If a video drops in a forest of things that seem to matter a lot–like  fingers waving in presidential faces and self-deportation–does it make a sound?

Nicki Minaj dropped “Stupid Hoe” last week.

Maybe I’m too old to have my thumb on the relevant spaces in the interwebs, but it seems like the video barely caused a buzz.  Responses from Jezebel, Clutch, and Vibe were mainly negative, complaining about Minaj’s use of animalistic imagery, neon colors and her less than creative wordplay.  Black feminists offered mainly negative critique for obvious and perfectly legitimate reasons.  Minaj’s challenge to “stupid hoes” included a reference to “nappy-headed hoes” and images of a pale, plastic, Venus Hottentot Barbie.

Me?  Minaj hurts my head.  She perplexes me.  I think of her as Trickster, two-faced in her betrayal of global black feminist possibility and powerful in her contradictory elucidation of black woman’s power within the realms of celebrity and hip hop.  Reading her as Ellegua, that frightful guardian of the crossroads and the in-between and the everything-that-is-not-yet seems to fit an artist who switches alter egos as easily as she switches clothes.  Conjuring the ritual and physicality of possession seems to fit a celebrity who changes clothes as she changes personality, putting on her and taking off her tropes as each personality comes down.  The sometimes garish, sometimes delightful carnival of color, glitter and expression–even the repetitive dancehall/house music refrain–also fit a woman whose aesthetic choices continually find their footing in her Trinidadian roots.

In other words, I think of Nicki Minaj as diasporic black, as radical, and as speculative.

A week ago, I would have said she is also afrofuturistic. There is something otherworldly about her ability to pick up and put down masks and characters.  It’s more than just having a stage persona.  It’s something I see as rooted in a longer black experience of contending with mainstream politics and culture, both of which prefer black female presenting people fit neatly into particular boxes.  Those boxes come in different shapes and sizes.  Some are just bodies, but with bionic booties for your jiggling pleasure.  Others are all-knowing Mammies with wisdom for latently racist white girls.  Still others are cruel, pray-the-gay evangelicals with anger written in hard lines across their faces.

A black gyrl can’t walk out the house these days without falling into one of these boxes.  Hell, with Oscar season on top of us, we’ve seen all of these stereotypes appear in the media, one right after the other, at one point or another, just over the last few weeks.

But I’d argue we’ve never seen anything like Nicki Minaj–or at least nothing like Minaj and her alters.  What she represents, yes even in all of her problematics and misogyny, what she represents is a black gyrl who has chosen.  She knows she can’t walk out the house without falling into one of several boxes.  Which is fine by her because she has a walk-in closet full of handcrafted masks, carved, of course, in the raw material caking the bottom of our worst stereotypes (let’s not be wasteful, yall).  And she has decorated and bedazzled and glitter-taped them all and those masks are no longer theirs or yours but her own.  And she doesn’t walk out of the house; oh no.  She skips or saunters or “twerks and spins away” according to whichever personality she has decided to put on her head.

I think this is why, in an epic conversation on Twitter with (Kima) @sweat_btwn, (Summer) @fecundmellow, @zero317, @AfroFuturAffair, and (Treva Lindsey) @divafeminist (the conversation, Storified here in full by @sweat_btwn, read away), I suggested Minaj could be read as afrofuturistic.  The conversation that ensued was amazing and hinged on clarifying and articulating what afrofuturism is.

For some of us, to be afrofuturistic meant more than aesthetics or appearance.  It meant contributing to a specific political project part of whose purpose was, in Kima’s words:

“abt a politicized body with a specific gaze toward building multiple blk communities in the beyond–beyond the scope of patriarchy or capitalism or racism.”  

Octavia Butler was the patron of this powerful vision, key being her ability to articulate the potential of the beyond–and its dangers.  And the ability to imagine and move beyond this world, into other realms, was crucial.

For others, the aesthetics actually were of importance, as was the potential for Minaj to inspire a particular vision, and the right of readers/viewers/fans to use Minaj’s project as inspiration for their own afrofuturescapes.  As @AfroFuturistAffair noted:

“…it is political but it is also aesthetics and imagery. she may fit in that sense…”

The conversation lasted for hours, with people coming in and out.  And I hope it continues.

Because I think I’m on the fence now as to whether Minaj is afrofuturistic.  That afrofuturism must be beyond-this-world is valid as shit.  Whether that means into outer space or into the underworld, to be afrofuturistic means being self-aware about what the next day or days will hold–even if the next day or days will be the end of days.  To the extent that Minaj or her alters have a specific gaze toward the future is questionable.

But the underlying assumption behind this definition of afrofuturism is that time is linear and revelatory.  It speaks to a  conception of time that is Anglo-black in its ideal and Judeo-Islamic-Christian in its eloquence.  Time soon come.  Time will be here.  The time is now.

What if the underlying assumption behind this definition of afrofuturism was challenged?  What if, instead of black life and thought (and future) existing in time and on straight, if intersecting, lines–what if it curved?  Webbed?  What if you wore time on your person so that instead of the time is now, time IS now, and then, and later.  What if the moment you are living here is being written of as the moment that will happen and the moment you are just past?

I opened the Storify by saying I see Minaj and moments like these as an afrofuturista.  I do. But I’m also a radical womyn of color who sees the future through the lens of Afrolatinidad. Latinidad has less room for linear time in its conception of the future.  Infused with indigenous elements, the future is happening now and has happened already.  Speculative latinidad, in some ways, is about the inability of being able to call the future what it is, or send the past back.  So that something like “Long Time Ago” by Leslie Marmon Silko (poet and author of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, white descent) can resonate as cautionary, prophetic and preemptive all at once:

It’s already turned loose.
It’s already coming.
It can’t be called back.

While speculative latinidad is often placed in the category of magical realism, I wonder if it is also futurist.  I wonder if it’s just that speculative/futurist latinidad imaginings are as much about the past as they are about the future.  And if that’s the case, and if afrofuturist imaginings are as much about the future as they are about the present, I wonder what Afrolatinidad looks like?

In other words, preoccupied with the slaveholding past and concerned about the racialized future, does an afrofuturist latinidad live at the crossroads between magical realist latinidad and the Afrofuture?*

Engaging with Minaj (and for my black-Puerto Rican, Chicago house music self, this also means engaging with the Caribbean characteristics in her work) forces me to consider ways afrofuturism can include magical realist latinidad and vice versa.  Earlier I said I was on the fence on whether Minaj is afrofuturistic.  Why?  Because she is still very much about, as Summer noted, a hyperhyperpresent, her caricatures being as much about mirroring our own stereotypes as they are about her self-representation.  Hottentot Venus Barbie aside, she also does not seem to be concerned with reevaluating the past-as-prophecy (unless in the Story of Female Emcees Past).  In other words, she is espousing neither a dream nor a nightmare of the future.

