‘Four (Single Parent) Women’: Emulating Nina Simone’s Storytelling for Critical Consciousness

From 2017 to 2018, I was privileged to carry out in-depth biographical interviews with black British women who raised children as single parents for my doctoral project. This project is part of my ongoing work to investigate the experiences of single-parent women in the context of urban inequalities, and also to challenge a continued problematisation of single motherhood among black populations. While collecting this data, I was a single parent with a young son. My motherhood journey was still unfolding, so I had a personal interest in what women with more years of motherhood experience had to say. In policy, media and academic narratives, single black motherhood has been represented as a bleak, troublesome and disempowering experience for women, not to mention the communities they belong to more broadly. This was a message I had internalised. I devised the project to try to understand women’s experiences. Listening to numerous personal accounts of single black mothers over months slowly transformed my personal beliefs about single motherhood—the way I viewed my own situation radically shifted. To me, this indicated the potential of stories to vindicate, to heal and to empower.1