Wash by Ebony Stewart
Reviewed by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton
"You've always been an exhibit of:
How to swell
How to swallow
And how to properly
Wear a
crown"
-Womxn God by Ebony Stewart
What comes to mind when you think of the word "wash"? For some, the immediate images of bathing begin to flood in. Mental bubble baths fill high with suds or rivers flow gently enough to dip one's own body into them to find cleanliness. But this is only part of the approach to Ebony Stewart's newest poetry collection Wash (Button Poetry, 2025). While it often conjures metaphors and descriptions of the way we purify ourselves, be it tears or purging, the speaker of the collection turns an eye more towards the workers and work that is often behind the communal act of purification. The Black womxn who labor and scrub, individually and for society, those queer, in and out of their own bodies, the silenced, the mothers, the forgotten, and the worthy of more sit front and center in this provoking collection.
Stewart is no stranger to the page, authoring three full-length books prior to this collection: Love Letters to Balled Fist (Write About Now Publishing, 2013), as well as both Home.Girl.Hood (Button Poetry, 2022) and BloodFresh (Button Poetry, 2022) in the same year. The Jamaican-American poet became a force on stage, competing in poetry slams around the world, before branching out as a playwright and public speaker. Her award-winning one woman show, Hunger and Ocean, received the B. Iden Payne Award and the David Mark Cohen New Play Award, cementing her impact as a respected voice and advocate within the global community. Her work typically focuses on the experience of "Black womxn," using this spelling as a way to create a more inclusive and open representation of how we label and access womanhood. For Stewart, the ideas of womanness are often deeply layered with sexual identity, race, and culture—all themes she examines more closely in Wash.
The initial poem of this collection, "A Body Mouth of Marriage," serves as an opening supplication that both blesses and commences the coming journey through the book. Taking the form of marital vows, the poem begins with a dedication to famed playwright Ntozake Shange before turning the form on its head:
I
Womxn
Take thee body to be holy, a righteous gospel and an example of how I
Choose to love thyself and
Others
Though the reader may imagine a ceremony between two lovers, it is self love that the speaker is advocating above all else. However, this is not the trendy, shallow version followed by a hashtag on social media. This version of self love calls for the speaker to air out all aspects of themselves:
I will have thee stretched, scared, and struggling
I will have thee plain
With or without the pain
In silence and in sweet
To have and to hold
It beckons one who looks closer at themselves, brings the dark secrets to light, wrestles with their demons in open court, and then finds a way to praise the strength it took to do all of that fighting. It is revelatory to embrace one's flaws as a means of self love. Throughout the collection, the speaker opens up space for the multitude of the self.
The first three sections focus on this "airing out," including poems about wrestling with self harm, body dysmorphia, an eating disorder, social acceptance, and lineage. Stewart proves that identity is a "labyrinth: a maze difficult to solve." This may be the most evident in the poem "Tomboy." A piece anchored by multiple dictionary definitions, it tethers the reader to an anchor allowing them to drift closer and farther via comparisons to natural bodies of water.
Beach or Girl
A shore; body of water covered by sand.
Give a little bit, but always stay close to yourself
For the speaker, youth affords the ability to hold oneself closer and with more gentle hands. However, it's the growing up and coming into oneself that shifts the speaker to become more of a "Ocean or sea or womxn". This idea of having to protect or save other people from her current moves the speaker to hide parts of herself. She seeks to become more of a "harbor or girl or womxn" that can serve as shelter for others, but this pull between who she is and who she wants to be seems as vast as a gulf. This is only complicated by struggles with infertility and expectations of motherhood that surround the next focus of the collection.
In "The Fibroids Are A Mass," readers learn that the speaker suffers from uterine tumors that prevent her from carrying a child to term. This illness that is invisible to the naked eye complicates her ability to accept herself and see herself whole. According to the Mayo Clinic, “uterine fibroids are more common and severe in Black women." Their research showed that "by age 50, up to 90% of Black people with a uterus have fibroids (9 out of 10)." Many never experience symptoms. Others, like the speaker, experience something more akin to "feeling pregnant, but not pregnant." The large mass becomes a "hurt or lower back pain." This ache is only compounded by the social expectation of parenthood, often from elders in our own families:.
My auntie says, "you're not a womxn until you give birth
Another one say, "A womxn will never know love until she gives birth
And, So, I am not, because I have not."
Not every womxn wants to have a child, but for those who do and can't, the speaker argues that this disease steals away part of the way the outside world can accept that person as a woman. This fundamental function, becoming a mother, is so tied to our understanding of womanhood that it becomes a marker of belonging. And for those on the outskirts of the darkness, they must find a new way to move forward. The childless woman may live her life in a radical and bold way or she may fall into silence, hoping to be ignored like a child in a house where they have no authority.
The title prose poem of the collection is modelled after such a child. Framed as an homage to Jamaica Kincaid's poem Girl, “Wash like a girl” speaks from the point of view of the speaker's matriarch. The poem combines cultural expectations like the practice of using cocoa butter to moisturize with the more misogynistic boundaries that girls must "watch how [they] play with boys.”The piece is a laundry list how-to guide to womanhood, and more broadly, being loved:
This is how you make someone stay… smile with your right shoulder. Smize, girl.
Be fierce and sure and humble, a mystery. Make your arms a bundle. Have
banana bread ready… You should taste fresh.
Yet, where Kincaid's poem centers more on the negative expectations of growing up, Stewart creates a new guide that gives room to expand the traditional roles of womxn to include self care and joy before while circling back to many of the central themes of washing that the reader expects:
Wash
Your body every day. You wanna smell good don't you?
Pure has nothing to do with color
Pure is clean, feeling whole.
This arrival is the start of Stewart's final ritual: self reclamation. Much of the third section of the collection lives in how one can find ways to celebrate amidst these conflicting identities. From a poem that quotes lyrics from the movie adaptation of Alice Walker's The Color Purple as a celebration of sisterhood and love, to Dark Star which advocates 'writing love letter to Black womxn" to love notes to oneself, Stewart curates a self-care curriculum for Black womxn in poem form. Often including simple affirmations like "Go the distance" and "Love, even when you don't want to, even when they don't deserve it" she lays the foundation for a more compassionate and holistic approach to humanness. And while geared towards Black womxn, it becomes something more universal that all people struggling with some form of their identity can access.
Wash is a lyrical chart on how to love oneself. From showing how to face your internal fears, to acknowledging the struggle of our own bodies and their limitations, to teaching practices of praise, it ushers in the new tradition of self-love at full volume. It doesn't ask for the reader to be something they aren't. Rather, it builds a new rubric for us to measure ourselves against—one that takes into account our scars as testaments of our survival instead of approaching them as the things that mar us. And for those that are often rarely seen, celebrated, or cared for-– Black Womxn— Ebony Stewart reminds us that we must hold space for ourselves as much as we hold space for each other. In her words:
How beautiful it is
a queen who can
Heal and adorn another
Queen
Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton is an internationally-known writer, educator, activist, performer, and and the first Black Poet Laureate of Houston, Texas. Formerly ranked the #2 Best Female Performance Poet in the World, Her recent poetry collection, Newsworthy, garnered her a Pushcart nomination, was named a finalist for the 2019 Writer’s League of Texas Book Award, and received honorable mention for the Summerlee Book Prize. Its German translation, under the title Berichtenswert, is set to be released in Summer 2021 by Elif Verlag. She lives and creates in Houston, TX. For more information visit www.LiveLifedeep.com