Breathing connection, breathing resistance: Black breath and poetry as praxis

How is your breath? I wish to invite you into a breath practice that brings us – people of the diaspora – into connection across time and place. I offer this article as a place of rest, a sanctuary for us to breathe freely. A place where our inhales and exhales are not constricted by the racialized structures that render us breathless. I carve out this space, a container, for us to breathe into each other, for each other, together. I guide this practice of breathing together through poetry because in poetry we breathe connection – to our sensual bodies, our communities and our Ancestors. In poetry and in praxis we breathe resistance. Learning from and responding to the resonant affects of Ev’Yan Whitney’s Sensual Dance Meditation, an ontologically Black movement practice, I explore the deeply embodied, shared and ancestral wisdom that we hold, that emerges through breath. Here, we breathe poetry together.