To Shontae, Ciara, Anthony, Cherise, Kalima, Shahid, Tiara, Hakim, Hanid, Corey, Ahmad, Joshua, Zaahirah, Oshane, Joseph, Frantz, Takiyah,and Hadiyyah… much love to you all. I apologize for the misspellings here (and there are probably many, EVEN after Takiyah and Hadiyyah pulled me aside and gave me the necessary tutorial!) I especially appreciated the discussions we had about the role of materialism in preventing black communities from realizing and pursuing the political protest history that is our tradition.
Every semester, one of my students references or presents one of the following two poems by Maya Angelou: “Still I Rise” or “Phenomenal Woman.” I think back to the first time I heard those two poems and I remember their stunning impact on me too. Nevertheless, I get nervous now that Angelou’s work, especially these two poems, are completely commodified and co-opted such that any radical representation of black women in her writing is gone. Of course, nothing I am saying here is new. I have especially liked Cheryl Higashida’s discussion of Angelou in her book, Black Internationalist Feminism, where Higashida reads Angelou’s autobiographies as the legacy of black women’s work in the post-World War II anti-colonialist Black Left. Higashida achieves a nice balance: she acknowledges Angelou’s presence as a Pan African radical; she criticizes the ways that Angelou oftentimes undoes the collective action and consciousness of the Black Left by celebrating individualist (and, thus, capitalist/neoliberalist) triumph and achievement. These two poles do not have to be opposing though. Like I already showed just with black women’s scarf wrapping styles, you can be a bold and emboldened individual and part of a collective too: it just depends on the ideologies you use to situate that individuality. Black women are often co-opted by mainstream audiences who, in turn, force Angelou’s revolutionary politics into the background by only celebrating the notion of a rise of phenomenal individuals. Higashida gives me a way to resuscitate Angelou’s fierce Black Feminist Left/Internationalism since, more often than not, that is deliberately erased from view in public celebrations of her work, including those celebrations by mainstream black academics and popular black celebrities. This ain’t no surprise though now is it? Put a black woman’s words in the mouths of misogynistic men, undercover-racist white folk who just want folk of color to join the mainstream, or bougsie/wanna-be-rich-and-famous black folk and the message will surely lose its meaning. Hardly a coincidence.
This semester was a bit of a switch with the video below that one student asked us to watch in my class. This video features an interview with Maya Angelou after shock jock, Don Imus, authorized himself to call black women on the Rutgers Basketball team out of their names. In that interview, Angelou calls out black men who publicly call black women b**ches but who would never do such a thing with white women in power, giving the then president’s wife, Laura Bush, as an example. I found her most compelling when she responds to Russell Simmon’s comments (at 1:32):
In the beginning of the interview, Angelou erases racial and gendered specificity by calling all vulgarity the same and marking all speakers the same— that’s just not historically accurate as any rhetorician would tell you. But then the FIRE comes, you can even feel a palpable difference in her speech and vibe. As she states, if black men called white women in power B-words, they would see how powerful they are: “see how long you will live. There wouldn’t be enough rope to hang your butts.” This is Angelou at her finest: a poetic way to basically call these men cowards and coons. Angelou goes on to remind us that black women “are last on the totem pole” which means that “everybody has the chance to take a chance on us.” Again, Angelou at her finest: another poetic way to show that the deliberate degradation of black women by black men for public consumption (while being too scared to do the same with non-black women) only makes you a stupid fool and sell-out. This is the Maya Angelou that mainstream America doesn’t readily present to us: one who locates words and experiences in the unique bodies and historical experiences of black women. Like she says, there is a reason black men and white men feel so free and comfortable to call women of African descent B-words and no other group. She leaves it up to imagination and drops off a powerful suggestion at the end, at least this is how I hear it: keeping taking your chance by taking a chance on us and see how we handle your stupid butts!
What Angelou teaches me (and I would say that the same thing is now happening with Ntozake Shange and For Colored Girls) is that I must teach how and why black women’s writings get co-opted… and participate in uncomfortable conversations of how we ourselves participate in this. It ain’t just the rap video vixens who are out here shaking their behinds for public consumption and pseudo-access to white male power. It’s an important lesson for understanding capitalism, black women, and black women’s rhetoric.
Many of you already know that my mother lives with me now. After she lost her job in the recession crunch, I had to do some financial wizardry and move her from Ohio to Brooklyn and become a new head-of-household of sorts (I have always been able to make a dollah outta 15cents but this took a little EXtra creativity). As I get older, I realize that most of us daughters will be facing similar circumstances in caring for aging parents. My mother, however, does not consider herself aging so we go to a Jazz Brunch/Bar in Manhattan every Mother’s Day and by Jazz, I mean a real quartet that does covers like “All Blues” from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, NOT that Kenny-G-Twinkle-Twinkle foolishness. It has only been in the last few years that I have even been in the same city as my mother on Mother’s Day so I figure we may as well go all out (which, for my mother, also means eating my dessert.)
