Free Bleeding

[Video for song at end of post]

In one of my first dreams of the year, I’m underwater (surprise), far enough beneath the surface that the light is hazy, diffused, the teal sprawled around and above me deepening to cobalt below. It’s partially a waking dream, partially a lucid one; I’m in that limbo consciousness, half-aware of dawn’s emergence beyond my eyelids, fully aware that as I dream the whales, they’re also dreaming me. There are whales in every direction, dozens of them, some within a few feet of me and others farther away. I can see them dipping, undulating, revolving in slow motion, but I can hear them better than I can see them. And I can feel them even better than I can hear them. They’re present with me in real time and I’m certain that they have pulled me into this vision—they called this meeting—this is a revelation of the next level in this journey with them.

There are humpbacks and cachalots within view, and I sense the presence of blue whales in the vicinity. A chorus of whales. There are so many voices in the water, there’s so much rumbling vibration that I’m lost in the sound; for a while nothing else exists, only these songs. Not all of them are facing me, but it’s obvious that the whales are directing their voices toward me. This song is for me, and more specifically, for my womb. And just as the dose hits, just as the medicine begins to take effect and I feel my center reverberating with something anciently and irresistibly regenerative, I awaken fully and sit up in my bed.

This, I understand, was a call to the core. The core of my body and the core of this undertaking—womb healing. Ocean as womb. Wombs of black bodies as containers of personal and ancestral trauma to the extent that fibroid tumors, cysts and related conditions are epidemic, and my womb is one of the many. There is remedy for this womb trauma in the songs of the whales. I’ve been knowing this, and the dream came as a clear summons to get back to my focus on the womb, where the blockage is so dense and the trauma so harrowing that it’s seemingly easier to simply avoid. Of course, there’s no avoiding it in truth; it’s always there, always looming, begging to be rooted out, and the whales have reminded me that they’re here to help with that. I thought last year was my year to dive with them, but obviously it wasn’t. I have to be fully present with the truth of this trauma as it affects me and so many others when I go down into the depths with them so that I can willingly receive the medicine of their vibrations. I must be open. I must be authentic and vulnerable and receptive when I face that music with my whole body in order to receive, then share, the full extent of its benefits.

This brings me to the story I’ve been trying to tell for a while here on the blog. I started writing about it right after it happened in October but am only now, in February, getting together the gumption to give it the space it’s been demanding. (Hurray for Black History Month and the ancestors being activated en masse). One of my last trips out to sea before leaving Brazil at the end of whale season was another private expedition focused solely on this project. There were only two other people on board: Sergio, one of the team members at Projeto Baleia Jubarte and an amazing photographer with an unparalleled ability to spot whales, and the captain for the day, Rodrigo. I had determined that this would be the day I would get into the water as I hadn’t, since the previous year, placed myself in the embrace of the open sea, though as usual I had been swimming and free diving daily in the shallower waters inside the reef along the coast. As soon as I submerged myself in the sprawling Atlantic, miles from shore, those Middle Passage ancestors started speaking--via my womb.

(Please check the title of this post again before proceeding. If the sharing of details about menstruation feels like too much information for you, you might want to stop reading here).

I was in what I understood to be the last day or so of my cycle, and there was a thin trickle that was just significant enough for me to put in a tampon, mostly because I was going out in my white bikini, which didn’t seem like a set-up at the time because there was so little flow. As soon as I lowered myself into the water from the boat and launched into my mermaid dive, though, I felt something like a pop in my abdomen and then an instant sensation of pressure being released as I descended to 10 or 12 feet below the surface, the water’s force making itself felt within my body. I noted it but didn’t process it mentally because I was much more focused on what was happening around me, experiencing the overwhelming immensity of the ocean and telepathically and sonically reaching out to the whales, humming as I resurfaced. I could feel that the whales I had connected to were several miles away and closer to shore, and got distracted as I was tuning in to them because I saw a white/transparent blob just beneath the surface of the water about 15 feet in front of me. I couldn’t say for certain what it was, but it was big enough to be noticeable from that distance and gave me the feeling that I should get out of its way. I hustled back over to the ladder and when I grabbed on to it felt the blazing, electrocuting zing of a bluebottle tendril wrapped around my arm. As Sergio and Rodrigo helped pull me up onto the boat and busied themselves with trying to remove the tendril without getting stung themselves, I felt gravity kick in and immediately exert its influence on my uterus. I looked down at the water pooling at my feet and it was tinged with blood, with various scarlet rivulets racing down my legs toward it. The guys didn’t seem to notice but they had to have seen the blood on my bathing suit as I moved to reach for my kanga, wrap it around my waist and slide a rag over the puddle with my foot. With the stinger finally off and my arm and hand welted and still burning with pain, I sat down sideways in the prow, doing my best not to bleed onto the seat, because by then it was clear that I was gushing right through the tampon that I had put in only an hour before.

