Abstract

How do we BIPOC folx survive amid cavernous terror and soul-ripping trauma? In this heart-centered literary story, I embark on a mystical, womanist narration—autohistoria-teoría—to provide the broken-hearted a pathway to better conceptualize and practice irreparable grief. From the incomprehensible pain of walking through the loss of three of my children as a WoC in the American nation-state, I serve as a mirror to BIPOC folx who sit in loss of any kind, and I demonstrate how to piece back together the wandering fragments of our Soul from shattering grief. In this work, I respond to the paucity of BIPOC-centered (un)birth trauma research by raising the volume on BIPOC reproductive trauma. I urgently step away from the multilayered inadequacies and insufficiencies of “western” psychotherapeutic models of trauma healing that are violent to us BIPOC folx and serve to pathologize our grief, and I dedicate myself to excavating critical Indigenous epistemology. I accomplish this with a deliberate and intentional blend of the personal, spiritual, and the scholarly to uncover the ways in which our narratives as BIPOC folx are often erased within material experiences.