“Fruit of Generosity” by Leslie Ansley (exhibited at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in 2012)
I know Mother’s Day is mostly a Hallmark invention but I must admit that I like a day to put it all on pause for mothers. For me, that means all the women in my family who have raised me… which is a lot. I have strong memories of being a little girl and various adults, especially my family and close neighbors, asking me: “who keep you when your momma work?” OR “who keepin you right now?” (the second question was for when I was on a part of the block where I wasn’t supposed to be or at the corner store without permission). Who keep you? That’s always been a favorite expression of mine. No one in my family or immediate kin network ever asked “who babysits you?” I was never babysat, I was always KEPT. These are two completely different meanings that African American Language so brilliantly captures. It is hardly coincidence that in a world that will bomb 4 little girls going to Sunday School, reference nine-year old actresses with curse words, and shoot a teenager dead for wearing a hoodie that black communities would use language to create a different world for black children. In my case, one of my female first-cousins kept me (most often, a cousin who I call Lat or Janet) or one of my seven Aunties kept me (most often an auntie who I call Aunt MamaLee.) I also kept my little cousins and so did my mother– who is still called Auntie by these ex-in-laws even though my parents divorced when I was a small child. There is a philosophy of mothering that elevates the role of childcare done by women that goes far beyond any biological definition. And there is also a philosophy for how black children need to be raised and looked after: keeping black children is simply a different kind of love. It is more than merely sitting with them, teaching them, or taking care of them; it is a kind of valuing that only black communities have been willing to provide for black children. You keep the things that are most valuable; you do not discard them even in a world that encourages you to do so. If we weren’t so self-hating by regarding Black Language and Vernacular Culture as “improper”/street/slang, we would see a worldview contained in it that could sustain us.
This notion of KEEPING also makes me think of my sister-friends today. Most of us do not live near our extended families, not like the way we grew up. I see my sister-friends go to great lengths to choose black daycare centers for their children and black caretakers who identify with black culture and black womanhood. To me, they are looking for people who will keep their children, not babysit them or even teach them to read and write. After all, as researcher/academic/professional, I would not need any school to teach any child around me to read or write. I can do that much better. What I would need is a community that will provide something much more than skills-building and childcare services: a community that will keep its children in a world that discards them at every turn.
Pick yo afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side
You need to pick yo afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side
Well, If you don’t pick your afro, you gonna have one side hiiiiiiiigh…
That’s basically the trailer to Erykah Badu’s “On and On.” When I hear those words, one image comes to mind: my undergraduate students.
Last spring, a student did a presentation on Badu using the video to this song. The video is announced as a story that opens with the lines above. As soon as that third line hit, If you don’t pick yo afro daddy, you gon have one side hiiiiiiiigh, the class sang in unison. And then everybody just started laughing.
Yes, I was cracking up too, but I was also surprised… now hold up, yall— yall was only 2 years old when this song came out. What yall know about daddy’s afro being high? They ignored me except, of course, Aysha, who came to my office (and still on many other occasions) to tell me I was EXTRA (I was always extra: extra with the homework, extra with the assignments, extra with the discussion topics, extra with the earrings…. just EXTRA… I have come to love this word!) I get away with these kinds of comments as a college teacher, stuff I never got away with when I taught high school. During lunch, I always turned on the old school at noon on HOT 97 (my hip hop station back then) so when students finished eating lunch, many would come to my classroom. I should have known better but I was surprised when these students knew ALL of the lyrics to every and any Rakim or Sugar Hill or Roxanne or KRS-One song they heard, though many were not born at the time or, at least, they were still crawling in diapers. When I expressed my surprise, they got all personal, snapped on me because I grew up in Ohio, and accused me of trying to learn to pop-lock when they just came out the womb knowing Hip Hop. Yeah, they took it THERE. I was not phased though and would describe, rather rudely (with reminders of what they just had for lunch), the kind of excrement they had in their diapers while I was grown, understanding what I was hearing, and able to wipe my own behind… in Ohio. Not exactly one of my finer moments, I admit, but, hey, I wasn’t gon let them play me like that. Sometime you gotta do what you gotta do. Point is: there is a cultural apparatus and literate community here that recreates black experiences through music.
You don’t need to have been alive when Badu first came on the scene with that first album, Baduizm, (and every album thereafter) for it to make its impact on how you understand your life and the ways in which you understand being a black woman. With Badu, I see my students placing themselves into new aesthetic expressions, whether it be through body adornment, sound collaborations, or the crafting of one’s singing voice. Badu even designs new AfroDigital experiences to go along with her opening lament of a lost love or with her choral request that someone simply clap for her and have her back (see Badu perform “Window Seat” at the 2010 Soul Train Awards below). We seem to notice, maybe even over-notice, when young people of Afrikan descent gravitate to meaningless or, worst yet, offensive commercial musicians who often have very little to contribute in content or talent. When students start singing a song that came out in 1997 as if they have lived that moment with Badu (they were only 2 and 4 years old at the time), then, clearly, it is not accurate to think they are only gravitating to commercially successful artists who trade in poppy gimmicks for style, choose corporate branding over aestheticism and music, and pursue money rather than soul. I love when my students let me feel the ways that they are feeling those differences.
When I have students who are so deeply invested in a genre or musician that is literally before their time, I stop to notice these explicit ways that black communities sustain culture, memory, sound, and history. In this particular case, there’s a word for it: Baduizm.
Every semester, one of my students references or presents one of the following two poems by Maya Angelou: “Still I Rise” or “Phenomenal Woman.” I think back to the first time I heard those two poems and I remember their stunning impact on me too. Nevertheless, I get nervous now that Angelou’s work, especially these two poems, are completely commodified and co-opted such that any radical representation of black women in her writing is gone. Of course, nothing I am saying here is new. I have especially liked 
Pick yo afro, daddy, because it’s flat on one side
You don’t need to have been alive when Badu first came on the scene with that first album, Baduizm, (and every album thereafter) for it to make its impact on how you understand your life and the ways in which you understand being a black woman. 