Charting Pathways from the Margins to the Menopausal Multiverse

From Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause by Omisade Burney-Scott

Margins are maps in disguise, coded with ancestral memory, ecological wisdom, and stories too bold for the center. The margins—the spaces where the stories, experiences, and wisdom of human beings deemed “other” have been relegated—are not places we chose. They were deliberately constructed by a dominant culture intent on controlling not just the narrative of menopause but the narratives of race, gender, sexuality, class, and power itself. For those of us who live at the intersections of these identities, the current menopause landscape could be considered inhospitable terrain, one that mirrors the broader societal patterns of erasure, exclusion, and pathologizing difference.

But what if these margins were sacred spaces instead of sites of exile? What if the margins were ecosystems of resistance, transformation, and care? They could be places where people create culture, conjure safety, and practice sovereignty. Margins are not the edge of the story—they are the origin of new ones.

The margins of menopause—once peripheral spaces of silence and invisibility—are being reclaimed and reimagined as intentional, intergenerational menopause maroon communities and a direct pathway to the Menopausal Multiverse.

A Word About Maroons

Throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, maroon communities were formed by formerly enslaved people who refused the terms of their captivity. These communities, often hidden deep in forests, swamps, or mountains, were rooted in self-liberation, sovereignty, and cultural preservation. They integrated themselves into natural landscapes, allowing them to live, organize, and thrive in plain sight. In the American South, the Great Dismal Swamp became a haven for those who had self-liberated from enslavement. Historical records and oral histories document that from the 1600s through the Civil War, thousands of Black people sought refuge in the swamp’s dense forests and wetlands, forming maroon settlements that lasted for generations. Despite the harsh terrain, these communities developed intricate systems of agriculture, bartering, kinship, and resistance. The swamp became not only a physical sanctuary but also a site of Black ingenuity, perseverance, and refusal.

In Jamaica, Queen Nanny of the Maroons is celebrated as one of the most formidable leaders of resistance against British colonial rule. Born in what is now Ghana, she was brought to Jamaica as an enslaved African and escaped into the Blue Mountains, where she became a leader of the Windward Maroons in the early 18th century. Nanny led successful guerrilla warfare campaigns against the British, outwitting colonial forces and negotiating a peace treaty in 1739 that secured land and a degree of autonomy for her people. Beyond her military prowess, Queen Nanny was a spiritual leader and herbalist whose knowledge of African traditions, healing, and community governance shaped maroon society. Her leadership embodied the power of post-menopausal Black womanhood—rooted in clarity, strategy, protection, and vision.

These maroon societies were not utopias, but they were declarations of self-determination in a world that denied their humanity. Many were led by elder post-menopausal Black women—women who wielded their wisdom, pragmatism, and power to build sovereign spaces of care, resistance, and renewal. Their stories offer not only a historical blueprint but also a spiritual map for how we might reimagine our own liberation.

The Menopausal Maroon and the Margins We Did Not Create

At Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, we recognize that people of the global majority did not create the margins of the current menopause landscape, but we are reclaiming them. These margins were built by systems that failed to see us: the medical industrial complex that pathologized our bodies, the wellness industry that commodifies our pain, and media and research landscapes that often render our experiences invisible unless they can be exploited for profit.

Yet within these margins, we are creating something different. Through storytelling, oral histories, intergenerational knowledge exchange, and embodied cultural practices, we are illuminating what has always been here: a rich and diverse ecosystem of menopausal wisdom. We are not hiding in plain sight. We are illuminating the margins as a sacred space of safe passage—a waystation between erasure and freedom, between isolation and multiverse.

Our divestment from the mainstream menopause landscape is not about abandonment, it is about realignment. It’s about redirecting our labor, attention, and partnerships toward the world we want to live in. And in doing so, we are transforming the margins into a map with a series of questions born out of 6 years of excavation from the margins:

• What might a divestment strategy look like if it begins with a question of sovereignty? What would it mean to build structures that refuse exploitation and instead center our stories, truths, experiences, power, and cultural wisdom?

