Anifa Mvuemba told the people on her mailing list that Hanifa is creating again, and the reason she gave for stopping was that she refused to rush back to prove she could take it.
Mvuemba is the founder and designer of Hanifa. She paused the label rather than keep it running on momentum.
“I don’t want to rush just to prove resilience,” she said of that decision. “I don’t want to pretend everything is fine just to keep momentum.” She said the stretch before it had left her hollowed out. “I realized how empty I was.”
The return was not framed as a comeback. “Taking this time gave me room to enjoy more of it, be present with my children, and return to creating with fresh eyes,” she wrote to subscribers.
Black women are handed resilience as a compliment and then held to it as a schedule. The praise goes to the woman who did not stop, which makes stopping read as a flaw in her character rather than a decision about her life. Mvuemba made that decision out loud and named the pressure she was refusing. A reader does not need a label of her own to use it. She needs the same permission, without having to file a report on why she earned it.