But what if she isn’t supposed to be the vision?

What if she is just the oracle?  The vessel?  A portent of things to come?

What if she is just the keeper of the crossroads?

She may be what lives at the crossroads between magical realist latinidad and the Afrofuture.  Well, mira, not her (praise Gawd).  But oracle work, scrying, divination.  All  making the act of and attempt to see the future just as important as the past-future seen.  The moment in the present before the past and future separate and becomes siblings as #relevant.

What if at the heart of an afrofuturist latinidad/futurist afrolatinidad is good, ole Second Sight?  And #Obatala?

*Which of course is a project to superimpose ON TOP of pushing latinidad itself to include its own black and African elements.

Norma Wood. 17mm, f16, 20 ", ISO 200 Image Credit: Akos Kiss

To some, December means the end of the year, the end of the warmth and the return of caramel macchiato and pumpkin spice latte addictions.

For me, December means the end of stress, other people’s labor and the beginning of beautiful snowy landscapes, family gatherings and time I can call my own.  I have time to dive into ideas I dreamed up during the summer months and tackle fall’s loose ends.  I’ve always done my best writing and thinking over winter breaks.  Something about the cool air just clears my brain of all the clutter.

Winter is here.  Capricorn season is upon us.

And so is 2012.  Sooooooo much happened….

Over the course of the year, Nuñez Daughter posts appeared online at the Fresh Xpress, For Harriet and the Liberator Magazine and were used as tools in undergraduate courses across the country, including University of Maryland and Bowdoin College (#peace to @ablackgirl and Samaa Abdurraqib).  I’m also surprised and pleased to report that while fewer posts appeared this year, they appeared on a more regular schedule (Monday or Friday), there was at least one blog-a-thon (the AMC 2011 series) and there was more emphasis on Speak Your Mind posts (social and political commentary) than ever before.  This blog, my writing, and my process may be finally hitting its stride!   *throws confetti*

With your financial support, this June, Kismet and MdotWrites joined the Shawty Got Skillz/INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence crew and headed over to AMC 2011 to workshop twitter/tumblr skills.  Our interactive, multimedia, socially networked ‘zine is scheduled to drop this winter (#capricornseason) and is going to be off the damn hook.  Stay tuned for that announcement.

In April, Kismet, along with MdotWrites, Diva Feminist, MoyaZB, Alexis Pauline, La Bianca and countless others created Betta Come Correct, a project in black feminist sexuality and erotic activism:  Because “black feminist sex is the best sex ever.”  Follow us on Tumblr or Facebook and join in the celebration of black lovebirds who love themselves, their partners and their orgasms and won’t let heteropatriarchy tell them any different! #comecorrect

In November, Kismet joined Tony Stark, La Bianca and BlacktinosUS_/La Republica Detroit as the team behind The LatiNegros Project which unveiled a brand new Facebook page in November (see the sidebar, like us today).  #machetebehavior

This December, I quietly introduced a Nuñez Daughter Tumblr, a Tumblr extension of the blog committed to “the writing life.”  I’m looking forward to sharing Nuñez Daughter posts and my own thought process (Speaking My Mind all over Tumblr!) in this new, more streamlined format.

Last, but not least, the Sable Fan Gyrl built me a time machine and I’m hopping in to breeze past my favorite Nuñez Daughter posts from the last year:

• Reading Dolen’s Wench, Part Two:  I began Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s novel Wench in August 2010 as part of a Twitter book club venture with @fortyoneacres and @mdotwrites.  This was my favorite post of the three posts I ended up writing about the book, in part because I ended up reading Thavolia Glymph’s Out of the House of Bondage at the same time.  Glymph’s book helped me see the ways violence and kinship and power intersected in the historical moment to absolve white mistresses of their own wrong-doings and paint female slaves as always to blame.  But Perkins-Valdez’s reconstruction helped me imagine what that might have meant for the daily lives of children and the consciousness of the next generation of slaves and ex-slaves.  I also learned something about myself–reading slavery as fiction is more work for me than anything else is.  Good work, necessary work but work nonetheless.
• Sunday Livin’: Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin:  I’m a bit obsessed with  Matana Robert’s multimedia jazz project Coin Coin.  Based on Maria Thereze “Coin Coin” Metoyer, one of the most famous free women of color in Louisiana’s history, and possibly the most famous next to Marie Laveau, Robert’s explores her ancestral connection to Coin Coin through art, music, moving images, sound and digital media.  It is a project in archive, slavery and history as much as it is a musical venture.  The blog she was running is no more, but Roberts continues her work on her Tumblr http://steelkiltrose.tumblr.com/.
• On Kanazawa, Black Women & Being “Fine” & “Well-Made”:  Remember back when a certain professor claimed science backed up black women being more ugly?  Yeah.  That happened.  It wasn’t a bad dream.  And I responded.  With facts.  Black women have been seen as “fine” and “well-made” for a very long time…and for some very wrong reasons.  Beauty (like love and pleasure) is as much a social construction as race.
• In the Future, We Kill Our Attackers: Rihanna’s “Man Down” as Afrofuturist Text:  One of my favorite videos and one of my favorite posts.  Again–I was lucky to be reading about afrofuturism that week or I never would have imagined a connection between the two.  Thank Gawd for black visionary thinking by Alondra Nelson, Isiah Lavender, Darryl Smith and more.
• #SayItLoud…and Dirty?, Or How Rodney McMillian’s Carpet is My Mama/Daddy/Abuela’s Carpet:  Nothing political provoked this one so I probably should have saved it and made it the first draft of some later essay on art, privilege and blackness (or submitted it to some e-mag as a review of the exhibit.  But I was in the moment and I tossed it up here.  Doesn’t matter, I love how the piece and the experience of viewing it in a gallery made me think about what art is and what it means to an upwardly mobile black and Puerto Rican woman like myself.
• Loving Vampire Diaries: Why History, Slavery and Race in Fandom Matters:  I feel the same way about this piece as the one above–I probably should have saved it and made it the first draft of some later essay on slavery, race, fandom and the Vampire Diaries.  The only thing that stopped me from doing that was timing; I was already late entering the series, the hype about it has passed and the opportunity to add something new to the discussion was passing as well.  And thus, here it appears, hanging out at Nuñez Daughter.  Many thanks to folks like @karnythia who linked to it on their blogs and Tumblrs.   This was also the first post where I attempted to meld histories of slavery with pop culture (as opposed to politics and larger structural oppression).  I’d like to do that more often in the New Year (i.e. Hell on Wheels, the rest of Vampire Diaries, etc.) so expect Right/Wrong to appear again.

Along with the above posts, in 2011 I manifestoed, I memorialized and I witnessed.  And I learned.  And I grew.  Thank gawd for having the time, space and energy to change (#peace to Lauren Olamina).

