Nou La! (We are Here!)
Stronger together
Someone asked me this week what is motivating me in this moment. I can say that this Haitian Kreyol statement energizes me immensely. In these times, to assert presence, show up for one’s community and declare one’s value can feel like dangerous work. But many of us persist and do it anyway, knowing that what matters most is putting thoughts and words into action, even if we doubt ourselves along the way, and even if others don’t always understand why we do things in particular ways.
Like all UIC’s cultural centers, WLRC is a space for the campus to learn, think about, and engage with ideas old, new, and emerging. We came into being in 1990/1991 because women students, staff and faculty saw the need to have a space on campus that was different from the traditional classroom.
Where you could browse a bookshelf filled with materials that you might not have encountered in any of your courses. Where you could be in a conversation about matters considered too risky or too political to discuss openly elsewhere. Where you could begin the work of building community and forging authentic relationships around shared values, knowing that at least one corner of the university would support you in that mission. Where you were able to understand that getting a college education is the beginning, not the end, of a journey towards self-definition and establishing one’s place in the world.
The university has always been a contested space; indeed, the cultural centers exist because of hard-won struggles over which bodies and ideas rightfully belonged on the campus in the first place. When I first arrived on a college campus in 1987, I understood it as a space for asking questions, learning different methodologies for arriving at answers, and working together to understand the implications of the answers that we offered to the problems of the world. A women’s center and women’s studies classes on that campus helped to make the social infrastructure of race, gender, class, and sexuality visible – in the ways that they shaped who was taken seriously, who was subjected to violence, whose presence and intellect were questioned, who was cared for, and who did the work of caring.
[ID: The cover of PET, a book by Akwaeke Emezi, which features a teenage Black girl looking forward and a black and white feather in front of her.]