Multihyphenate Sanaa (pronounced sah-NAH) Green’s primary job is “to help women connect with their brighter selves through earth-touch practices.”
One of those practices is teaching belly dancing. She currently conducts a four-week class at the General Baker Institute on Livernois, which Green describes as a “social-activist hub.” The class started on March 21.
The classes are sponsored by the Wisdom Institute, which received a grant from the Transforming Power Forum “to organize marginalized people in a nontraditional way and build political power,” said Green. The grant, which is called “Passing the Torch, Preserving the Flame,” is in the third year of its three-year span. Green is one of the teaching artists that the grant supports.
“I’m starting the class in the Spring because I wanted women—cisgender, transgender and nonbinary–to be able to start this new season in a celebratory way. I know how important it to mark the change of seasons so we’re in concert with the earth, but I don’t push that on the students.” She did ask the class to contemplate what was “budding” for them, such as new projects.
Green’s class is also “a reclamation for women of African descent.”
“I love to provide a space for those who are on the front lines of social justice work as a counterbalance of having to be ‘big and bad.’ It’s OK to be big and bad, and it’s OK to be feminine and soft—and be those things at the same time.”
Belly dancing has helped Green reconnect with her femininity, fullness and sensuality in a way that’s non-judgmental, she said in a one-on-one interview with the Michigan Chronicle. She’s been doing the dance on and off since the early 2000s.
That non-judgmental reconnection was momentous for Green. “I’ve always been hippy, and I always wanted to cover up because I didn’t want to give the wrong impression.”
That impression came from social strictures on women’s bodies, in particular how respectability politics dictate how ‘good girls’ are supposed to look and move.
“’Good girls’ don’t move their hips. As a matter of fact, in this society, we walk in a way so that we don’t move our hips. But hips are designed to be flexible and to move, to walk and bend and sit and even give birth. In order to do those things, we have to move them.”
African dances and dances that are of African descent are pelvic- and hip-centered, Green said. “And we Black women love to move our hips.”
The hips are related to the root chakra, or the energy center that flows from between the legs and into the earth, said Green, who has done master’s-level work in ecopsychology at the renowned Naropa University and is a reiki master.
The root chakra keeps humans grounded physically and energetically, she explained. She connected the root chakra and how Indigenous women in West Africa and the Amazon sit or squat when they cook as another demonstration of how women of color are linked to the earth.
“The way I teach belly dancing, my intention is to activate all seven chakras, or energy centers and the students’ overall energy and to become aware and connect with the Divine Feminine within.
“You may think that moving your hips and being sexy connects you to the Divine Feminine—and that’s a part of it. But it’s also the interconnectedness of all the chakras working together that creates that awareness of yourself as someone wonderfully and sacredly made.”
Not that everything is and will be perfect and happy, Green stated, but there’s this part in ourselves that is created to love and be loved.
When asked how belly dancing fits into the current conversations within Black communities about divine femininity in terms of wearing make-up, dressing up in certain clothes and being submissive to attract a man, Green said, “The divine feminine was hijacked centuries ago.”
Belly dancing, she continued, came out of North Africa and danced throughout what historians and archaeologists call The Fertile Crescent, such as what is now known as Syria, Persia, Ethiopia and other countries in that region. That is where the Goddess religions were “strongly felt” and practiced.
Belly dance was created with the awareness that women are the bearers of life, “not only human life but also communities. The men in those communities were magicians.” Therefore, “masculine and the feminine are designed to work together, both in the [human interactions and relationships] and inside of us,” Green said.
The dance done in the presence of a group of women is a form of bonding. However, when the Goddess-centered communities dispersed and women had to make a living, that’s when belly dancing became a performance, including decorating hip scarves with coins, according to Green.
For more information about the current class and future workshops, please visit www.centerherpower.com.
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