

Elizabeth
So how much was that part of your identity as a Finnish Nigerian complex? I guess while you were living in Lagos, and then obviously, it really, really became something that created hardship when you were living in Sweden, how did you navigate that? How did you begin to be thinking about race? Was it already something very much on your mind? Or was it that kind of age 13 – I gather you were beaten up, you had racist attacks, and then it’s not something you can ignore?

Minna
Yeah, yes, it was in Sweden that I really started to think about what it meant to be racialized in the world, what it meant to be black. Nigeria is the world’s largest black nation, it isn’t a topic that is discussed in the way that it is in the diaspora. And so it wasn’t until I was in Sweden, and I was experiencing racial prejudice that I started to grapple with what that would mean. I remember coming across one of my old journals from when I when I had just moved to Sweden, this was quite recent, a few years ago, and I found this whole journal and I was writing on a whole page, I’d written like aphorisms about blackness, things like, ‘I love to be black, black is beautiful’. Yeah, and I could really tell that this was – it took me back to that young Minna, who was experiencing racism, but internally sort of affirming my blackness to myself, I think that’s like, probably the kind of defining point at which I, I became black as a racial subject in the world.

Elizabeth
Interesting. And do you remember a similar point where you became a feminist?

Minna
Yeah, probably when I was born. You know, how people have their very earliest memories. It might be a colour or a cartoon they watch or something. My earliest memories are my anger at the unjust treatment of girls. I remember being very small, maybe I’m, I don’t know, three or something like that, and just feeling like, Why are girls doing different things? Why are women expected to behave differently? So yeah, my earliest memories are kind of feminist. But of course, I didn’t have that language then. The kind of first big moment where I’m more of a conscientious conscious being is when I was 16. And I read a book called Sula by Toni Morrison. And Sula is a book about a woman called Sula who’s kind of a wayward woman, living in the late 19th century, she’s African American, and she is somebody who defies all norms, she’s completely anti conforming, she has several lovers. She refuses to get married, or to have children, despite all of society’s pressure, and I read that book, and I thought, This is me, even though you know, different ages, different kinds of environments, but I related so much to that character. So that for me is like my first feminist awakening. And but even then, I still didn’t use the word. Just because it wasn’t, you know, wasn’t mentioned in the book. It wasn’t a word that sort of was around me, you know, in a pronounced way. The first moment when I became a feminist explicitly was in University in Sweden, and it was actually a Swedish man, my professor, who was teaching a class in media studies, and we watched Pretty Woman. And he showed us excerpts from that, he was telling us that this is the male gaze, he was describing that. And he said, This is something that feminists have been theorizing for years. And the moment he said that word, it was almost like, you know, he said that particular word with a loudspeaker or something. And it just started to, like, bounce in my brain or something. And, and yeah, I couldn’t wait for the lecture to be over. And I cycled to the library and asked the librarian to …

Elizabeth
Give me all the books on feminism!

Minna
It was amazing. And then I just spent, you know, weeks in that section and felt like, Yes, I’m home. You know, this is me without a doubt.

Elizabeth
Yeah. I think we underrate that part of the world of ideas, right? That very often it’s about a sense of belonging. A sense of the questions that we have about the world, that we feel lonely because we have them, and then we find other people who have those same questions. And yeah, we will come to this, obviously, the role of emotion and the sense of being seen is such a big thing, I think. We’ve met a little bit and I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you and reading about you before. The thing I – It’s a real privilege actually this job because it feels like you just get to have a little bit of a deep dive into a person and yeah, I always end up feeling incredibly tender towards everyone that I interview and that kind of specific tenderness with you is the sense of the, you’ve talked about the kind of the pain of the world and your kind of unflinching commitment to calling out what’s broken and calling out injustice and challenging systems, where you see them causing oppression and people feeling invalidated and marginalised. That activist heart of like, no, I’m not just going to go along with this, I’m going to see clearly and speak clearly, which is where the power of your voice comes. How do you build emotional resilience to keep doing that? What are the practices or habits or sources of wisdom that mean, I guess the burden of it doesn’t destroy you almost, is the honest question?

