Category Archives: The Life/Work I Want to Live/Do

Black-Eye Peas for Native Sons and Daughters

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ist2_547632_black_eyed_peasIt is New Year’s Eve and so I am doing what everyone in my own family and many other African American families who I know do: I have started slow-cooking black-eye peas in a crockpot for my first meal on January 1, 2013 to bring in good luck. Various scholars have traced multiple Diasporic histories related to black-eye peas: a pre-travel fattening process for the enslaved Africans who left Goree Island to ensure their physical and psychic survival; the legume’s symbol of abundance in places like Senegal because they grow even in drought conditions and refertilize the soil with their nitrogen; and their role as a medium of exchange for the Orisha in Brazilian Candomble.  kadirThe beautifully illustrated children’s book, Heart and Soul, by Kadir Nelson, also introduces this New Year’s tradition to children.  These days, I think about how these kinds of rituals in my family marked us as working class rather than today’s media-overdetermination that black folk who grew up poor look like the pathological sensations we see on “reality TV” (which seem to represent the imaginations of a white media “reality”, 21st century Moynihans, really, more than anyone else.)

I no longer eat red meat (I am still making a slow turn to vegetarianism) and so, today, I look to Bryant Terry’s Vegan Soul Kitchen to understand the spices and meat alternatives that will give the peas that flavor that I remember from my youth.  Terry’s book was a gift from a vegan friend who was working/cooking through the entire book.  Terry’s recipe for Baked BBQ Black-Eye Peas/Boppin John (pages 143-144…and, yes, Boppin John is the remix of Hoppin John) comes with a listing of the necessary culinary ingredients, of course, but the recipe also comes with other emotional/psychic ingredients: suggestions for reading, seeing, and listening.  Terry’s soundtrack for Baked BBQ Black-Eyes Peas is none other than “Harlem” by Bill Withers:

AngelaYDavis-442x4501The visual encounter with this dish is “Portrait of James Baldwin” by Brett Cook-Dizney.  This Portrait is part of “The Models of Accountability series” which Cook-Dizney describes as his study of people who have been avatars for social change including people such as Nelson Mandela, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Thich Nhat Hahn, Caesar Chavez.  Cook-Dizney represents these avatars in spray paint on mirror with their written words and published texts attached to mirrored shelves at the base of each piece. The art, therefore, shifts and refracts through the mirroring of the viewer who is literally moving about and amongst the pieces. He wants us to see these avatars not as distant, abstract icons but as refractions of our ourselves.

0623The reading selection that Terry offers us is Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin.  As he himself attests in his introduction, Terry makes these suggestions in his cookbook as part of his intention to bring the culture back to agriculture, a sure connection to the cooking and foodways of my grandmother’s generation in the rural south. I have enjoyed this book and Terry’s recipes since I received this gift.  Given the history of black-eye peas for the African Diaspora and the fact that everyone in my own family has eaten them on New Year’s Day as far back as anyone can remember, it is only fitting that Terry’s black-eye peas come with a soundtrack, reading nourishment  from James Baldwin, and a visual arts system where the avatars that have gotten us here are ones that we should see in ourselves.  It feels like the right way for Native Sons and Daughters, to remix Baldwin’s coinage, to start off the new year.

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“Everyday Will Be Like a Holiday”

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This year, my father gave me money for Christmas since he seems to have given up all hope of buying me clothes, jewelry, electronics, etc.  After I opened the envelope, here is what our conversation was like:

You know you put money in this envelope, right?  I wasn’t gon tell you in case it was a mistake but I figured I better be honest with it bein Christmas and all.

Oh, naw, baby, that was a mistake.  Gimme that money back.

Ima put it in the mail for you right now.  I hope it get to you, cuz you knooooow how the post office be.

That’s pretty typical banter between my father and me, especially since he is becoming more and more like Fred Sanford with each passing year.  The banter has ALWAYS been like this, it pops off very quickly, and Christmas was never an exception.  The monetary gifts are a new thing but the wit, love, and laughter have been constant.

