Give us roses, too
JAY BERNARD ASKS FOR BEAUTY WITH HER POLITICS
A few years ago, I did a panel on black feminism alongside a florist named Lauren Craig. She was asked by the audience how her writing – a piece about black eco-feminism called Think ing Flowers? – related to the more political stances of the rest of the speakers. How does the arrangement of cut flowers relate to, or even compare with, police brutality, gender-based violence, oppressive beauty standards or workplace discrimination?
Her response was that although beauty was what initially attracted her to flowers, engaging with them led her to start a social enterprise that challenged banks, the working conditions of women “whose reproductive systems are depleted because they are working with pesticides”, and the issue of products “which are 90% water, being transported from the driest parts of the world to the wettest”. I admired that answer because she acknowledged that beauty is as good a method for examining the world as the black bloc staging a die-in. And, in fact, there is something poignant about someone who arranges flowers talking about deaths in police custody.