Minna
That was very beautiful, what you said about having tender moments to people that you speak to. And yeah, thank you for bringing that into this conversation as well. So the thing is that, I guess first of all, I don’t necessarily see myself as an activist, but I’m always very honoured when somebody else calls me that. James Baldwin has this incredible essay where he talks about the creative, and the artist, being somebody who is at war with society, at war with the world. And that is the place in which you can create freely, because you’re not complying, you’re not having to be agreeable, or conformist. It really is something that inspires me a lot, and informs, and resonated with me. And I mention it because doing this work is a tremendous sense of joy. Like, being feminist is such a pleasure. Because I know the life in which I wasn’t yet living a feminist life. And I want to say that it’s a process, like I’m still a work in progress, but you know, because I know that life, whether it was when I was working in marketing, or when I was a student, or when I was in relationships that were unfeminist, or when I didn’t have the bravery to speak up if something was said around me that I disagreed with. I now can contrast the way that I now live, which is yeah, like I see the oppression, I see the ways in which people can form and contort themselves into shapes that are so disagreeable for them, especially women. And from that place of seeing that and refusing to participate in it, it I mean, I cannot describe how much joy, it’s a kind of, you know, maybe it’s a kind of political joy, which contains seeds of also, of course, of suffering and pain and just frustration with how the world is. But yeah, knowing the opposite kind of life where you’re constantly making compromises, is then, this for me is really the only way I can I can see myself living.

Elizabeth
That’s, yeah, that’s a very inspiring and helpful perspective and helps me in it kind of bridges to a conversation about feelings, and feelings in our public conversations, feelings in those with a public voice and particularly feelings in the world of ideas. I had another guest on the podcast this series, with Stuart Ritchie, who is a psychologist, he does a lot of kind of public science communication. And he is very self–aware that his tone, even when he talks about very serious things, like COVID deaths or big public health things, he sort of jokingly says he sees it in Boris Johnson also, is very calm, unrufflable and slightly jokey. And that is very effective in those settings. And as you were saying I was like, Yeah, it is damn it, because that’s not everyone’s posture or temperature and maybe nor should it be. And you’ve written about writer’s grievance, which was a lovely phrase, this sense of the way we do knowledge, the way we do status, the way we do power, mandates that the people taken seriously are almost the ones with no feelings who can stay very cool, calm, you know, witty, cheerful. Unpack your journey with that for me as a writer and someone with a public voice?

Minna
When you’re writing you, there’s this notion of writer’s block, which comes up frequently, when a writer just cannot write for days or months, because they’re stuck for finding ideas. During my career, my journey as a writer, I have sometimes found myself in a similar kind of place. So a place in which I feel very unable to write, I feel a kind of resistance to writing. And I started to unpack that, and, and I realised that it isn’t writer’s block that I feel, because if anything, you know, touch wood, because I’m not saying that that is not possible, but I always feel like there’s so many things that I want to write about, there’s more things to write about than I have the time to write about. But what was happening was, that I would feel what I then call writers grievance, which is, I would become aware of the kind of almost howling rage in my words. I am this person who’s passionate about feminism, and black liberation, and just social transformation at large. But I’m also a writer, I’m somebody who’s very passionate about words. There’s a part of me, which sees myself writing just beautifully, you know, just creatively. And so when I would see that, that anger, that howling rage, in my words, it would create this tension between those two parts of the process for me. If you belong to a group that is marginalised in systemic ways then even when you’re writing about something mundane, you know, could be what you had for breakfast, you start to think about, oh, who made this bread? You know, what is the cost dynamic? Or the gender? Like, who runs the company? And, and usually, it’s going to be a man. So what is his wife doing? And there’s all this kind of narrative around it. So you can’t just sit down and write about your bloody breakfast. And that’s what I refer to as writers’ grievance. But you know, it’s important to say, for anybody listening, who may have similar feelings, and those who don’t to understand that this is like, going back to what I was saying about feminism bringing joy. I would also say that it brings truth in that sense, it brings complexity and a kind of dynamic approach to even something like breakfast, you know, and if we can do that with even something like breakfast that’s so quotidian, then we can apply that same kind of dynamic approach to much bigger questions.

Elizabeth
Yeah. Give me a temperature check on how you think we’re doing with conversations about race. It feels like a lot has changed. And depending on who I read, I feel hopeful that things have changed for the better or I feel despairing that things are going backwards or you know that there’s many threads in this conversation, but certainly, it’s been top of agendas in the mainstream in the public consciousness in a way that it hasn’t been for the last few years. What’s been your kind of journey through that? And how do you think we’re doing?