The folks on the whale watching boat radioed that they were in sight of some whales, much closer to shore, so we headed that way. I was aware of what was happening around me but only from a distance, it seemed; half of my attention was in another realm altogether. Seeing my blood flowing on the floor of the boat had triggered an experience that felt like a time breach, and as I sat down I tuned in to the part of my consciousness that was suddenly inside the hold of a cargo ship full of captive Africans, surrounded by blood. Transported to another time that is both past and concurrent, I am in the blackness of a bunk with dozens of other women, most of us bleeding. There is blood on the wooden plank beneath my body, blood on the floors, and the acrid smell of blood fills the tight, dense air. There is a sense of purpose to this; I am aware of and among women who choose to remove their cloths and allow the blood to pour from their bodies as an act of self-determination, an act of defiance, sanctifying the space to which we’ve been confined, despite its design to defile and desecrate us. The power is ours, we say with our blood. The air is abuzz with an electricity exponentially more potent than what has been pulsing through my right arm post-sting; I’m barely aware of it now as I sink into the sound of the voices around me. There is moaning, there is humming, there is singing. Humans…and whales. I can hear them. They accompany us, echo us, harmonize with us, cloak us in the vibration of compassion with lullabies larger than this lie of our enslavement…Freely we sing, and freely we bleed.

I grab hold of the mélange of sounds as I slide back into full presence on the boat speeding toward other whale watchers, feeling my womb releasing some of what has been backed up, blocked up for so long. Feeling something beginning to dislodge... As the noise of the boat motor grinds its way back into my consciousness, I start to lose the multi-layered song that had enveloped me moments before. I close my eyes, breathe deeply and affirm that it’s still there inside me and I can access it when I need to. I breathe into that trust, knowing that my ancestors and the whales are supporting me in tapping into this healing. When I open my eyes again, the schooner is in sight, and so are the whales. There’s no getting into the water now, in view of these tourists, with my blood-soaked bikini bottom. Not that I’m ashamed—it’s just too sacredly intimate to share with strangers, what is happening to me in the moment. Though the hydrophone is not picking up any singing from them, I sing to the whales as usual, songs that carry a strain they always seem to recognize, these co-originators of the blues.

By now we are a few generations into a relatively widespread acknowledgement, at least among black women and gender nonconforming folks who are/have been womb carriers, that ancestral trauma is a major factor in the challenges so many of us face with regard to sexual and reproductive health. That whatever personal narratives around illness, abuse, assault, loss, etc., we may have as individuals are compounded by the centuries-long trajectory of direct and indirect violence to black wombs is not a secret to many of us, though it’s also true that many remain unclear about the details of this history and its impact. My focus here is on my direct experiences with that trauma as it has shown up in my body, my relationships (with others and myself), and the memories/flashbacks/regressions/dreams/time breaches like the one I described above that connect me to the roots of it from the early stages of colonization and capture, through the Middle Passage to the present. Before forming this bond with the whales, I held the awareness of it and sort of chipped away at it, mostly from the outside, through various healing practices and procedures, including a myomectomy, but the fibroids eventually came back, prodding me to deal with the fact that I never dove all the way into unraveling the “roots” of the issue—something my late maternal grandmother, Bertie, told me to do in a dream I had not long before my first meeting with the whales. I can say that I knew from the beginning of this work that this womb focus was central, but it’s only now, after the fateful year of surrender that 2020 was, that I’m bringing the sharing of it to the fore. I can also say that until I connected with the whales, began to feel their presence with me at all times and truly listen to their songs, the thought of diving into this trauma in any kind of focused, extended manner was utterly terrifying and overwhelming to me. I had poked at it many times over the years, but always recoiled after briefly touching upon it. Therapy has been a powerfully beneficial tool for working through the impact of traumatic events and experiences in my lifetime, and, it has brought me to the understanding that those events and experiences are in fact the top layer of the trauma. That in the center, at the core, is this morass of tangled emotions, physical responses and survival mechanisms stored generation after generation after generation in the wombs of the women who passed their DNA to me and with it, the inherent bodily understanding of this sacred container as the storage site for inexpressible pain.

But it must be expressed. Those roots Bertie mentioned-- all the unshed tears and unreleased fury from the innumerable rapes, children born of rape, children sold away, forced breeding, cultivated self-loathing, terror, horror, wickedness endured by my ancestors—are spaces I would rather not go digging around in. But here they are balled up inside of me: my inheritance. And all around me, as evidenced by the wounded and/or hystorectomied wombs of so many of my peers and family members. Again, this is not news; there has been amazing work done around healing ancestral womb trauma over the years, and I’ve benefitted from aspects of some of those trailblazers’ work—Queen Afua and Iya Osunnike in particular—but never managed to fully engage it on a practical level. My ancestors guided me to this work with the whales as a way for me to tap directly into this ancestral trauma and go through it, without re-living the terror, to get to the medicine. The songs are my way, and the ancestors’ songs—the spirituals, the blues, etc.—combined with the whales’ songs, are my guiding lights in my quest for the buried treasures within me and the sea: songs of healing for all these wombs “past” and “present” and for whales and the world’s womb and therefore the world itself, nothing less than this.

