Changemaker grant recipient, Diane Ghogomu, collaborated with Afro-Brazilian sexual educators to create free sexual education workshops for Black women in Brazil during the summer months.
The room settled into a thick silence before the collective hum rolled out like a cushion of grass. A hypnotizing buzz of 30 black women, shoulder to shoulder, our singular and circular vibration set the stage as we sounded in unison. I was the first to howl. My eyes closed and swaying in a trance, I felt a firm push on my back, sending me into the center of the circle where she told me to sing out my pain. Soft knees, palms lifted, I became a mother of the land, standing at the top of a hillside, an animal skin stretched across a boxy wooden frame. My mouth, a vein, wide open, and spilling song all over the theatre.
“This was never meant to be!” She screamed loudly, as one by one, each woman was gently nudged into sounding out their pain in the center of the circle. Some guttural, some soft and longing, some piercing, and all the while we hummed. Our collective resonance, the earth, where the shouts, the howls, screams, and tears bled and fertilized.
We collapsed in a collective embrace, and our eyes slowly fluttered open, we regained our consciousness of our place, space, and time together. We remembered our physical presence at the Goethe Institute theatre in Salvador, Bahia, gathered together to interrogate our interpretations of Audre Lorde’s “The Erotic as Power” and the implications of living Black Women’s lives.
Though we started out by reading out loud about what Lorde calls, the erotic: “the lifeforce of women; creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which [women] are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives…[and exemplifying] how acutely and fully we can feel in doing”, the proposal was that all those in attendance had a chance to feel into this sensual force of life.
My particular interest in this meeting was gathering Black Brazilian women, who worked specifically with other Black Brazilian women to help them encounter and embody this erotic force as a source of empowerment to bolster their daily lives. I presented an introduction of breath and movement, awakening the attendees into a re-remembering of their body. Then, there was an academic who studied porn and led us to examine the story of our own engagement with our sexuality. There was a performance artist who led us into collective touch and the intimate listening to each other’s heartbeats and connecting to our breath. Then an orgastic therapist who led us to reconnect with our pelvis, dancing towards ecstatic movement — collective eros of joy and excitement where we were nourished in an infinite loop. Then came Lais, who led us into the rescue of rage in the service of our care for each other. The rage that allowed us to cleanse the body, a rage that called our nervous systems back into the possibility of relaxing into loving each other.
After the gathering, we lingered and shared our experience; some admitting that this pulsing sensation had filled them with energy, inspiration, and an inexplicable love and connection towards everything and everyone around them. And with the help of the Changemaker award, I continued to explore this question throughout the entire summer with various sex-educators, orgastic therapists, artists, and tantric healers. What can erotic empowerment contribute to Black Women in Brazil? What does it look like, and what can it really do, in the face of so many stark inequalities that exist.
As the Changemaker grant provided the most precious gift of freedom and flexibility during my summer organization process, it led to a most magical and redemptive flow, that allowed me to find where my true generosity in service lies. I recognize that my most proud accomplishments and collaborations this summer came after truly harrowing and humbling devastation. In the month of June, my entire fellowship proposal and my entire year’s research came to sudden and tragic implosion. My collaborator in Brazil was violently attacked and this dramatically transformed the entire panorama of both of our lives quite suddenly.
Though initially, my heart was shattered and it was hard to find the way towards reorienting and stabilizing in order to follow through with the ambitious plan of co-creating erotic empowerment sessions free of charge for Black women — the way was made. During the aforementioned trip and workshop in Bahia, I was invited to participate in the Afrolatinas conference, the biggest conference for Black Latin American women in South America.
An embodied exploration of Audre Lorde’s “The Erotic as Power” at the Afrolatinas conference in São Paulo, Brazil.
During my presentation, where I was able to lead two workshops for 30-50 Black Brazilian women about intimacy, empowered consent, and decolonization of our ideas of sexuality, I also met another brilliant collaborator who was excited to bring forth the Changemaker proposal with me.
For our project together, using the methodology of her sexual education organization Sexualidade Aflorada, we created a sexuality education workshop for 12 adolescent girls from the favela. They read portions of bell hooks, talked about self-love, created hands-on strategies to create love in their lives, and practiced consent and empowered touch with each other. Their leader, Elania, also created a portion of the workshop where the girls were able to cook and clean together. She emphasized the importance of “feeling into” all of our available senses to live their most fulfilling lifestyle.
This Changemaker Award really confirmed the value of sexuality education in a truly embodied way in my life — not only as an academic practice but as a modality that can truly create differences in the lives of Black women everywhere. As one workshop participant said to me through tears after a workshop, “This is the first time that I have felt a relief from the constant pain in my body in such a long time. I was truly able to feel a pleasure that I haven’t even been able to recognize for so long!”
It is only within the expansive nature of true collaboration that these workshops were so touching and life-changing for hundreds of women. It is the faith of redemption and the power of the erotic that allowed the flow of life to unearth the true pathway forward during this challenging summer in Brazil. I am so excited to continue to analyze this summer’s work in my master’s thesis and within my professional work as a somatic sex educator.