Minna
I think that progress has been made, certainly, since the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, which, you know, importantly, were not the first Black Lives Matter protests, they’ve been going on for almost a decade. But those ones, which happened during the height of the pandemic, you know, they for some reason, really were catalytic for a lot of conversations, which I do think have resulted in, in a lot of changes. I mean, I almost – in my world and the work that I do, I’ve almost started to think about my conversations as a kind of pre 2020 BLM and post 2020 BLM. Also in relation to that, it’s amusing somehow, because, you know, conversations that that I’ve been having with, you know, people in my network, and people like my kind of comrades for over a decade now, are conversations that people are now having on a kind of mass scale. It’s not even amusing, it’s amazing, is a better word, you know, it feels really, really positive. Because for so long, we were like, having these conversations and really wanting people to listen, and all of a sudden, in just the space of a few months, it was like you could have those conversations in any public space and, and people kind of get what you’re talking about. So all of that is really positive. I think what is worrying, or one of the things that is worrying is well, first of all, the co–opting of a lot of the language around racial liberation, which, you know, just turns things into commodified, easily palatable movements, you know, words like anti–racism, it just starts to, to lose the real kind of revolutionary character of that work. But also, and especially I think, the timing is, it was necessary, but it’s also unfortunate in so far as everything about our world and our societies right now is on the edge, you know, there’s a climate emergency, there’s new forms of social media that are creating so much tension, we’re losing democracy, our politicians are increasingly corrupt, there’s more and more refugees that are fleeing, you know, there’s so many things, populism etc. And so that means that when things happen. that are even the most progressive shifts forward, are happening in a time in which everybody’s on edge and that means that it can be really difficult to conduct conversations in productive ways. So I think we are seeing a lot of polarisation because of that, because people might actually be more sympathetic to certain causes but because they are so threatened by the wider…

Elizabeth
Destabilizing moment

Minna
Exactly so it becomes easy to blame it on things that they might otherwise actually see as progressive as well.

Elizabeth
Interesting. And your work is really characterised by your blog MsAfropolitan. And, and the book ‘Sensuous knowledge’ is really grounded in the centre kind of black Afro centric feminism as a gift, as a lens, as a kind of enriching standpoint. One of the words that comes up a lot which some of our listeners will be very familiar with, and some of them won’t, is intersectionality. So I just wanted to do like, you know, black feminism 101 and get you to say a bit about that word and what it means if that’s okay.

Minna
Yeah, of course, although I do not mention intersectionality I don’t think once in my book,

Elizabeth
Right. So tell me tell me why. Because if you want to say I’m not a fan, that’s helpful, too, it’s good to know.

Minna
Sure. So I mean, firstly, intersectionality is a theory that was coined by a black feminist scholar called Kimberlé Crenshaw. And it is a brilliant theory that she coins, which describes the way that black women’s lives are limited by multiple forms of oppression. So at the point, when she wrote her famous essay in the 1980s, there was still this idea that people were either discriminated because they were black, or because they were women, or because they came from the working class. So there was like the single issue analyses of oppression. And what Kimberlé Crenshaw theorised was that actually, if you’re a black woman, you’re experiencing oppression because of your race, your gender, and very often also your class. She wasn’t the first person to talk about this. Prior to her coining intersectionality it was called ‘multiple jeopardy’

Elizabeth
I like that

Minna
Yeah, that’s great, as well, there’s a theory called ‘the six mountains on your back’, which was another way of looking at these multiple oppressions. And Kimberlé Crenshaw certainly like, you know, she consolidates it in a way that then kind of doesn’t take off until 20 years later or so in in the mainstream. And that is why I don’t tend to call myself an intersectional feminist, even though I mean, of course, as a black feminist, I am, I agree with her arguments. But the way in which intersectionality is understood, since it entered the mainstream, without the kind of rigorous thinking behind it, is, in my view, dangerous. I see a lot of institutions, whether it’s like corporations or academic institutions, for example, who say that, Oh, we are intersectional. And yet, they may have like, 1% of their staff are women of colour or something. And so it’s just so completely co–opted. And I feel like the more that we as black feminists use that the more we kind of validate that co–opting, but it’s not something that I, you know, that I reject, or I take issue with, I just don’t use the that language myself.

Elizabeth
Yeah. And tell me, tell me what ‘sensuous knowledge’ is, this book – It’s really lovely actually seeing these multiple identities of you as a poet and as a kind of intellectual, and that the way those threads come together. Tell me what sensuous knowledge is, and why you felt you wanted to speak about it?