So tapping into this remembrance of bleeding as an ancestral affirmation of agency, inspired by the sight of my own menstrual blood, was like finding the rarest of jewels and realizing it’s connected to a whole mine. That mine is mine, and I can appreciate and share the wealth it represents without a depleting extraction process by just letting it flow—there’s that word again. Connecting to the creative process through bleeding as a link to my forebears’ empowerment has been an invaluable gift, straight from the Middle Passage. Each time I went to sea after that day (three or four more times, as it happened within a few weeks of my departure from Brazil in late October), I had the same experience of feeling time collapse on itself, sometimes seeing the waters from the perspective of being on a slaving vessel, in other instances feeling the eyes of captured Africans on me, aware of me as I stood high above the water on the prow, queening over the whole seascape. This was dizzyingly visceral for me on my last day at sea, when I could again hear them clearly. One of the songs from the hold of the ship, the tune coming in through my ears from the salty air, seeping out through the memory in my blood, the lyrics, translated, bubbling up from the mine within. I’m finally sharing it here, months after first writing about it. It wasn’t complete enough until I came to this point of directly addressing my womb and this bleeding experience. I found myself unable to record the song without giving voice to my womb, or rather, I found myself unable to give voice to my womb through the song without first presenting the song as one of the pearls of my wounded, recovering womb, emerging from the most intimate, tender, precious part of me that I feel instinctively inclined to protect and keep hidden as I move through this healing process, but that I must reveal in order to continue to do so.

When I started writing this post, the title came to me right away. At first it came through in Portuguese, as Deixa Sangrar, which literally translates as “let it bleed.” When I looked it up to see if there were any other nuances to the phrase I should understand before using it as a title, I discovered that it’s the name for a whole movement, which in English is known as Free Bleeding. Somehow I had never come across this apparently global affirmation of “period pride” supporting the abstinence from the use of any products to stop or capture the flow of menstrual blood, both as a way of protesting the cost of so-called sanitary products and as a way of removing the stigma associated with menstruation in so many societies. I have long understood menstrual blood as an extremely charged natural force and am in community with others who honor it as sacred. I’m also aware that in many indigenous cultures, girls, women, and genderfluid people who bleed traditionally spend their bleeding time away from the rest of the community, often releasing that blood directly into the earth. But the Free Bleeding movement had stayed off my radar until I started writing this post, and until the experience I just described, I had never considered the notion that one of the many ways the enslaved had of expressing their autonomy was by refusing to block the flow of their womb blood. Now…I know. So Free Bleeding takes on a whole new richness of meaning in the context of the Middle Passage and those who understood their power to be far more essential—that of life itself--than the violence which was used to hold (parts of) their physical bodies captive.

This rabbit hole goes deeper, of course. There’s another experience I had, which I can genuinely call a spontaneous regression in terms of the way it happened, that took place before I even had the idea of Whale Whispering, but that I now understand to have been a precursor to it all. The telling of that will be for another time, perhaps here on the blog, maybe on film, maybe in song or all of the above. I want to also acknowledge that for many people who deal with fibroids one of the symptoms is excessive bleeding, though that hasn’t been a regular part of my experience, and what happened in October was different than anything I can remember. It felt like a release—something genuinely freeing. And once I got back to the shore, after spending some time in the water rinsing myself off and preparing myself for the transition back to land, I sat on the beach for a little while to let the light-headedness I was feeling pass. As I walked back to my apartment, I proceeded to bleed onto the sand, onto the pavement and onto the soil in the distance I covered, and I just allowed it to be what it was. I don’t know if anyone noticed. My wet kanga covered my lower body and the fact that I was coming from the beach dripping wet was nothing abnormal, but if anyone happened to look down around my ankles or at my flip-flops, they probably caught a glimpse of it…that power.

Marine biologists speculate that humpback whales’ songs are related to their reproduction, possibly even to promote estrus in female whales, something I discovered after receiving the initial guidance, in the early stages of this project, that the whales’ songs would be healing for my womb. I have already experienced tremendous soothing, cramp-relieving benefit from their recorded songs and in dreaming, and I’m so excited for the time when I can finally be underwater with them in physical form and feel the unbridled force of their melodic magic moving through me as I continue to navigate these Middle Passage Blues.

Survivors’ Song*

As long as we keep on breathing

and sing our way across this sea

as long as we know in our hearts

we are the Power, we will be free (2x)

As long as we know we are the Power

as long as we know we are the Power

we will be free, yes, we will be free

Keep breathing, keep singing

keep breathing, keep singing

Keep breathing, keep singing

We know, we know, we know…we free

*This is a rough self-made video, just to share the gist of the song. When I record it in the studio, it will be with an arrangement for many more voices. The whale recording used here is courtesy of Eduardo Melo of Projeto Baleia Jubarte.