The Secret Society by LaToya Stevenson Watkins

The Secrety Society

LaToya Stevenson Watkins

As a fulltime grad student, I find myself running across a few (unexpected) good and influential reads every now and again. In my experience, graduate work, including the reading assignments, (which professors must be forced to choose from a dusty collection buried deep within the dark crevaces of a dead king’s library somewhere in England) are extremely boring. This semester I find myself deeply immersed in two beautifully engaging courses. Let’s see... Empowering is the word I’d like to use to describe these classes. The first class is taught by a male, Dr. So-and-so in Dallas, Texas by day, and an aboriginal dances and trances instructor at a small school in Pennsylvania on Friday nights.

Being a wife, a mother, a writer, an editor, and a grad student, is time consuming, as you can probably relate to or imagine (women work hard ya’ll). So, I procrastinated on the first reading assignment BIGTIME! I had a week (considerable amount of time for 200 pages) to read a book by a Canadian woman by the name of Anne Cameron. This is what I learned:

*Never underestimate a boring book cover.
*Women were the bomb in indigenous traditions
*Literature holds a power that we sometimes dimiss… Any genre (contemporary literature, sci-fi, urban fiction, etc.), if well written and researched, can survive as history
*Outside of all the roles that I listed as time consuming, I am a woman and that is a very powerful…yeah powerful, God given role and because of that (and of course God), we can handle all other roles.
*We are a part of a secret society and encouraging each others as sisters will always be a part of who the best of us are

I’m not a practicing feminist or anything like that, but these classes (Women in History and Aboriginal and Indigenous Traditions: Dances and Trances) are causing me to step back and look at us with more admiration and love. And though I know all women won’t feel me here, I’d like to offer up a very positive notion. When you see a sista making it, don’t hate on her. Look at her and say to yourself, “If she can do her thing, I can do mine.” Lift her up. Don’t try to beat her down with words of discouragement (which won’t change what God has for her one way or another). I know this is a very rudimentary challenge, but I think it is one that warrants revisiting on a regular basis.

Small piece of information about us and our power—during pre-civilization, the first uncivilized nations to fall, were those where the empowering and sisterly bonds of the women were broken.

The dynamic LaToya S. Watkins is the author of the forthcoming, In Love with Losers, which debuts from Peace In The Storm Publishing in 2010. Find out more here about LaToya at http://www.peaceinthestormpublishing.com/

www.myspace.com/latoyaswatkins * latoyaswatkins.wordpress.com