Minna
Yeah, sensuous knowledge is a spiritual and a holistic approach to knowledge that is rooted in black feminism. Because it is an approach to knowledge that is looking at any given issue in this kind of dynamic way that we’ve been discussing. So trying to understand things holistically, bringing in interweaving, you know, science with art, or academia with storytelling, the poetic with reason, because that is how we live as human beings, you know, we have these kind of multiple experiences. So it’s really about bringing the realms of lived experience together. And by that I also mean, the more than human natural world. But at the same time, since the phrase came to my mind, and I decided I would title my book that and I would write about sensuous knowledge, it’s also still important for me to say that it’s a, it’s an expression that is… It doesn’t belong to me and isn’t ever fully defined. It’s a kind of explorative way of approaching knowledge. And it is that because what it is resisting is the conventional approach to knowledge in our world, which is one in which we try to measure and control and domesticate and sort of turn everything into something robotic and machine like, that’s what so much of our epistemic knowledge traditions are about

Elizabeth
Just the centering of the rational and the measurable.

Minna
Exactly. And so if I were to do the same to sensuous knowledge that would be in contrast to what it’s trying to do. So it isn’t something that can be defined or, you know, there’s no formula for it. It’s something explorative and open.

Elizabeth
I was really thinking as I was reading your book about the difficulty of operating within the world of ideas, whilst also trying to broaden the horizons of the world of ideas. And I sometimes, you know, felt this in various places and lots of people do, I think we have these signifiers of who’s smart, who’s to be taken seriously. And it depends who you quote, you know, what you’ve read, who you know. And one of the phrases from your book that stood out was black women in the world of ideas feel like intruders. I think, possibly women more generally, as well. Have you felt that tension of realising that to help shift the centre of gravity of what we think of as valid high status knowledge, you have to sort of play the game of the existing world? And are conflict and compromise in there, speak to me a bit about that?

Minna
Yeah, I think that I probably myself have been able to kind of shape shift more in the past where, you know, you enter a space and it feels intimidating. And, you know, this whole thing about imposter syndrome, for instance, is something that resonated with me for a long time. But no longer does, I now find it more important to try to not adjust to whatever environment I am in, it’s not easy. And you know, without a doubt, I probably fail sometimes. But that’s, that’s how I strive to be in the world. And it goes back to that motto of mine that I will live, but that is all I will do for patriarchy. And so I refuse to play the games. And since making that kind of decision in my life, what I realised was that what we call imposter syndrome is more about, you know, it’s a kind of cover up. Because when you’re in an environment where you are feeling hostility towards you, and it’s made clear in sometimes very subtle ways, but there’s, you know, people may ask you questions that they kind of know maybe you won’t know about, because that’s not who you are, and the intention of that is to put you in your place. And to describe what comes from that as imposter syndrome is to kind of victim blame somehow. And once I realised that, it was a real aha moment for me, it’s like, no, I’m actually in an environment that is hostile toward me, it is very normal for me to feel intimidated. And, and what I then can choose to do is to either respond to that, which is probably what I would have done in the past. But now I will just speak my truth as calmly as possible without wanting to be antagonistic, but really, you know, focusing on my integrity, because ultimately, that’s what the victimisation or the prejudice is trying to do to us, to make you lose your sense of stability and integrity.

Elizabeth
That’s helpful. I’m very sad to see that we are coming to the end of our time. And I want to finish with one final question, which I guess I need to frame by saying, I am very aware that the best–selling book on race in the UK has been ‘Why I am no longer talking to white people about race’. And so I’ve obviously thought a lot about all the ways kind of my own questions and my behaviour and how I can just listen really well. So I’d like to ask particularly about that. You have been very generous with your time today and I know in lots of settings you are talking across boundaries and wanting to be in a range of spaces with this, kind of, this is what a black feminist story perspective posture on the world can bring, you know, it is a gift, we need to understand it. What helps those conversations be productive and a sense of actual humans meetings? And what harms those situations? I guess for white listeners, like me, kind of what can we avoid? What can we do better, and anything else that you have observed just makes them more likely to be productive and constructive, rather than dividing and destructive?