Great things are coming in the new year.  Along with regular Friday posts, AMC 2012 is on its way, and we will be there.  A new #AntiJemima is in the works (#peace to Dove + Mdot) and we look forward to working out her kinks and introducing her sometime next spring.  Best yet, Kismet is taking the #AntiJemimas on the road; she may be presenting at a conference near you!  Stay on the look out.

I’m taking a break, but I’ll be back on the 13th.  Until then, enjoy the posts above, check out the Top Posts in the sidebar, or leave me a note on Tumblr or Twitter.

And enjoy your Capricorn Season too.  Be good….

abrazos,

Kismet

Never mind.  News about black folks (read: African-American)  is capital these days.  Especially news that appears to cross conversations occurring within the community with the megaphone of an unsympathetic outsider.  I’m not a Google spider, but I can only imagine a certain host website exploded its monthly click and traffic quota this month.  And I won’t help since there are so many amazing critiques floating about.*

What did not get much burn this week was this:

South Korean women forced into wartime sexual slavery held their 1,000th weekly protest outside Japan’s embassy yesterday, demanding compensation and an apology from Tokyo as they have since 1992.

The Japanese military forced Korean women to work in brothels during World War II.  Known as “comfort women,” silence surrounded their ordeal for decades.  In 1992, a group of the remaining women staged a protest outside of the Japanese embassy in Seoul, asking the Japanese government to admit wrongdoing and offer reparations to the survivors.  The protests have happened every Wednesday since.  Estimates on the number of women coerced, kidnapped and otherwise held against their will is in the 200,000s but only 63 are still alive.  WSJ reports that that the oldest woman, Kim Soon-ok, used sign language to communicate.

“Five former comfort women attended, sitting in chairs and covered in blankets. They wore a yellow vest with the sign that says “Honor & Human Rights to Halmeoni (Grandmothers).”

I’m sorry, but anything involving elder women of color being radical, being insurgent, sharpening their machetes, running for their guns brings me to damn near tears.  And these women have been out there every week.

Every. Week.  One thousand times.

“The highlight came midway through when a bronze sculpture was unveiled as a tribute to the comfort women. The statue is of a young girl in a hanbok, or traditional Korean dress, sitting on a chair. It was placed permanently on a sidewalk across the street from the embassy.”

One thousand and one is next Wednesday.

Read the rest at WSJ. Give this article some traffic.  We can discuss the possible impact of Skype and good grades on poverty some other day.

Um, this happened:

Byron Thomas is 19, black, a freshman at the University of South Carolina Beaufort and a proud Southerner. He hung a Confederate flag in his dorm room window until the university asked him to take it down because several people had complained about it. (The university later stepped back from the request, saying all students have the right to free speech.)

“I know it’s kinda weird because I’m black,” Thomas said in an iReport he submitted. “When I look at this flag, I just don’t see racism. I see pride, respect. Southern pride, that’s what I see.”

“Ignorance gave that flag a bad name, ignorant people like the KKK,” he told CNN’s Don Lemon.

And this happened:

In April 1865, the United States was faced with a discomfiting reality: it had seen 2 percent of its population destroyed because a section of its citizenry would countenance anything to protect, and expand, the right to own other people. The mass bloodletting shocked the senses. At the war’s start, Senator James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina, believing that casualties would be minimal, claimed he would drink all the blood shed in the coming disturbance. Five years later, 620,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulys­ses S. Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse” invited the damnation of history. Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.

Sir, say that again?

Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.

Ahh.  So what you mean is, the Civil War was about slavery.

I almost never enter these debates.  I do slavery.  Not just the South.  Not just antebellum America. Not even just early African American  history.  I. Do. Slavery.  And like all systems of abject and absolute injustice, slavery eventually had an end.  And, in the United States, slavery ended because of the Civil War.  And the Civil War occurred because of slavery.

Let me say that again.  Slowly:

Slavery was a system of abject and absolute injustice (Read: It was not benevolent or paternal or Christanizing or whatever else Ron Paul or Michele Bachman are talking these days).

Slavery eventually ended (Read: Five centuries after its start–and only after small and large revolts by black slaves on four continents, and political organizing by free, freed and enslaved blacks on four continents, and political organizing by liberal-minded whites on four continents, and the rise of an economic system (capitalism + wage labor + colonialism in Africa and South Asia) that could sorta-kinda replicate the profits and the labor system but without all the nasty guilt of, ya know, bondage–slavery ended).

In the United States, slavery ended because of the Civil War (Read: Lincoln wrote the 13th Amendment only after years of bloody battle and only after he realized there was no way he was going to keep the Union together without sweeping the South’s prime labor system out from under itself without having more troops, i.e. black troops enlist and fight for the Union for their own freedom.  And then those troops, black and white, had to go ahead and win that war to make that amendment a reality).

The Civil War occurred because of slavery (Read: Lincoln wrote the 13th Amendment only after he realized there was no way…blah blah blah… There was no way on God’s green Earth the South was going to give up slavery without a war and there was no way the Union could remain viable as long as slavery remained acceptable, condoned and institutionalized within its borders)

Got all that?

Because the last one is a doozy.

The Confederate flag only exists because of the Civil War.  It was created to represent the South at a time when the region was willing to kill for the right to enslave (and rape and maim and kill) other people.

You can say what you want about what the flag means now.  I live with a southerner.  I’ve heard it all.  But the history of slavery and its end is disgraceful to EVERYONE on either side of the Mason-Dixon line.

There is nothing post-racial or post-black enough on this planet to redeem that bloody piece of saltired fabric.  The only way to endow a symbol so afflicted with “pride and respect” is to participate in a willful act of collective amnesia:

We knew, of course, about Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. But our general sense of the war was that a horrible tragedy somehow had the magical effect of getting us free. Its legacy belonged not to us, but to those who reveled in the costume and technology of a time when we were property.

Our alienation was neither achieved in independence, nor stumbled upon by accident, but produced by American design. The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.

Coates’ essay, “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” is in the Civil War issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

Unidentified black soldier dressed in Zouave uniform / Library of Congress / Posted in "Beyond 'Glory'" @nytimes Disunion Blog

Thomas is too young and too ignorant and this story is too sad.  I will not roast him.  Besides, his mama and daddy got this:

I might not put it back up now because my parents are disappointed in me. They’ve said I can do what I want but I want them on my side. I want them to see it as trying to make a change for my generation. I’m sorry if I’m making my family look bad.

(Mmmhmmm!)

And the truth is:  Thomas is our mistake.  We decided that history shouldn’t be taught in schools with the rigor it ought to be.  We decided that slavery–and, hell, these days, the civil rights movement–is a thing of the past and we’d better not rehash it.  And I don’t mean we as in the black community.  We as a society are flushing critical thinking and the ability to do thorough, independent research down the drain by putting our educational resources behind paywalls, by gutting our public schools and by turning higher education into debt servitude.  We’ve caged the production of knowledge so nicely that accessing the most current research on any subject outside of the university setting is like trying to get from Dayton to New Greenwich with only a day’s time to spare.