• What would it mean for genderqueer, nonbinary, and trans people to divest from narratives that flatten or erase their embodied experiences, and instead claim space as knowledge holders, visionaries, and healers?

• What would it mean for formerly incarcerated people to reshape the narrative entirely, to reclaim agency in a system that pathologized and punished them, and build a community rooted in care, dignity, healing, and renewal?

• What would it mean for people under 40 to divest from the idea that menopause only belongs to the old, the straight, or the settled, and instead, see their own early, surgical, or medically induced menopause experiences as valid, powerful, and transformative? What would shift if younger people navigating menopause were affirmed in their identities and offered language, community, and care that honors their transformation as legitimate and deeply wise? What if their stories became maps, guiding others through uncharted terrain with clarity and courage?

Our answer, shaped by the determination of maroon communities and the futuristic vision of the Menopausal Multiverse, is this:

It means building something sovereign and interdependent. It means reclaiming the ecosystems we’ve been told are wastelands. It means listening to our elders, trusting our stories, and creating spaces where all of us, not just some of us, are free.

Lessons from Queen Nanny and the Great Dismal Swamp

As we shape new ways of being and belonging in the Menopausal Multiverse, we activate the memory, strategy, resilience, and creativity of our ancestors—not to replicate the past, but to honor its wisdom while creating something radically new. These lessons from Queen Nanny and the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp remind us that what has been built before can be reimagined, and what was meant to be hidden can now be illuminated.

From Queen Nanny, we learn that leadership can be strategic, emergent, and deeply spiritual all at once. Her legacy teaches us that organizing for freedom demands not only tactical brilliance but also a profound reverence for ancestral knowledge. She reminds us that survival alone is not enough—we must also fight for land, for dignity, and for the sacred right to govern our own lives. In this light, menopause becomes more than a biological transition; it emerges as a threshold into a new kind of leadership, one that is clear-eyed, protective, and unapologetically rooted in community.

From the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, we learn that even the most seemingly inhospitable places can be transformed into havens when shaped by collective will and resistance. The margins, far from being empty, are alive with potential, with memory, and with the blueprint for what is possible. These communities show us that we do not need proximity to power to create safety, culture, or systems of governance that reflect our values. What we need is each other, a deep connection to land, shared commitment, and the courage to build beyond the gaze of the systems that have abandoned or betrayed us.

To build the Menopausal Multiverse is to carry forward these lessons. It is to reconnect with the land, with the community, and with ancestral wisdom. It is to root our future in place, resistance, and self-determination. It is to honor the margins, not as peripheries but as portals. It is to understand that healing justice and reproductive justice begin with remembering who we are and refusing to be forgotten. The Menopausal Maroon is not a metaphor. It is a living practice of reclamation and redesign. And it will lead us home.

The Margins Are a Map

A Meditation from the Menopausal Multiverse

Close your eyes.
Inhale deeply.
Let the breath trace a line—not to the center, but to the edge.
To the margin.
To the place you were told was too much, too complicated, too far.

Now exhale, and imagine this:
The margins are not exile.
They are a beginning.
They are the ground where ancestors whisper,
where stories root,
where liberation takes its first breath.

The margins are maps in disguise—
coded with memory,
lined with resistance,
drawn in the hand of the Maroon, the midwife,
the queer visionary, the freedom-seeker.

They are where those of us othered by our race, ethnicity, gender, religion or access to resource
those who have been cast out have always conjured safety,
crafted beauty,
and practiced sovereignty.

So today,
if you find yourself at the edge—
of a system, of a story, of your own becoming—
know this:

You are not lost.
You are not late.
You are not outside.
You are exactly where the map begins.

This margin,
this wild edge,
is not a boundary.
It is a portal.
It is a place of power.

Breathe into it.
Honor it.
Name it sacred.
And walk forward, not toward the center,
but into the multiverse
where all of you is welcome.