photography| black excellence, graduation and 2018 expectations

black women celebrating black women.

hi

i hope you’ve welcomed twenty eighteen into your life with love and learning. i hope last year has taught you, as it did me, to prepare yourself for lows and indulge indulge in the highs and saturate yourself in the blessings so that gratitude follows you. whilst this is not ever going to disguise itself as a ‘new year’ (nothing is made new in the dead of winter), it is an opportunity to begin afresh. and reactivate. since i celebrate the new year according to hebrew/biblical observations of nature and law, i treat this time of year as a chance to become greater in time for spring. i take it as my final season of shedding and being bare, just like the rest of nature. and so, i’ve done very little thinking about what i want this year to be. i’m uncharacteristically minimal with my expectations actually. i will storytell this later. first, a moment of appreciation for the efforts of black women in education: i invite you to celebrate @HOttun and @fatimalidu

black excellence | @HOttun

black excellence | @fatimalidu

I love graduation ceremonies. I love witnessing people and being invited to part-take in one of the proudest days of their lives. i’m glad i got to document this day. i hope to document more of these days. my photography feels best here, where i am unconcerned with poses or styling. i chose to share these ones, where the energy and emotion of the day is the focus of the image. these are the best things about life and so these must be the best photographs to capture. All Praises. i think back to my gradation day and i felt a mixture of feeling like my best self, regal, established and proud to be cemented into the history of this space that i made it out of alive. i also felt sick about being a part of the bloody and colonial history of this space, i felt like i shouldn’t feel happy in a space that made me feel unwanted and secondary. i also felt like even now, once graduating with a first class, as a prize winner that i was still being stared at as though i, and my family, were obviously impostors. it is strange. it is academia that will make the black individual feel established and capable whilst reminding them they are not. my expectation for life post-graduation was wildly off, but i’m glad and no longer confused by it in twenty eighteen. in fact, it has helped me already…

regal.

Master Hawwa | that LLM glow

black excellence | we have to know how proud we have made our families and ourselves.

expectations. 

this will be a year without them. i come with no expectations. i come empty-handed. completely. i mean it. this year i enter into positions that i have been welcomed into (by The Most High), jobs, events, relationships, writing with no expectation or assumptions. i will be intentional, ofcourse. i am currently in a season of strong manifestation and i am speaking things into existence. and that is how i will live. i think it can be so easy to acquire something, a degree, a job, a new partner, something material or immaterial and become fixated on what it shall become and place heavy expectations upon it. no my love, let it become; find strength in not assigning expectation, only goals. and anyway life is better when you free yourself of ‘what should be’ and just

go.

psalm 62, 5

My being, find rest in Elohim alone. Because my expectation is from Him. 

Amara Amaryah.

Thank you for reading what i write

#graduaion #lifelessons #academia #photography #blackwomen #storytelling #lifestyle