Nurtured Magazine’s ‘Metamorphosis’ Issue and the Radical Capacity of Evolution

“No black woman writer in this culture can write “too much”. Indeed, no woman writer can write “too much”...no woman has ever written enough.” — bell hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

The January I was first approached to be the new Editor-in-Chief of Nurtured Magazine, the flagship publication by Black Women* at Edinburgh (BWE), I felt at a strange sort of crossroads in my life. I was still only in my third year of university (though the time had steadily been creeping on towards that inevitable end point) and confronting the realities of what it is to be human, at its most essential core. That of course being — change.

Try as you might, you cannot circumvent change. It will lurch towards you when you least expect it, wrapping you tightly in its confines without any remorse. I was learning this lesson by force, shifting the weight of this truth from toe to toe, and hating it, in spite of the better part of my last four years being entangled with change in a very direct way. It is a big something to contend with, that everything has its end, and nothing remains the same. And this truth is particularly damning as a Black woman at a predominantly white institution (PWI), for whom settling comfortably into any environment is a decidedly latent process. There is no handbook for coming-of-age as a Black girl; we hurtle into our womanhood by means of adultification, where research shows that Black girls are viewed as less innocent and more adult-like than our peers from the age of five, and we are made hypervisible subjects for scrutiny through it all. I had to conceptualise not only the change itself, but the capacity this had to unsettle my core communities. I had only just found my footing – what did it mean if the rug was going to be pulled from under me anyway?

Fundamentally, I knew that acceptance was the only way through it. All these confusions, and the push-and-pull of my thoughts is what birthed ‘Metamorphosis’, the second issue of Nurtured Magazine. Following on from our inaugural issue, ‘Strength in Sisterhood’, I felt pulled to the notion of metamorphosis in that it reconfigures the fears we have surrounding change, honouring our radical capacity for growth, and suffusing the past and present in the process. In metamorphosis, we must confront and live alongside the evolutions we undergo. This confrontation transmutes into a quiet sort of self-revolution, a reassessment of who we have the potential to become. 

I have always been someone who has used creativity as a channel. Often, I feel like my writing is an extension of the most honest version of myself, someone who is unearthed as the words tumble out of my being. When I first joined the Nurtured team in the summer of 2024, I felt a little creatively stifled. As much as my experiences with academia have technically positioned creativity at the helm, I struggled with situating myself, just me, within the academia. And whilst creative hubs on campus existed prior to the creation of Nurtured, my identity as a Black Muslim woman was something that often felt like it sat at a contradiction with these spaces. It was like an invisible wall, something technically intangible, but that materialised in a very real way in my day-to-day life.

All of these facts lay together as an amalgamation of why Nurtured means as much to me as it does. This archive of experiences for Black women does not just exist as a creative project, but as an actualisation of community in its very being. In the past year, Nurtured has held me in all my changes; I would attend meetings in between moving my luggage to my new flat, read submissions as I took the train back home, and plot my own article in the gaps between seminars. The work I do for Nurtured is also a form of self-work; there is a sense of life to our magazine because is a touchpoint for everyone who contributes, everyone who reads it, and everyone who has partaken in its existence. Ultimately, I hope the ‘Metamorphosis’ issue of Nurtured will continue this thread. Last year, Nurtured saw us publish 22 submissions by a cohort of talented Black women artists, writers, and immortalise the 2024-25 year of BWE — our first official year as a society. This year’s issue will continue to honour the legacy of Black feminist publications and the radical capacities of print activism, carving a space that celebrates and centres Black women at Edinburgh, mapping the creative vitalities that exist in our communities through this process.

As I reflect on what the future could hold for Nurtured, I think of this poem from the essay ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’ by Audre Lorde:

‘We have chosen each other

and the edge of each others battles

the war is the same

[..]

if we win

there is no telling

we seek beyond history

for a new and more possible meeting.’

As the ‘Metamorphosis’ issue comes into fruition, holding all of our honesty and truths uncovered – we too will choose each other.

Author biography:

Hanaa Yousof is a fourth-year English Literature student at the University of Edinburgh, the Co-President of Black Women* at Edinburgh (BWE), and the Editor-in-Chief of BWE’s flagship creative publication Nurtured Magazine. She is a keen writer who hones storytelling as a mechanism for change, and is passionate about exploring the intersections between racial and feminist thought and cultural and creative spaces. 

References

Epstein, Rebecca, et al. “Girlhood Interrupted”: Georgetown Law School Center on Poverty and Inequality., 2017. 

hooks, bell. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. The Women’s Press, 1999.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Penguin Books, 1984, p. 138.

Newton, Veronica A. “Hypervisibility and Invisibility: Black Women’s Experiences with Gendered Racial Microaggressions on a White Campus.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, vol. 9, no. 2, 2022, pp. 164–78, https://doi.org/10.1177/23326492221138222.

Thomlinson, Natalie. “‘Second-Wave’ Black Feminist Periodicals in Britain.” Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 27, no. 4, Oct. 2016, pp. 432–45, https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2017.1301129.