“We have the ability to question everything, even these hashtags, and in doing so have deeper and richer conversations about ourselves”

Publishing her debut book, Carefree Black Girls: A Celebration of Black Women in Pop Culture, in October was in Blay’s own recollection “the most intimate and terrifying thing that I’ve ever done,” and although it’s been a few months since the book came out, she’s still getting used to the extended reality of the writing process—talking to readers, listening to reactions, and coming to terms with fulfilling a task that was physically draining and emotionally exhausting. “I have said this before and I even wrote it in the book, but I don’t think people really understand that I didn’t go out for months when I was writing my book,” she said. “The farthest I got was to the lobby to pick up the mail and food delivery.” I could hear relief and disbelief in her voice, transmitting her happiness at completing such a labor while simultaneously struck by the bleakness of the memory. “It was a torturous process and, in retrospect, although I am grateful for what the experience taught me, I also know now, that the state I was in could have been made better by just leaning on my community and my people,” she said. A quarantined life is something the world had to acclimatize to for the last two years, yet there’s a solitary existence that most writers tend to fall into and wear like a blanket—one that’s often self-imposed and usually necessary because world-building takes time. In Blay’s case, the personal excavation she had to do demanded a focus that tuned out everything else.

Carefree Black Girls is a series of essays looking at Black women’s experiences with visibility, romantic intimacy and pop culture; it’s Blay's long form take on the impact and influence of #carefreeblackgirls, which she coined back in 2013. The hashtag would go on to proliferate across the internet from Tumblr to Instagram showcasing Black girls in various states of ecstasy, their afros picked to the gods, often with a vintage patina over the images projecting a sense of timelessness. While the hashtag arose from a need to reflect “the full breadth and complexity of Black women,” it gradually became a silo for a particular type of Black femininity. “I think it’s telling and interesting that images of light-skinned girls in flower crowns became synonymous for some people with the idea of being a carefree black girl,” says Blay. “Images say things—they mean things and the fact that we cannot even conceive of a dark-skinned, fat, disabled Black woman also filling that space tells us a lot about how we feel about Black women and who gets to claim joy.”

With her book, Blay wanted to finally interrogate and articulate the types of limitations that consciously and unconsciously swallow the little space that Black women are allowed to possess, inch by inch. The essays are analytical and insightful, spanning a variety of communal and personal lived experiences including fatphobia, colorism, and misogynoir, all of which Blay approaches with no small amount of tenderness and care. She tapped into her years of reported journalism and culture commentary to deliver work that carries the weight of research, and the empathy that comes from observing those who are so rarely granted time or an audience.“We have the ability to question everything, even these hashtags, and in doing so have deeper and richer conversations about ourselves,” Blay told me.

The essay titled “Girlhood” is an exploration of what growing up looks like for girls who were not the “popular” or “awkward chick” reflected in a majority of Hollywood films. Those who weren’t even glimpsed by the lens and had to navigate the heightened stakes of first-times without any pop culture reflection. To gently wade into the waters, Blay reached for the work of other Black women whose creative work had also honed into the experience of Black girlhood revealing its fissures and softness. “I was listening to Aaliyah’s last album a lot. I was reading How We Get Free [Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor], and a lot of Toni Morrison because I love the clarity of her thoughts.” The essay, though a painful read, is a necessary addition to the canon of coming-of-age literature for readers in search of a shared truth.  “As solitary as writing is,” Blay shared, “at the end of the day we write to connect.” 

It’s a sobering but familiar type of dissonance that, while working on a body of work committed to helping Black women love and see each other better, Blay struggled to do the same for herself. It’s a reality that far too many Black women understand too well. “I had a really hard time letting myself rest without feeling guilty. My depression tells me that ‘whatever you’re going through nobody wants to hear about it and you just need to keep this shit to yourself,’”she said. “So I was in a bit of hole for three years that I am frankly only now emerging from.” As part of a generation of Black girls whose immigrant parents nurtured them far from their first homes, conversations on self-care have revealed the caveats of the term, determined by geography and cultural expectations. Blay was born in Ghana but was largely raised in the U.S., and doesn’t remember seeing her mother, grandmother, or the other women around her, reveling in the bliss of doing nothing, or taking time to do something specifically catered to their cravings and desires. “I think for my mother her idea of self-care was taking care of me, and her family. So when she made the most incredible meal, sure she would eat it too, but it was mostly for us, so that we were alright and taken care of.” Only recently are these unwritten rules being held up for inspection as more people realize that personhood is just as necessary as family. 

Today, it’s the small things that Blay has made rituals so her mind and body can freely move,  and they are helping to restore her mental health after months of loneliness. “I drink a glass of water in the morning with lemon, something everyone always says to do and which I have now started. I also journal, which helps.” At the beginning of our conversation after I asked what she did for her health that morning, Blay’s disarming admission that a healthy, good poop had helped set her up for the day, stripped away the awkwardness that usually commences when talking to a stranger about some of their deeply personal work and experiences.

As it tends to happen between Black women who are fans of other Black women, Whitney Houston came up in our conversation as a point of connection and love—an artist whose work and life fully embodied Black women’s determination to survive and be joyful, “even while going through it.” Listening to Blay recount her on-going journey towards contentment and peace, reminded me of a group of women in the town of Ruby, from Toni Morrison’s Paradise. Here, a community that had run from violence and chose solitude as the gateway to happiness saw fractures in their goals when the seemingly unruly women embodied their joy in the same way they did their grief and dejection. “How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness,” started Morrison, “and how thin the human imagination became trying to achieve it.” In Carefree Black Girls, Blay compels us to imagine with fervor and grace the possibilities of what we can become, without solely relying on perennial happiness as a compass. “Being carefree is not a destination to reach. Like if you have a career, a house, and a boyfriend, you can now be carefree,” said Blay adding, with hardened curiosity, “Because who wants to be happy all the time? That’s not realistic or interesting.”

Tarisai Ngangura is a Zimbabwean journalist and photographer whose work has appeared in Vanity Fair, T. Magazine, New York Times, Lapham's Quarterly, Rolling Stone, and Oxford American. She is currently a senior content strategist at The Atlantic and contributes to Pitchfork. Her debut novel, The Ones We Loved, is forthcoming from HarperCollins Canada in 2023. You can find her on Twitter @FungaiSJ.