I assume Coates meant, in general, black people don’t study the Civil War.  Because when it comes to the Ivory Tower, there are a number of African-American scholars studying the Civl War.  The phenomenal black woman historian of slavery Thavolia Glymph (Duke University) is in the midst of a new project on the experience of women during wartime–she presented a tragic and powerful piece on women, rape, and violence in contraband camps at the 2011 annual meeting of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.  Julie Saville (University of Chicago) wrote the authoritative text on the impact of the Civil War & Reconstruction in South Carolina.  Elsa Barkley Brown’s classic essay, “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition From Slavery to Freedom,” on black women’s political behavior after the Civil War is well cited and well circulated among black feminists doing political history and theory.  Regardless, Coates is right about one thing.  The classic works, the ones scholars, publishers and journalists continue to turn to, are written by white men: Eric Foner, Steven Hahn and James McPherson (who Coates cites) to name three.

Either way, much of this work sits in bookstores or, more likely these days, university press warehouses, waiting to be purchased.  But not by individuals–for the price of a paperback these days I could get a Busboys and Poets pizza and a Coke to wash it down.  And not by public libraries.  Those bastions of independent learning are closing left and right because cities can’t afford to keep them open.  Perhaps not even by university libraries, who are cutting back on print requisitions in favor of electronic versions, shifting even more of the cost of books (+ Kindle or other ereader)  onto the backs of the consumer.

And not by Thomas–who may not even know these books exist.  Like so many college freshman, he may be just learning how to use his library and distinguish primary sources from secondary ones.  That was a snark free statement–I know of what I speak.

So for those of us who DO study slavery and the Civil War, who are educators, who are citizens of color in this nation, what role do we play in this brave new world?  The one where books cost a lot and the knowledge we produce is bound up in copyrights and contracts?  The one where our own children and grandchildren can proudly proclaim they see uncomplicated “Southern pride” in a flag created to be the banner of a nation in which they were never meant to be more than perpetual slaves?

Bonnie (Kat Graham) and Emily (Bianca Lawson) in CW's Vampire Diaries

I spent a good chunk of my Thanksgiving break falling into the CW’s Vampire Diaries (thank you @Netflix).  In the process I turned Little Sis, T the Great and Nuñez Mom into fangirls and addicts.

I didn’t mean to get sucked in.  I cut my tween Sable Fan Gyrl teeth on the original Vampire Diaries trilogy (plus one post mortem) by L. J. Smith.  And when the CW series started, I was determined not to watch because it couldn’t possibly be as amazing as the books were.  I was convinced the casting was all wrong and a little pissed the disgusting success of Meyer’s Twilight was the only reason anyone even seemed interested in L. J. Smith fandom.

I was stupid, ignorant and wrong all at once.

I spent the weekend re-reading Smith’s series.*  It reads just as well as it did when I was a young adult.  And Smith’s Vampire Diaries are “feminist” in the sense that the main character is female, aggressive ( especially in pursuit of her main man, Stefan), sexual (if “sinking fangs into” isn’t a metaphor for penetration, I don’t know what is) is a leader in her community and that her leadership comes from a strong work ethic, ability to organize on the ground and the way she commands attention.  Consensual and non-consensual sexual interactions of the fanged and unfanged variety run through the series, as they should in any YA novel, and the “bad guys” (Tyler and Damon) play their role by getting all rapey and forcing intimate interactions.  If fashionable is a feminist trait for you, then this book is also “feminist” in that regard.  Much ado is made about the way clothes and clothing mold to the bodies and personalities of our young protagonists.

But the main female characters are Magical White Women and there is nothing feminist about that.  Elena, Meredith, Bonnie, and Caroline are fashionable, beautiful, and just domineering enough to get the guy but not scare him off (of course, they each need rescuing at some point).  Their “beauty” in the books is premised on typical genre tropes–long, flowing hair, slender bodies, white, translucent skin, etc.  Those who do not fit this image are pointed out for some reason:  Bonnie has short curls but she recently cut her hair; Meredith is olive skinned but “elegant” and “exotic;” Caroline’s curves and sensuality seem to foreshadow the betrayal and scheming she will eventually be at the center of.  And Elena’s immense focus on getting a man (Stefan), keeping a man, or spending time only with her man played closer to a Bella-and-Edward pattern of intimate relations than I like to admit.

Most important, there are zero people of any color.  In Fells Church, Virginia?  Meredith is ambiguously “olive” but otherwise the absence is obvious.  And I could forgive it when I was a pre-blackness, pre-Butler fledgling but it is too obvious for me to ignore now.*

And yes, this IS the decisive unfeminist element.  By not bringing up the issue of race in a southern town, Elena is able to act out a comfortable, middle-class, pre-Civil War property-owning, summer in France, Ivy League aspirations existence where the only question of status, hierarchy or socioeconomic position is whether a family is directly or indirectly descended from a town founder.  Who are the janitors?  Who are the maids and the babysitters?  Who lives on the other side of the tracks?  How’s that desegregation going?  Hell, who were the town founders…and how many slaves did they own?

In other words, by ignoring race, the books are able to ignore a whole host of issues that could have added depth to the setting but would certainly have distracted from the overarching girl-and-two-brothers love triangle.  Ignoring race also allows Elena’s confidence, popularity and assertiveness to appear natural by erasing the trappings of entitlement and never placing Elena in the position of deconstructing where her privilege (or clean shirts) come from.  In other words, the link between her upper-middle class upbringing and her social status among students at school is never discussed much less questioned.  Imbued with WASPy confidence, Elena is free to participate in what is a pretty unhealthy preoccupation of chasing down Stefan and still appear “feminist.”

In short, the books are good but they aren’t perfect.  And they definitely aren’t worth shunning a TV series for.  Like I said, stupid, ignorant and wrong.

I also re-read Arturo Garcia’s great piece, “White Vamps, Black Witches: Race Politics and Vampire Pop Culture” via @Racialicious:

“Because here is a show about a small Virginia town (Mystic Falls) that is, yes, overrun by hot vampires, but also obsessed with its past. Its’ Civil War past, to be precise. And not just the mythic/mystical town, but the show itself is obsessed with Scarlett O’Hara et al. There are frequent flashbacks to times of crinolin and Confederate soldier-y. In fact, back when he wasn’t, er, un-dead, hottie Damon was a Confederate Soldier. Yet, we are pointedly told that Damon quit the army because he “did not agree with their ways” (huh? because he was against slavery? spit it out, writers!)

