How Urban Black Girls Write and Learn from Ethnographically-based Poetry to Understand and Heal from Relationship Violence

Abstract

This paper explores the engagement of African-American, Caribbean-American, and immigrant West African girls in the critical analysis and writing of poetry to make sense of their multi-dimensional lives. The authors worked with high-school aged girls from Brooklyn, New York who took part in a weekly school-based violence prevention program, and who became both ‘participants’ in an ethnographic research study with the authors and ‘poets’ as they creatively analyzed themes from research data. The girls cultivated a practice of reading and writing poetry that further explored dating and relationship violence, themes that emerged from the violence prevention program sessions and the ethnographic interviews. The girls then began to develop ‘poetic knowledge’ grounded in their lived experiences as urban Black girls. The authors offer that ‘participatory narrative analysis’ is an active strategy that urban Black girls enlist to foster individual and collective understanding and healing.

Structural Racism and Its Influence On Sexual and Reproductive Health Inequities Among Immigrant Youth

“…[ 29 ] Promising strategies to be used in both program development and program implementation include didactic and participatory methods, such as youth participatory action research (YPAR), CBPR, and arts-based methods like digital storytelling, body mapping and story circles, and poetic inquiry. [ 27 , 30 – 33 ] These strategies are successful at engaging immigrant youth by increasing their sense of autonomy and self-expression, and by valuing and amplifying their voices in forms that do not rely solely on spoken or written English-language skills.…”

“…Similarly, our results underscore the important role to be played by youth-serving organizations, as they can facilitate network-based social capital and positively affect access to SRH education and resources. [ 33 ]…”

“The hook‐up”: How youth‐serving organizations facilitate network‐based social capital for urban youth of color

“…To begin data analysis, the first author read through the interview text to identify emergent themes (Emerson, way of increasing validity (Furman, Langer, Davis, Gallardo, & Kulkarni, 2007), through a 3-month group-based participatory narrative analysis approach. This innovative methodology, informed by the author's positionality as an arts-based and critical participatory action researcher, has been detailed in the peer-reviewed literature (Dill, 2015;Dill, Vearey, Oliveira, & Castillo, 2016;Dill, Rivera, & Sutton, 2018), but will not be the focus of this article.…”

Maroons: Blackgirlhood in Plain Sight

“…I know that I run to read and write poetry myself over and over and over again and to make lighthouses for these Brooklyn girls and other Blackgirls like them (Dill 2021). And I also know that these Blackgirls are poets themselves, whether they claim that title or not, by the mere use of line breaks and stanzas for their own acknowledgment and maps and safe havens and lighthouses (Dill, Rivera, Sutton 2018; Dill et al. 2019).…”

“…I know that I run to read and write poetry myself over and over and over again and to make lighthouses for these Brooklyn girls and other Blackgirls like them (Dill 2021). And I also know that these Blackgirls are poets themselves, whether they claim that title or not, by the mere use of line breaks and stanzas for their own acknowledgment and maps and safe havens and lighthouses (Dill, Rivera, Sutton 2018;Dill et al 2019). These Blackgirls-invisible and hypervisible and in-between-are marooning every day at home, in school, at work, in church, not in church, at the bus stop, on the train, and in their Central Brooklyn neighborhoods.…”