Chit Chat: The Idle Conversation of Women

Ring, ring.

Ring, ring.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Girl, it’s me, whatchu doing?”

“Reading.”

“Whatchu reading?”

(Pauses briefly)“Uhh, a book on African Philosophy.”

“Really?”

“Really.  (Pauses) I’m reading an essay by Kwame Nkrumah.”

“Who?”

“Kwame Nkrumah,  he was the first Prime Minister of Ghana”

“Oh.  I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”

“Hmmm…I’ll tell you about him one day.”

“Naw, that’s alright.  That doesn’t sound like something I would be interested in.  (Pauses) I was just calling you because me and X are going to the mall and we wanted to see if you wanna come.”

“Nahh.  I’m cool.  I can’t think of anything that I need at the mall right now.”

“Girl, you don’t go to the mall because you need something, you go because you want something.  We’re just looking around anyway.  Macy’s got a killer sale going on right now.”

“I don’t care much for Macy’s clothes.”

“Well, there’s other stores….”

“Girl, I don’t want to go to the mall.  Catch up with me when you two leave, if you don’t eat at the Food Court, maybe we can go and have a bite.”

“Ok, cool.  But don’t try to school us on that Kwame man, ok?”

(Laughs)“Ya’ll need to learn about him”.

“Yeah, but I’m not in college anymore.”

“Oh.  Ok, then.  Talk to you later.”

“Bye, girl.”

(Hangs up).

If I can count how many times I’ve had similar instances with several of my sisterfriends, I could probably earn a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for idle conversations.  Many of my male friends have relayed to me frequently that women love to talk but we do not have anything to say sometimes.  As I think about it, I’m inclined to agree with them.  While women are deemed the Great Communicators,  we do need to check our subjects occassionally for usefulness. 

Somewhere along the course of our womanhood training, we learned that women were to talk about things that were supposedly relevant to us.  Things concerning the home, family, personal appearance, and the like fell into that category of Girl Talk.  We embraced that as proper and appeared to do very little in the way of questioning it.  But, many women stepped outside of that traditional conversational box and spoke against societal ills.  I am covering a few of them with my Cloud of Witnesses series (I’m working on the next entry–should be ready in a few days).  Black women’s clubs of the early 20th century had the appearance of being the typical ’hen meetings’ but instead, these women organized for social causes which required them to move beyond the usual discussion of drapes and recipes.  All of these women were engaging in what I like to call ‘WomanSpeak’.  Now the term WomanSpeak has been used before, but for the purposes of this post, I have decided to incorporate it as the alternative to Girl Talk.  See,  many of us engage in too much Girl Talk and not enough WomanSpeak.   

Girl Talk, in my opinion, is defined as the typical discussion about men, clothes, shoes, hair, furniture, children, and other women; not necessarily in that order.  WomanSpeak is defined as  deep, probing conversations about God, life, love, dreams, purpose, guidance and profound critical thinking about the world outside of your immediate self.   Girl Talk tends to focus on superficiality and materialism, while WomanSpeak adovocates change, both internally and externally. 

Girl Talk allows us to hide from ourselves, creating the illusion that we are emotionally stable, while WomanSpeak ruptures the dam and that emotional tidal wave finds release, followed by the restoration of healing and peace of mind.  Finally, we can have Girl Talk with any woman, but WomanSpeak requires a trusted friendship with other women.     

WomanSpeak has had a comfortable space in my life for quite some time now. I am rather limited in my conversations with other women because at an early age my interest in ‘girlie’ things only went so far. For instance, I’ve been wearing my natural hair since 2004 and I have not missed going to the hair salon in the least.  One of the most agonizing things about being at the hair salon, for me, was the 30-40 minute dryer times and the pointless conversations that I would have with the other women there.   See, I only have about 10 minutes worth of good Girl Talk and then after that, I could care less about Coach bags and shoe sales; but I do want to discuss the long term economic ramifications of the financial bailout and what that means for the Black community.  Please understand that I am, in no way, trying to be condescending about this, but at the same time, it’s important that we upgrade our conversations for the benefit of acknowledging today’s times.  We owe it to ourselves and our families to engage in productive and informed dialogue whenever we can in order to glean from each other and seek out viable strategies to overcome these turbulent times.   

I can guarantee that we can’t develop those strategies in the midst of an exchange about hair color, which reminds me, I’m seeing one too many gray strands in the ‘Fro–looks like I need a touch up.