There are also references to a Black woman/witch named Emily (pictured above in bonnet, foremother of hazy witch Bonnie) being the ‘servant’ of the super-baddie and super-skinnie white vampire chickie Katherine. Yet, despite both the show and the town’s historical obsessions, not once do I think the word ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ is ever used. (Nor do we ever get close to finding out how, in Civil War era Virginia, an Asian woman and her daughter could own a store, and said Asian woman could romance a white ‘founding father’ of the town. REALLY, writers? You think us Asian folks could just sweep into town in our hoopskirts and set up shop in the 1800′s? Gimme a break.)”

Reading this, the Sable Fan Gyrl hit me up:

Vampires and witches + the history and memory of slavery?  Fandom and genredom + African-American/Afro-Atlantic history?  Say again?

So here I am.  Finishing up Season 1 and well on my way to tackling Season 2.

So far?  I agree with Garcia.  I am doing too much work trying to make the connection between race, slavery, history and the characters in the story.  And while I do think Tituba is mentioned once in a very casual, off-hand way (they should have dropped bombs all over her name; that was a baaaaaaad black gyrl), Bonnie mentions her ancestor Emily from “Civil War” as opposed to a more familiar expression “slavery days.”  The antebellum scenes are appropriately gauzy and Gone with the Windsy and I’m sure when the season first aired unschooled teenagers everywhere sighed and ooohhhed and “oh, the fashion”-ed all over their TV screens.  Bonnie is also light-skinned enough for Little Sis to call her ambiguous.  I don’t agree but there are clearly issues of color and race in Hollywood (shocker).

And do they get the slavery stuff right?  Well….

RIGHT: #Tituba

If we assume that my ears weren’t playing tricks on me and that my brain is doing the right kind of work, Bonnie is descended from Tituba, the “Indian slave” of Salemite and witch burner Samuel Parris.  I wrote about Tituba and race and memory here but that she may have been of Native American as opposed to enslaved African in the Caribbean descent is not an issue IMHO.  Neither would change Bonnie’s fundamental characterization one jot–her descendants would almost certainly have blended into late seventeenth- early eighteenth-century slave or servant communities and those communities were majority of color.  The idea that Tituba fled Salem and had a family elsewhere is also reasonable although we have no documentation of the same.  Plus the idea of legacies of family magic fits nicely with existing folklore about Salem women, and Native Americans and African women and men enslaved in the United States.

WRONG: #Tituba

But really, Tituba?  You and your family members fled Salem trials….to Virginia?  You, an enslaved woman of color, went SOUTH to escape persecution?  Now why the hell would that happen?  And how, with no freedom papers to travel with or protect you upon arrival from re-enslavement would you head SOUTH?

And no, I will NOT assume that Tituba and family couldn’t have known what Virginia was like in the 1690s (in case you are wondering, it was a swampy, penal, violent hell hole servants and slaves, black and white, spent a lot of time trying to run away from; no gauze or Brett or Scarlett here).  That would presume Tituba wasn’t sharp enough for her own good–and to have Bennetts that survived slavery and segregation into the second millenia, Tituba would have to have been wicked sharp.

Assuming Tituba didn’t know what Virginia would be like, didn’t know that she was more likely to be enslaved and stay enslaved in Virginia than say, in New York, where a critical mass of free people of color left over from the Dutch regime lived and worked…well, that would be #rude.

Or assuming that, as a “good” domestic, Tituba didn’t know than she’d better eavesdrop like her life depended on it, follow gossip, watch out for runaways (and for how runaways were caught), pay attention to what whites said and how they said it, look for allies in servants or slaves, learn about the lay of the land…even more #rude.  Slaves survived slavery by building community.  Period.  And community building is work.  Period.  The  only way this storyline works is if, as Garcia noted, we don’t look too hard at the connection or we do our own work to fill in the blanks (i.e. Maybe Tituba and company headed to New York and she purchased her freedom and then ended up in Virginia…or something….)

RIGHT: #EmilyTheHandmaiden

Emily Bennett, Bonnie’s Civil War ancestress is introduced as Katherine’s handmaiden not her slave.  She could be both and this is another example of the show avoiding the whole race/slavery thing.  But the handmaiden bit does function against the history.  By 1860, 10% of Virginia’s black population was free and free black communities were well established in cities like Petersburg and Richmond.  Then again, Katherine, “Atlanta orphan” that she is, could have brought Emily with her from there where only .8% of blacks were free.***  Then again again (see what I mean about doing a lot of work), Katherine, undead creature of the night that she is, could have brought or bought Emily who knows where.  New Orleans?  Charleston?  France?  The point is, Emily could be a free woman of color employed by Katherine or a slave and neither would change the storyline…at least not Season One’s story line so far.  I’ll keep you posted.

Last but not least….RIGHT/WRONG: #BonnieBallin

This had better be fleshed out as the series goes on, but I’m struck by how class and blackness is represented in the show even as it’s juxtaposed against a slave past.  Grams (Jasmine Guy) is a university professor who teaches occult.  Bonnie attends what may be the only high school in town but she certainly has no problem being part of the in-crowd which, unlike in the books, is more clearly distinguished by those who have wealth, those who are descended from the founders, and those who are not townies (see: Vicki and Mike vs. Tyler and Elena).  It makes me wonder how they did that and who they are within the community as a whole.  Is there a broader community of color the Bennetts belong to?  If so, how is their socio-economic status measured against that community?  Yes, their economic comfort is easily explained with magic.  Sure, they could have just wished wealth and property into their laps.  But it could also be explained if Emily was a free woman of color.  The connection between contemporary black wealth and free status during slavery is not discussed as often as it should be.  Either way, this could be right or it could be wrong and it is the best example yet of how a trip into the murky waters of race and the less murky if more sordid history of slavery could really add depth to the characters and the show.

Like I said:  I’m still watching.  But good lawd, the show is an improvement on the sries.  Actual characters of color–hell yes.  A renewed link to southern history (albeit watered down to translucence)–hell yes.  Bonnie lights fires and explodes jewelry with her brain, Emily is played by Bianca Lawson (Whedonites will know her as Kendra from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), her grandmother is played by Jasmine Guy and apparently Persia White pops in as her mother in later episodes?  Hell friggin yes.

Black women and gyrls who fight back and aren’t afraid to get dirty but are still fun and sexy (and jeezus, Lady Guy, you are fierce!) and on network TV?

#FTW

I’m spanking myself for letting my own memories be so…well…so Gone with the Windsy.  Boy oh boi, sometimes loving the past is a tricky, thorny thing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*I re-read Smith’s original four books: The Awakening, The Struggle, The Fury and Dark Reunion.  I haven’t delved into the new crop of books she’s released.  And given the genrecrack the original books are to me (I finished all four in 24 hours), I think the rest will have to wait for summer.  One must manage ones addictions after all.

**The rest of Smith’s 1990s catalog isn’t quite so whitewashed.  Dee from The Forbidden Game Trilogy is the main character’s black best friend and a sprinkling of black characters appear in the Night World series.  But the main female characters are almost always white or European descent.   

