SAYHU Feminist Community-Building in the Time of Covid-19
By Rachel Afi Quinn
The work of community-building with SAYHU has been a slow yet steady process. As we transition to virtual community-building strategies, I’ve had to continue to expand my thinking on what it means to foster feminist community in Houston. For various reasons, I’ve had a significant role in community-building for SAYHU (in person and online over the last three years). I’m part of a university community and have been able to recruit students to participate in our summer programming but also I don’t bring the same emotional baggage to my efforts in outreach that some SAYHU community members carry. As it happens, those who we want to center in SAYHU often carry a lot of trauma from other types of South Asian spaces where the ways that they were being South Asian was monitored and policed. The pressure to be a certain way while in community with immediate family or with religious and cultural groups has meant that they didn’t have space or time to choose a South Asian community where they could be all parts of themselves.
SAYHU has been an experiment in community building. We’ve worked with the intention to create an inclusive community, to consider what that means for the diverse group of South Asians we know in Houston. We have read together novels about relationships and diaspora identities and discussed books such as Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Adrienne Marie Brown’s Emergent Strategy to confront some of our own beliefs and limitations in thinking about difference or in thinking about community organizing. These contemporary texts remind us of the ways we are connected to one another—and how we might take responsibility for one another in our communities. When thinking in terms of disability justice, environmental sustainability, and pandemic conditions, we must think in terms of community responsibility. One thing we’ve learned along the way is that for folks who have never had such a community, it can be uncomfortable.
One aspect of community-building that requires practice is accountability. While participants of our collective and our larger community want to connect and collaborate with others—and even receive mentorship in leadership—they don’t immediately feel responsible to the SAYHU community or know what it means to be held accountable by their community. That takes time; it’s something we practice together. The truth is, it doesn’t always feel good when someone holds you accountable:
“You said you’d show up and bring the materials we need for outreach but you didn’t. Why not?”
“You told us you wanted to initiate a community event but we haven’t heard from you for months. What happened?”
“We put in time and energy to help you figure out how to make your project a success, but you cancelled the project and didn’t even let us know. Do you realize how that made the group feel?”
Accountability to a community can feel overwhelming—it demands that you live up to your stated values, that you are who you say you are. It means others expect something of you. It’s a relationship skill. For members of our community, accountability to SAYHU has also meant wrestling with prioritizing family needs first--as so many of us were taught to do—and often we are pulled away to last minute family responsibilities, making it hard to prioritize others. On top of that, for young people who have grown up with communities online or being in conversation with people online but making little commitment, “ghosting” is a common practice. People disappear because they can, and pulling away from an online group or online connection might not have much consequence in a culture in which folks are told “you do you.” But individualism isn’t a useful orientation towards social justice work. In fact, it’s far from the feminist values and community organizing strategies we draw on for our work with SAYHU and it actually undermines the power of feminist world building that we are engaged in with SAYHU. So we keep reaching out and pulling SAYHU community members back into the fold because community accountability is something we can all learn and practice together.
In SAYHU, we’ve continued to show up for one another through all of the ups and downs that life has been dealing our community members: job transitions, sick parents, weddings, final exams, book projects, mental illness, transportation issues, work responsibilities, lack of resources and much more. This ever-expanding range of responsibilities often keeps us from spending more time collaborating effectively. But each time we do spend time together, connecting with one another online and off, we are realigned with our values, and reminded of the energy and inspiration that community can create. We continue to dream of a better world, even though showing up day-to-day can be difficult in the conditions in which we are navigating right now. During a pandemic we are overwhelmed by the need to care for others, yet it is necessary for us to care about the well-being of others, something that seems to get lost in a “side hustle” world. Nevertheless, South Asian young people in Houston keep finding their way to SAYHU to join this kind of community. Those of you who find ways to stay connected with us—who follow us online and message us occasionally or turn up each year to share knowledge our summer institute—are part of this community not because you want to see what you can get out of SAYHU but because you are committed to putting something into it so that the space can exist for you and others in the long run.
SAYHU has used social media and tools like Slack to keep in touch, to share what is going on in our lives, to keep collaborating (on our Preservation Project) and keep organizing ourselves (for virtual gatherings). We use social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) to share what we know to be true with those around us who choose to connect. We reach out again and again because sometimes people need those assurances that we exist and that we want them to be a part of our community. Over time, our efforts of communication as well as in-person time spent going to movies, going out to dinner, talking about things we are passionate about, learning about our similarities and our differences has all been part of our process of community-building and creating a trusting environment for thriving relationships. Through these relationships we heal and grow. The SAYHU collective has modeled this for our community members and our Summer Institute participants, who we hope will acquire these relationship skills that are so essential to feminist social justice work. We invite folks in—to write for the blog, to try conducting an interview, to work on our survey, to practice facilitating an event, to develop curriculum for our community—because whether or not you’ve kept connected to SAYHU in the past, we want all of you with us as we head into the future.
This summer we’ll be thinking in different ways about how to build feminist community in Houston while keeping physically distant in order to keep each other well. The internet has allowed us to keep connected; work with SAYHU has allowed us to stay engaged and grounded. We’ve constructed a space of peer support, and we’ve allowed ourselves the grace of figuring it out as we go along. As we live through this difficult moment, with a government solely accountable to a small minority, our transnational feminist values guide us towards social justice and remind us to remember all members of our diverse community. As we take care of ourselves and those around us, let’s remember to check on our people outside of our immediate families because these relationships are equally meaningful to us as we work to produce the community we want to claim as our own.
If you’re interested in learning more about accountability, please check out this write-up by Mia Mingus on The Four Parts of Accountability: How to Give a Genuine Apology along with other great resources on restorative justice and disability justice available on her blog as well as the video What is Accountability? created by the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Rachel Afi Quinn is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Comparative Cultural Studies at University of Houston. Her research and teaching focuses on globalization, transnational feminist theory, mixed race, gender and the Caribbean. A founding member of SAYHU, Dr. Quinn is committed to mentoring young Houstonians from all walks of life. During the pandemic she has found a bit of peace in gardening and art-making.