Sonya Renee Taylor - The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

Praise for The Body Is Not an Apology

From the moment I met Sonya Renee, I knew my life, my world, and the way I view myself and others around me would never be the same. The Body Is Not an Apology is essential reading for those of us who crave understanding and those who are already on the path to learning how beautiful and complex our bodies are. It will empower you with the tools to navigate a world that is often unkind to those of us who whether by choice or design dont adhere to societys standard of beauty. Her words will echo in your heart, soul, and body just as they have in mine.

Tess Holliday, plus model, author, and founder of Eff Your Beauty Standards

The Body Is Not an Apology is a gift, a blessing, a prayer, a reminder, a sacred text. In it, Taylor invites us to live in a world where different bodies are seen, affirmed, celebrated, and just. Taylor invites us to break up with shame, to deepen our literacy, and to liberate our practice of celebrating every body and never apologizing for this body that is mine and takes care of me so well. This book cracked me open in ways that Im so grateful for. I know it will do the same for you.

Alicia Garza, cocreator of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and Strategy + Partnerships Director, National Domestic Workers Alliance

The Body Is Not an Apology is a radical, merciful, transformational book that will give you deep insights, inspiration, and concrete tools for launching the revolution right inside your own beloved body. Written from deep experience, with a force of catalytic energy and so much love.

Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues and In the Body of the World

In 2017, #thefirsttimeisawmyself was a trending hashtag and Netflix campaign. As a disabled woman, #thefirsttimeireadmyself may well have been this book. Thank you, Sonya. Bought two copies, one for me and one for my daughter.

Rebecca Cokely, Senior Fellow for Disability Policy, Center for American Progress, disability rights activist, and mom

Sonya Renee Taylor is a treasure that this world simply does not deserve. The Body Is Not an Apology is the gift of radical love the world needs! We are all better off because of her presence, talent, compassion, and authentic work. Thank you, Sonya, for all that you do.

Jes Baker, aka The Militant Baker, author of Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls

In these times, when the search for answers to the mounting injustices in our world seems to confound us, Sonya Renee Taylor offers a simple but powerful place to begin: recovering our relationship with our own bodies. To build a world that works for everyone, we must first make the radical decision to love every facet of ourselves. Through lucid and courageous self-revelation, Taylor shows us how to realize the revolutionary potential of self-love. The body is not an apology is the mantra we should all embrace.

Kimberl Crenshaw, legal scholar and founder and Executive Director, African American Policy Forum

The Body Is Not an Apology

The Power of Radical Self-Love

Sonya Renee Taylor

The Body Is Not an Apology

Copyright 2018 by Sonya Renee Taylor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

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First Edition
Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-62656-976-8
PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-977-5
IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-978-2

2017-1

Set in Arno Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Cover design by Irene Morris, Morris Design

Interior design by Laurel Muller

For Terry Lyn Hines (19592012)
My first and most enduring example of the power of radical love.

My Mothers Belly

The bread of her waist, a loaf
I would knead with eight-year-old palms
sweaty from play. My brother and I marveled
at the ridges and grooves. How they would summit at her navel.
How her belly looked like a walnut. How we were once seeds
that resided inside. We giggled, my brother and I,
when she would recline on the couch,
lift her shirt, let her belly spread like cake batter in a pan.
It was as much a treat as licking the sweet from electric mixers on birthdays.

The undulating of my mothers belly was not
a shame she hid from her children.
She knew we came from this. Her belly was a gift
we kept passing between us.
It was both hers, of her body,
and ours for having made it new,
different. Her belly was an altar of flesh
built in remembrance of us, by us.

What remains of my mothers belly
resides in a container of ashes I keep in a closet.
Every once and again, I open the box,
sift through the fine crystals with palms
that were once eight. Feel the grooves and ridges
that do not summit now but rill through fingers.
Granules so much more salt
than sweet today. And yet, still I marvel
at her once body. Even in this form say,
I came from this.

Long before there was a digital media and education company or a radical self-love movement with hundreds of thousands of followers on our website and social media pages, before anyone cared to write about us in newsprint or interview me on television, before people began to send me photos of their bodies with my words etched in ink on their backs, forearms, and shoulders (which never stops being awesome and weird), there was a word well, words. Those words were your body is not an apology. It was the summer of 2010, in a hotel room in Knoxville, Tennessee. My team and I were preparing for evening bouts in competition at the Southern Fried Poetry Slam. Slam is competitive performance poetry. Teams and individuals get three minutes onstage to share what is often deeply intimate, personal, and political poetry, at which point five randomly selected judges from the audience score their poems on a scale from 0.0 to 10.0. Its a raucous game that takes the high art of poetry and brings it to the masses in bars, clubs, coffee shops, and National Poetry Slam Championship Tournaments around the country. Poetry slam is as ridiculous as it is beautiful; it is everything gauche and glorious about the power of the word. The slam is a place where the misfit and the marginalized (and the self-absorbed) have center stage and the rapt ears of an audience, if only for three minutes.