***Stats via Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters : The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 137.

Magic is a funny thing.

At a brunch meeting with Allied Media Conference folks, one of the attendees commented on making IT more accessible: “because everyone starts from zero.”  When we began sharing stories about bad experiences with tech support, Macforums and Genius Bars, someone else remarked:  ”It’s like magic.  They wave their hands and its fixed.  But you don’t know how they got there.”

Genius Bars are on par with the DMV on my list of Least Empowering Places To Go.

And the metaphor was perfect.  Every time we enter words into a Google search, we are visiting an anonymous diviner, asking them to read our palm and guess (using the clues we unwittingly give them) what it is we really need to hear.  The average Google user doesn’t know how an online search works.  And we might not always trust the answers Google gives us, but absent a good counter-argument, most of us leave the page resolved to accept what we heard.

Those who code are something like oracles, dealing in 21st century runes and hieroglyphs, praying the gods of net neutrality will answer.

Or–if knowledge is power and the symbology of html is only one way to invoke it–they are the closest thing alive to wizards.  And Steve Jobs is their Merlin.

Magics, literacies, intelligences and technologies.

I know there are political economy folks who would discuss technology, knowledge and specialization in terms of capital, capitalism, commodities, markets and productive bodies.  But the Sable Fan Gyrl also recognizes the mystical, and the mystery of smoke and mirrors that makes certain people invisible and gives others power.

Either way, is there such a thing as “tech justice?” If there is, it’s about more than providing access.  It’s about making that access meaningful and sustainable by redistributing tech knowledge.

In other words, helping wizards become commoners and commoners become gods.

Jeezus.  I sound like an N.K. Jemisin novel.

#Win

Today I stopped and stared at a carpet.

I was at the @CorcoranDC’s 30 Americans exhibit.  I’d just passed through a gallery featuring works by Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon and William Pope.L.  But now a carpet dominated the entire length of one wall, with a single strip of tattered and stained material extending into the path of patrons, guarded by black, rubber bumpers:  Rodney McMillian’s, Untitled (2005).

I’d originally passed it by.  How does an old, ugly carpet compare to Carrie Mae Weem’s portraits?  Or Glen Ligon’s Mirror (2002)?  Or Nina Chanel Abney’s caricatures?   Granted, Abney’s twisting lines and bright circus carnival colors assaulted me if I focused too closely.  And the topics were strange.  Ghosts emerged from dress ties and the tails of animals.  Jagged teeth gaped and spread into red, wet smiles.  Disturbing.  But interesting.

As interesting as the suit made of sequins, beads and old leg warmers.  As interesting as the portrait of an impressively masculine black body draped in white cloth, silver vines and pink flowers.  As interesting as a Kara Walker silhouette–and not nearly so problematic.

In other words, I could deal with disturbing if it was interesting.  I could even be proud of disturbing if it was interesting.  And I wanted to be proud of all of the black artists on display.   The 30 Americans being featured happened to all be of African descent.  Some (Lorna Simpson, Gordon Parks, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kehinde Wiley) were well known.  All are under exhibited because it is still a novelty for African American artists to be featured in and of their own right:

We decided to call [the exhibition] “30 Americans.” “Americans,” rather than “African Americans” or “Black Americans” because nationality is a statement of fact, while racial identity is a question each artist answers in his or her own way, or not at all. And the number 30 because we acknowledge, even as it is happening, that this show does not include everyone who could be in it. The truth is, because we do collect right up to the last minute before a show, there are actually 31 artists in “30 Americans.”

—Rubell Family, November, 2008

These artists represented some of the best artists of African descent in the U.S.  And on this fine fall day, I was one of many bodies of color walking through this art gallery.  So what if this was only because the Corcoran Gallery happened to be offering free admission for FotoWeek DC.  So what?

Didn’t matter.  On this fine fall day, I was witnessing representative artists–and I represented the best of us too.  I was a Smart Negress.  The kind who goes to (free) galleries on the weekend, who walks through ever so quietly and patiently, who contemplates with pointed silence the images on the walls and who would be damned if she let even the security guards of the gallery see her act out of pocket.  Nope.  Good behavior only in this here bastion of privilege and wealth and elitist curatorial power.

Then I’d turned the corner…and run into a carpet.

Before I could stop her, a little, not very nice voice in my head cranked up:

“See, this is why we can’t have nice things.  What is this carpet doing here?  Who the hell thought that an old, musty, stained, frayed piece of shit like this ought to be hanging in an art gallery.  See, this is what white folks think of us and our art, they just take any old thing and any old Tom, Dick or Harry can toss some paint on a wall and claim that its (black) art because of the color of his skin because white folks just don’t understand….”

I ignored the voice long enough to read the blurb beneath the title and the artist’s name.  But I did not look at Untitled (2005) for any longer than it took to walk around it to the Kerry Marshall vignette on the other side.  I walked very carefully around the outstretched lip of rayon (or whatever carpets were made of in 2005) and tried to put some distance between it and me.  I tried to focus on the little pink hearts that floated and the black face against grey river on the opposite wall…

The carpet, in the meantime, just waited.  I felt it at my shoulder.  It didn’t leer.  It didn’t loom.  It waited with the patience of a thousand black grandmothers, a thousand Great Migrations, a thousand gallons of Pine Sol’d bucket water and bleach and elder women on their knees with yellow gloves scrubbing.  Scrubbing stains out.

“You read the blurb,” the little voice said.  ”You did your Smart Negresse duty admirably.  Keep it moving.”

But I’d glance at it from the corner of my eye.  Embarrassed.  Wrinkle my nose.  Turn away.  Turn back.  Frown at it.  Glare at this especially black stain and listen to the little voice in my head complain that someone–probably some poor black folk, probably some nigger in some ghetto somewhere–didn’t know how to rub two pennies together and buy a gallon of bleach.  Turn away in shame.  At myself.  At my people.  At a long history of internalized disaffection and neglect.

But then I’d turn back again.  Curious.  Because something in its threads was singing to me.  Across blood, across soap, across lye and smelling like talcum powder and old cigarette smoke.  Something in Untitled (2005) was not telling me a story of systemic oppression turned inward and drunk down like poison.  It was telling me about this or that weekend at my father’s, running around the apartment, dropping pizza and ketchup and syrup on the rug despite the roaches that were likely creep in from parts unknown for a midnight snack because we were too busy laughing to care.  It was telling me of weekly chores and being made to vacuum walkway carpet so used and well loved the threads wouldn’t bounce back anymore.  It was telling me of days off from school watching my abuela scrub this stain or that spot, yellow gloves on wrinkled brown hands, nylon skirt over arthritic knees, trying to get under dirt that was not our own but she would punish anyway because it would be years until either of her daughters would afford a down payment on a house.  They did, eventually, but the wheels of economic boot-strappism turn slow.  Abuela arrived on the mainland from Puerto Rico when she was fifteen.  She never earned enough money to even dream of owning the property of her dreams.