Minna
So what I’m always wanting to convey, and this comes from a place of compassion, and that’s why the subtitle of my book is a black feminist approach for everyone. And it’s quite intentional, because I think a lot of the literature is, you know, it’s either specifically targeting white people or not white people, which ultimately what that does is just centre whiteness, all the time. And so I want to be expansive. And, you know, this is for everyone. But I have had, you know, some readers have come to me and said, oh, but you didn’t kind of explain in the book why it is for everyone, and how it is relevant to white people. And that’s precisely the point. You know, like I read books by white men, by white women, by people from all over the world, I watch films, I listen to the news, whatever, all of the time, I am taking in material, which isn’t specifically telling me how it is relevant to me as a black woman. This is something that I feel is a kind of, it’s a gift, perhaps, of being somebody who’s racialized as black and in a female body, is that I can see the humanity of others without having to be asked to see the humanity of others. And so that is what my work wants to say to white people, if anything, because I am speaking to everyone, I don’t want to say specific things to white people or to black people, I just want to say my truth, and hopefully that can inspire or motivate or just inform people about other ways of seeing the world. But what I would say is, you know, this quality of just, you know, seeing, listening to others, and not having to be told that that is the right thing, or the ethical, the progressive thing, to realise for oneself that what it means to be a human, to see humanity in others.

Elizabeth
Minna Salami, thank you so much for speaking to me on The Sacred.

Minna
Thank you so much, Liz. It was a pleasure.

Elizabeth
Well, as always, lots of thoughts swirling around after that one. One of the groups of people that I sometimes feel most nervous about talking about are people that I at least perceive to be activists. And actually, that’s a bit of a strange category. And I’m realising Minna probably wouldn’t put herself in the category of activists possibly, but not just on issues of race and gender, issues of climate. There’s another episode in this series with Rupert Reed, who is philosopher and climate campaigner. Because there’s a certain activist energy, which is, in theological terms, we’d call it prophetic, kind of pointing out injustice, or calling people to a higher standard. But the Old Testament prophets from where we get that term, were not always easy people to be around, it’s quite confronting and quite challenging being called to a higher standard, actually, and often brings up feelings of guilt or complicity. And then often, maybe this is just me, some sort of resentment in there because really, I don’t want to have to think about all of that. This is really being vulnerable now. All of which is to say I often go into conversations with activists not super excited. And, as is often the way in those conversations, those feelings turn out not to be just not necessary, that the best voices who are speaking about these deep and painful issues, whether it’s climate or race or gender, one, they’re complicated, fragile human beings like the rest of us. They know, you know, they haven’t got it all together either. And they’re just passionate and urgent. And we really need those voices.

Yeah, and Minna – Minna is one of those, I knew her a little bit so I knew the kind of richness and the complexity of her voice and the things that she’s interested in. But, and I said this in the podcast we did quite a while ago now with Chine McDonald, conversations about race feel high stakes at the moment, it feels really easy for things to get painful and awkward rather than productive. And there’s some good reasons for that. And that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have them. But yeah, I’m just grateful for Minna’s graciousness, and her matter of factness, also, and her – just a sense you have that she’s really quite comfortable in her own skin, and she’s saying what she’s saying, and she’s navigating some of these difficult things, in what feels like a really healthy way and given what she said about her childhood, this beautiful, vivid picture of a kind of Nigerian household compound with generations living together, different people living together, and then having to leave that because there’s too much violence in your country, and travel without one parent to a completely different culture in which you experienced racist abuse, can’t help but have been quite traumatic and very formative. Yeah, I just, I heard the pain in that. 

I really liked her –and we didn’t get into it too much, because I didn’t want it to get too technical – but she has this contrast between what she calls Euro patriarchal knowledge, which is very – measurement, linear spreadsheet, high value of rationality, low value on kind of intuition, and the senses and the arts. And sensuous knowledge which has high value on those alternatives. And I realised there’s a huge irony that I’m going to quote a white man here, but it reminded me of Iain McGilchrist, who I quote a lot, and he has a new book out and his stuff about different hemispheres of the brain actually having a different ontology, a different way of understanding the world, of being in the world. And we’ve created a society that’s very left brained, that forms us to value linear rationality, measurability, concrete concepts. And so he’d put things like faith and religion and art and creativity and intuition into kind of right hemisphere ways of knowing and ways of being in the world. And sensuous knowledge reminded me of that. 

And finally, her thing about it’s sad that she has, she had to say, ‘black feminist approach for everyone’. Because certain speakers in public conversation don’t feel the need to say this is for everyone. They assume it’s for everyone. And just that, yeah, this sense of how deep our tribalism goes, and how easy it is for us to see each other, usually unconsciously, as not fully human. And how much attention and intention it takes to be continually challenging that in ourselves. And I draw deep on my kind of Christian theological tradition to do that. I think it’s a very powerful call to see the image of God, the Imago Dei, in everyone. But however you go about that practice, it again just feels urgent and important today.

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