Stephanie Latty & Kristina Mucker

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this is a zine for quiet black girls. for weird black girls. for girls who bit their tongues because their words would tear the world in two. for black girls who

get asked what they’re thinking more often than most. for black girls who get told they’re too shy and too quiet. too something. this is for you. we are a small collective of introverted, weird black women and femmes who wanted

to put something into the world that we wish we could have found our-selves. in this zine you will find writing and art by us. for you. we love you.

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4For Quiet Black Girls

honeysuckle solitude

i have known for centuries that if you do not listen, you will miss things.you will miss people.this is why i give so generously of my silence.when i speak, i speak in breaths. i breathe in words;i want to eat words.

i want to trap them in the hollow of your neck.want to break the hollow ones over your head.each time you open your mouththere are only bees and yellowjacketsand i want the honey instead.

i have known for ages that there is beauty in silencein solitudein the velvet sound of flowersand hearing oxygen roll across my ears.

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you speak in starlight,but you think in sonic boomsnight sky narrator.

-quiet ones with loud thoughts

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honeysuckle solitude

i have known for centuries that if you do not listen, you will miss things.you will miss people.this is why i give so generously of my silence.when i speak, i speak in breaths. i breathe in words;i want to eat words.

i want to trap them in the hollow of your neck.want to break the hollow ones over your head.each time you open your mouththere are only bees and yellowjacketsand i want the honey instead.

i have known for ages that there is beauty in silencein solitudein the velvet sound of flowersand hearing oxygen roll across my ears.

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Dear Black Woman,

I know how tough it is to navigate a world that does not accept you for who you are. It is a constant struggle to not succumb to assimilation or feel the need to constantly shrink yourself into invisibility. This world has not been kind to you, despite our natural tendency to expel a love that is like no other. However, despite this sad truth, this is what makes you beautiful. And I don’t mean the kind of beauty that you see on the cover of magazines or strutting down runways.

The type of beauty that I am talking about has resisted and survived centuries of torture, abuse, and mistreatment. Beauty that time and time again makes a way out of no way. Beauty that has historically been ridiculed, but others cannot resist trying to duplicate or appropriate. The type of beauty that shines through in our

#BlackGirlMagic

You are more than the stereotypes and preconceived notions that have been created to box you in. You have the power to create your own narrative and you are the only one who can define who are. Society has a tendency to show us as monoliths, but we know better than to let society control something that is uncontrollable. If you fear that who you are goes against the norm, embrace that realization and walk in your truth with your head held high.Your resilience is not marked by how much you are able to carry, but more so by your ability to love. Love your skin, love your hair (natural, relaxed, synthetic), love your voice, love your features, love your body, love your walk, love what society has tried and failed to beat out of you. It is important to know that loving yourself and making yourself a priority for a change does not make you selfish. Trust yourself and protect your heart. Do not let men or other people walk over you or walk away with all your stuff. You are so much better than that. Make your physical, mental, and emotional health a priority. Understanding this and putting it into practice is power and it’s a power that does have an ability to change the world.

You have always been and will always be enough. You are enough. You are enough. You are enough. YOU ARE ENOUGH. Anyone who tells you anything different does not love you and does not deserve to be in your presence. Remember that the only validation or confirmation you need is from the person looking at you in the mirror. She is worthy of love, patience, acceptance, encouragement, and so much more. You represent all of the hope and all of the promise of Black womanhood. I am both blessed and honored to write this letter to you. I hope that you will always remind yourself (and others) of the magic that is inside of you.

I love you.

6For Quiet Black Girls

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white women have the ability to not have a care in the world, while black women continue to

carry the weight of the world on their shoulders.

- different worlds

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8For Quiet Black Girls

to the one who knows the sound of words unspoken.

you are the sound of the wind through autumn leavesthe sound of the ocean across a billion grains of sandan explosion in Andromeda.

they will try to dissect your silenceexcise the voice from your throatproject images in negative over your bodyand fill in the blanks that you have chosen to leave unfilledonly because you know they would burst if you tried.

you are expansive beyond all measurecosmic and particularand wise beyond all time. an oracle soaked in silence.

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When you knowwhat you bringto the table,there is no shamein acting accordingly

- a seat at the table

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10For Quiet Black Girls

I can remember feeling anxious in my day-to-day life ever since I was small. I was a nervous kid. I was shy but I had friends. I hated confrontation and was careful to never rock the boat in elementary school or high school. I didn’t speak in class because that would mean that I’d be putting myself in the spotlight and I couldn’t entertain the thought without slipping into an intense state of anxiety. Getting called to the chalkboard to solve a math problem would catapult me into an anxious oblivion.

Fast forward to my adult life. When people meet me, their first impression of me is that I’m ‘quiet’. For some people, its more comfortable for them to be sharing space with a quiet black girl who doesn’t take up much space but for others, it is extremely uncomfortable that they don’t have immediate access to my inner thoughts. They can’t place me. They can’t read me. I am not the transparent body that they want me to be. They don’t know what to make of me.

As I came into political consciousness and begun to spend more time in anti-racist feminist academic and activist spaces where I thought I would find community, I instead found more isolation. I had read enough black feminist literature to know speaking is considered crucial on the path to lib-eration so I would force myself to speak, but it never seemed to be enough. I would be hard on myself and impatient about my quietness and intro-version and about the anxiety that I knew drove it. I had internalized the stereotypes about black women being loud and thought that if I could just gain the courage to speak and be “normal”, that everything would get better. The activist spaces that I was frequenting to search for community paradoxically reinforced my increasing feelings of distance from community. I constantly felt like an outsider. I felt as if I would be judged for being solitary, for being quiet, for being intro-verted. And I was.

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My quietness and my softness are often mistaken for weakness and ignorance.

Audre Lorde said “Your silence will not protect you” and while speaking is important and powerful, some of us are finding other ways to express our truths whether that be through writing, through art, or through action. It saddens me that my biggest gifts and most potent sources of power — my quietness, my tenderness and my introversion — are deemed socially unacceptable, considered antithetical to the movement and remain bound up in complex matrices of racism and patriarchy.

At the present moment in which I find myself, I’ve managed to carve out a space where I am okay with being quiet. I relish my quiet time and feel no more pressure to perform extraversion in social situations. I don’t feel a need to constantly take up space with inane chatter and will speak when I am ready. I am more at ease with my quietness and with peoples’ mis/perceptions of it. I understand and acknowledge the power of being an introverted black girl. When I speak, I am steadfast and deliberate with my words and that is power.

To be clear, I don’t consider myself shy. Quiet, yes. Shy, no. I’ll speak if I have something I feel like sharing and am happy to meet new people. Otherwise, I generally prefer to quietly observ e a room. I glean vastly more information from watching people than through talking with people. While I need to connect with the people I love and make new friends to feel happy and whole, large groups of people tire me out and I spend a long time recovering from socializing. Superficial conversations and small talk are insufferable for me. I would rather not talk at all than waste my energy engaging in meaningless social niceties for propriety’s sake. If I choose to engage with you then forget superficiality. It’s going to be intense, deep and genuine.

People tend to be threatened by my quietness. A sense of threat that is amplified by my black womanhood. My quietness and my sensitivity somehow make me less of a black woman and I am looked upon as strange. I experience frequent silencing and my ideas are often not taken seriously because I don’t constantly talk about how much I know. Friends think that I don’t speak up for myself, which is of course not true, and take it upon themselves to do so for me in restaurants and public spaces in paternal acts of “kindness”.

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Stephanie - @SlowHands_Tarot on IGKristina - www.blackgirlintroverted.com

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