Untitled (2005) was telling a story I was familiar with.  A story of family love and dispossession and hard work and being clean in-spite-of.  Of siblings who love hard and rowdy and rough.  Of small spaces packed with extended family.  Of bedrooms and trundle beds and sharing beds.  Of shifting furniture to make a space roomy, airier, softer, hotter, more owned because we had yet to own anything of our own and because we could not assume we ever would so we had to be happy, perfectly happy, Nikki Giovanni happy living in rented apartments now.  A story of foreign carpets in neutral shades that would never be white again but dammit if my mothers had anything to do with it, they would always, always be fucking clean….

It was as I turned back that I saw another young black woman, a slender and dark silhouette against the carpet on the wall.  She stopped at Untitled (2005) for the length of time it took to blink twice, stalked over to read the description, and stalked away.  A moment later she was back.

“Will you look at this?”

The young woman was dragging another young man with her to read the description.  Her companion looked uninterested but surprised at the energy and emotion behind her insistence.  She was animated.  ”Look!”

She gestured to the description in disgust and consternation.  Then they both looked at the carpet.  The young man bored but obedient.  The woman indignant.  ”I just can’t get with this one.  I just don’t understand it.”  The young man nodded but did not commit, did not speak.  He didn’t need to.  He sensed (and I sensed) that the woman had simply needed an audience for her outrage because in another moment she’d thrown her hands up, turned on a flourish, and was stalking her way into the next gallery over, dragging him along.  He was happy to go.  His face hadn’t changed since he arrived on the scene.

As she left, an elderly black couple turned the corner and walked slowly to the piece.  Black and stately, man and woman, they peered at the piece.  The woman moved to the description first, followed by the man.  When she finished reading, she very discreetly turned away from Untitled (2005) and moved towards the Abney caricatures, quick, quiet distance.  The man looked, regarded, but seeing his companion had moved on, followed her around the corner.  He looked back once.  She didn’t look back at all.

I watched and witnessed.  Untitled (2005)’s siren song had long since driven the little voice into its usual oppressed silence in the back of my brain.  And I was still ashamed; but now for a different reason.  I was ashamed of my reaction and my failure and my lack of self awareness.  I’d said I could deal with the disturbing, the grotesque, erotic and flagrant as long as it was interesting.  I didn’t say I could deal with my own history, tacked on a wall, right here for these high and mighty white curators to see.

But you don’t choose what your art is.  Your artists do.  And you don’t choose your history.  You are born into it, you inherit it.  You disown it at great, great risk.

I stopped and stared at a carpet today.  And I fought it.  But it brought me back.  And it felt like home.

In many of Rodney McMillian’s enthralling instillations and performance pieces, he ignites our sensory functions as much as he does our cerebral ones. Whether it’s an empty, soiled upholstered armchair or floppy, cut-out canvas of the Supreme Court Building, his works evoke a melancholy past of bygone glory days as he depicts the emotional void. Still, there’s often a socio-political edge to his works, as they often touch upon important events and people who are sometimes omitted from conventional historical records.

Let’s hope so.  Because me, Tony Stark (Anthony Otero), La Bianca (Bianca Laureano) and La Republica Detroit (Violeta Donawa) have formed like Voltron–if Voltron knew how to cook arroz and collard greens with platanos and ran new media projects on the side.

I like Tony’s intro so I’m gonna steal it from his blog:

We are of the mind set that neither of us can educate alone. All of us on this team believe that alone we can only reach just a few people, but together we can be extraordinary. So when we formed, it was out of the belief that @beingafrolatino was bigger than all of us. Over that last few months we have been working together on twitter and over tumblr to educated awareness and show the injustices of discrimination….

Meet the team!

Anthony Otero is Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian that was born and raised in the Bronx, NY and currently a staff member at Syracuse University. He is one of the co-founders of The LatiNegr@s Project. A constant writer, he is currently working on his first book of poetry called “My Twisted Life Through Lines of Poetry” set to come out in 2012 and created the blog Inside My Head.

As one of few Latino administrators at Syracuse University, he become an adviser to many Latino students and Latino student organizations. Anthony also helped create the Latino Heritage Month celebrations that still occur today. He took graduate courses in Cultural Foundations of Education and finally understood that what it means to be Afro-Latino after soul searching through research papers. This sparked the creation of all his blogs including the newly retitled Tumblr site: Black, Brown, and a little Mestizo. He also created the @beingafrolatino twitter account as a way to promote and unite Afro Latinos.

Bianca I. Laureano is a first generation Puerto Rican sexologist living in NYC. Raised in the Washington, DC area in an activist environment, Bianca is the daughter of an artist and educator and a product of the public school system. In the field of sexuality for over a decade, Bianca has worked with and taught youth of Color, working class communities, speaks at national and international organizations advocating sex-positive social justice agendas. She has presented both locally and internationally on various topics concerning activism, Latino sexual health, feminisms, youth and hip-hop culture, Latinos and race, Caribbean cultural practices and sexuality, dating and relationships, curriculum development, reproductive justice and teaching.

She’s a board member at the Black Girl Project, doula with The Doula Project, co-founder of The LatiNegr@s Project, and Monster Girl. Bianca is an instructor and a freelance writer and was awarded the 2010 Mujeres Destacadas’ Award (distinguished woman) from El Diario/La Prensa for her work in sexual health. She hosts the website LatinoSexuality.com and identifies as a LatiNegra, media maker, radical woman of Color, activist, sex-positive, pro-choice femme. Find out more about Bianca by visiting her website BiancaLaureano.com. Follow her on Twitter and Tumblr@LatinoSexuality

Violeta Donawa is a Detroit native, born to a Panamanian father and African American mother. As a doctoral student, she examines racial ideologies and paradigms, as well as the impact of social media on identification processes. She has two publications, entitled, “Exploring the Afro-Latino Presence: The Afro-Panamanian Experience in Michigan” in the journal, Negritud: Revista De Estudios Afro-Latinoamericanos and “Defining and Documenting Afro-Latin America” in the journal, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.

Raising visibility of the AfroLatin@ community has always been a passion. She has found multiple ways to integrate this passion into her everyday life through academia and social media. As a freelance writer and emerging blogger, she has contributed to the Voices from Our America ™ project, volunteered with The AfroLatin@ Forum, written for www.vidaafrolatina.com, and runs her blogLa Republica de Detroit.

Kismet Nuñez is a black and Puerto Rican woman of color insurgent who deploys 21st century forms of art, autobiography, and performance against the discursive terrain of race, sex and personality. With the help of new media, Kismet breaks herself into pieces to become more than her parts in a revolutionary act of defiance, affirmation & self-care. Kismet is a blogger, writer, student, teacher, researcher, historian, fangirl, lover, sister, daughter and everything in between. In 2008, she foundediwannalive productions, a social media collective specializing in radical black gyrl media, political education, sex positive empowerment and complete and utter disruption of the archive, academy and hu-MAN-ity as we known and understand it. iwannalive productions manages #AntiJemimas, a social media performance project.

