Sister Days: Kujichagulia (Self-Determination)

Kwanzaa day two: The day of Kujichagulia, “self-determination.” This is the day “to define ourselves, create for ourselves, and speak for ourselves.” 

The South, a land of secrets and codes, would prompt William Faulkner, one of its favored literary sons, to observe, “The past is never dead: it’s not even past.”  In the 1950s, a girl come-of-age in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, had long known of her adoption, but she had more questions.  Back then, adoption was a thing people heaped under layers of shame and guilt.  Not knowing how to embrace the past and the future life for which the child had been chosen, the attempt was to bury a past that could never stay dead once empowered by intrigue.  Understanding her daughter’s need to find the link that was hers to clasp in times of joy and need, Hattie Rutherford Watson told her daughter, Marian Etoile, what she knew of life: “Don’t worry so much about the immediacy of yesteryear, look into your face and see the millennium of time.”

Here today, as we stand before a new millennium, we look to our yesteryears in adopted/adapted motherlands the world over and there is doubt.  Yet, linked and lifted, in all we have seen and done and overcome, the future is ours to dare.  We are the ones who create the legacy that will inspire generations to come.  We are the ancestors who will steady the steps of tomorrow.  We are the ones who will chart tomorrow’s yesterday.  In our faces is the wisdom of time; in our eyes the power of sight.  With vision, we move on . . . . 

-Dr. Janus Adams

In partnership with SwagHer Magazine, Dr. Janus Adams, Emmy award-winning journalist, and historian presents SISTER DAYS Inspiring Moments in African American Women’s History.

During Kwanzaa Adams will share seven days of uplifting meditations on courage, daring, and resistance that brings us valuable reminders of how real women in real times– from the Daughters of Africa to Mary Johnston to the first African American diva to perform at the Metropolitan Opera Marian Anderson – created a better way of life for themselves and a better world for others. In reading their stories, we ensure that these women live on–as shining beacons to light our own quests for happier, more fulfilled lives.