Sacred Tear-Stained Pages: Memoir as Womanist Methodology in Theorizing Black Women's Grief

This paper theorizes memoir as womanist methodology by examining how Black women's personal narratives of grief constitute authoritative sources of theological and phenomenological knowledge. Drawing from my forthcoming book Mourning in the Margins, I argue that integrating lived experience with scholarly analysis enacts Alice Walker's womanist principle that "the personal is political." Through phenomenological attention to my grandmother's death and my anticipatory grief, I demonstrate how embodied storytelling disrupts Enlightenment epistemologies that privilege "objective" knowledge over experiential wisdom. This methodology centers Black women's tears as sacred texts, the body as archive, and grief as an epistemology that reveal what systematic theology and trauma studies have rendered unintelligible: that Black women's grief is simultaneously personal, historical, political, psychological, physiological, and spiritual. By employing a "bookend" narrative structure—opening and closing each theoretical exploration with personal anecdote—I show how womanist scholarship refuses the false binary between rigor and vulnerability, between academy and ancestor.