Begun in 2010 out of an earlier blog project exploring self love (and hate) titled Self Care: Revise, Revise, Revise, the #AntiJemimas project is about infinite literacies, multiple beings and the conundrum of trying to build a real black gyrl in a world of 21st century digital engagement. The project’s goal is to circumvent the oppressive power of the iconic that traps woc bodies, sexualities and genders into roles labeled Only or Never. Today, #AntiJemimas has evolved into an online universe of blogs, Tumblrs and Twitters committed to the very hard work of building a real gyrl of color in a world of new media. You can find Kismet fomenting rebellion at Zora Walker, making gris-gris in the WOC Survival Kit, living on a distant star as the Sable Fan Gyrl, stroking her thighs asPretty Magnolia, or twiddling her thumbs on Twitter. Kismet also blogs at Nuñez Daughter, the base blog for #AntiJemimas. Founded in May 2008, Nunez Daughter is an experiment in digital autobiography and archive. It expands on thoughts formulated in a research paper titled, “‘I’m On to You:’ Troubling Performances of Race, Gender and Class.”

We are Team Being Afro-Latino. You can follow on Twitter or on Tumblr. Buckle your seat belts, it will an exciting ride.

I just returned from hearing Rita Dove, poet and professor, read from the published Penguin Anthology of 20th Century Poetry (which she edited).  She is full of fun and laughter and sarcastic good humor.  I would be her best friend if I could.  She signed my journal and left a blessing: “Fill these pages with your songs.”

Seeing her reminded me it is a gift I give myself when I visit artists who paved the way.  Rita Dove was the youngest U.S. Poet Laureate and the first African American woman.  She is a teacher and it showed in her performance and presentation.  I got home and pulled my old and just yellowing Vintage Book of African American Poetry down from the shelf.  It’s in my lap right now, balanced on my left thigh, and it smells a little like sweat and coffee grounds and dusty storage bins.

In the past, poetry was always my quiet art, an intimate ritual I did for myself and by myself.  Or for a few select people.  But poems were different.  Poems were open for all and they needed to be shared.  I made whole binders full of other peoples poems.  An amateur editor, I brainstormed ways to bind and redistribute poems I’d collected from volumes by Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Alexander, and Phillis Wheatley.  I didn’t understand publishing rights then, of course. But I understood that words were important and poems were meant to be given to people you love and there were not enough poets of color, women of color especially, for my taste in the textbooks being handed to me.

Years later, I’m still moved by the portability of poetry.  Poems move in more ways than one.

And they surprise.  Poems lead to each other and to other things.  When I opened the Vintage Book of AA Poetry, Jupitor Hammon, New England slave, Methodist preacher, early antislavery activist, was the first poet in the volume.  I do slavery so I was suddenly happy to be reminded that he existed, he was real.  Reading him again, I was also reminded how problematic he was.  Witness the vague condescension in his poem for Phillis:

“O, come, you pious youth! adore

The wisdom of thy God,

In bringing thee from distant shore,

To learn His holy word.

Slavery salvation memes abound.  And that’s only the first stanza.

But he lived.  He was real.  He was a slave and he was speaking and he was not a Toby-caricature of enslaved men.  Surprise.

This visit to Rita had already led me (back) to Jupitor when I turned to the section of her poetry and found this piece, in honor of Billie Holiday (surprise), dedicated to Michael Harper, co-editor of the volume (surprise) and whose last line Farrah Jasmine Griffin used as the title of her book on Billie which I finished a few months ago and loved, loved, loved:

Canary

For Michael S. Harper

Billie Holiday's burned voice
had as many shadows as lights,
a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,
the gardenia her signature under that ruined face.

(Now you're cooking, drummer to bass,
magic spoon, magic needle.
Take all day if you have to
with your mirror and bracelet of song.)

Fact is, the invention of women under siege
has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.

If you can't be free, be a mystery.

#Peace to the poets who unwrap our mysteries line by line by line.  Honored to share the Earth with you.

Leslie Brown

Thinking a lot of academy thoughts this week.  Reading Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower.  

Dr. Brown just articulated better than I ever could what it is like being a College Educated Negress:

Where can students of color get intellectual validation that does not require them to so fully assimilate that they lose the best of themselves, their families,and their cultures? It occurred to me that through grade school and high school we had learned to compete, to keep up, but not to surpass; to stand alongside but not in front; to fit in but not to reshape.*

Standing alongside you begin to know the discomfort of ghosts.

And that pressure to assimilate, to choose between where your family is and where you are…well.

Piri Thomas

That feels a lot like the dissonance of being raised under the determined, near frantic optimism of a colorblind, post-Movement, Puerto Rican mother and an African-American father seething with internalized racism in cocaine80s Chicago.

And that feels a lot like wanting things and not having them and striving for things and not getting them, and dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s and still watching the goal move further away again and again and again, and picking up Piri Thomas for help and picking up Cherríe Moraga for help and picking up, good gawd, and picking up and holding close and hugging Gwendolyn Brooks for help and good heavens almighty, it feels like picking up Octavia and picking her brain and reading every word and holding her hand when things were too much….

And it feels a lot like frustration and tastes bitter as blood.  Because Piri is dead now. And it took over 24 hours for an obituary to post.  And I never had a chance to tell him what his work meant to me.  And Gwendolyn is dead.  And she lived in Chicago.  And I, knuckle-head high schooler I was, missed the chance to tell her what she meant to me.  And Octavia is dead.  And she lived half a country away and I was never gonna get to tell her what she meant to me but damn if only I could have.

And….

And it feels like the cold that sweeps across the back of your neck when you realize a mentor you loved like a father…his facebook page is still active.  Active. Alive. Living.  And you want to post something but you can’t.  Because how do you tell someone that you are also active.alive.living now but only because they lived?  How do you tell someone that you have survived this far in part because of what they were and that you are remembering them all the time and regretting every phone call you didn’t make and even that doesn’t make you feel better because you know they knew that they knew that you knew you were loved anyway.  That nothing you could do could lose their love for you.

And it feels like ……..

But is also full of promise.

After all, here I am.  Writing stuff.  Grateful for things like Facebook profiles and black Latinidad Twitter communities and emails from mentors that affirm that “yes, I check it too” and voices who check in with me from across social media to say, “Hey there.  Hey.  Hear my voice.”

I am still here.  Writing stuff.  Thinking thoughts.  I haven’t disappeared yet.

#Lawd

*Leslie Brown, “How a Hundred Years of History Tracked Me Down,” Telling Histories: Black Women Historians and the Ivory Tower, 262