Many academics who I know will tell me that my nostalgia is romantic or maybe even essentialist.  But these people are not usually Black.  Or, if they are, I don’t really like or respect them very much (I may as well keep being honest).  Whether or not I am romantic or essentialist, I don’t really care about these elitist labels from people who divorce their thinking and intellectual work from everyday, social action and participation in real communities and neighborhoods (college campuses, volunteerism, and nuclear family life are not THAT.)  So I am proud to say that I remember the holidays fondly.  Material scarcity did not conflict with emotional abundance. After all, it didn’t take any money for my father to grant me my one Christmas wish: to let me hear Kurtis Blow perform my favorite Christmas song, the one that got me in trouble in school because those were the only lyrics I memorized:

Now, of course, I was about 8 years old and really excitable.  You have to realize that, for my father, this was quite a sacrifice, because his favorite Christmas song was none other than William Bell’s “Everyday Will Be Like a Holiday” and he kept it on rotation all day long too, to my obvious dismay given my emerging tastes.  And I had a lot to say about it too.

Legend has it, according to my father, that my uncle (one of his 7 brothers), could sing this song better than anyone in Alabama. I tend to take that seriously, since my uncles are not ones to give you a compliment when you do NOT deserve it and will, quite forthrightly and loudly, tell you when your skills are lacking.

There were, of course, commercial breaks from my father’s rotation of William Bell’s song.  That was when I would hear Charles Brown’s version of “Merry Christmas, Baby.”

Or… there were also times when I could hear my favorite “old-timey song” (as I called it back then) that my 8-year old self was willing to tolerate without loud objection: Diana Ross and the Supremes doing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Me”:

Now let my aunts, my father’s seven sisters, tell it, ALL of them can sing this song better than anyone anywhere.  I have heard them sing: I think they are right.

Convinced that Charles Brown was a woman with a scratchy voice, I always loved this line, my all-time-favorite Holiday words: “Well, I haven’t had a drink this mo’nin, but I’m all lit up like a Christmas tree…ooooh.”  At eight years old, I had no idea what these words meant but I could recite them.  And I could talk a lot of stuff too about all this holiday music that just sounded way too much like what my father was always playing: Motown, Soul, Blues… just…too… much! Like I said, I was young with questionable musical taste.  But if you were visiting my house, you would hear William Bell playing all day too.  And, before you walked out, you’d be twinkling, all lit up like a Christmas tree, and you might get some banter in between too (once again, I’m just being honest here).

As I closed out my 2012 Winter Solstice observance, I find myself nostalgic and it is a nostalgia of the utmost significance to me: it reminds me that in the midst of the most savage oppression, we can demand and participate in our own humanity.  We can laugh and help a little girl inject her generational, Black aesthetic into the groove and we can create an environment that sounds like love even when the rest of the world won’t sound that for us. These days I see these moments as incredibly radical.   Maybe that’s why my father liked William Bell’s song so much: maybe the challenge really is to make everyday like a holiday.   I’m glad my family gave me a set of memories and dispositions to point me in that alternate direction.

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Winter Solstice 2012: Tis the Season!

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SolsticeIf Thanksgiving perplexed me, then this Holiday season overwhelms me more. Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus, reindeer, and a host of 5-foot-tall Christmas Nutcrackers appear to be visiting Baby Jesus in a lit-up manger right up my block.  The owner of the home, Tom, was so happy putting it all together that it’s hard for me to even be mad at him. I must admit that I like watching people like Tom find such immense joy at what appear, to me at least, to be some of the tackiest, most contradictory aesthetic displays imaginable.

I have fond, childhood memories of this time: the kitchen of the aunt who helped raise me and the joy and laughter everywhere when we were stuck inside in the Ohio, winter months.  I have memories of my cousins, the single mothers, who always talked to me like an adult even when I was really young, explaining how they planned and saved money for their children’s gifts beginning in July and August.  They were all struggling in all kinds of ways but always saw to it that their children would smile every Christmas morning (it was only as an adult that I figured out that my mother was doing the same.)  It wasn’t about the gifts ever, just surrounding their children with the kind of wonder and awe that poor people are not supposed to experience. The financial planning that working class/working poor single mothers did back then during the holidays (no one I knew had credit cards) represents a financial genius that could re-organize our collapsing economic system, if that was what we really wanted!  A working class, single mother who is doing it all on her own, without the social imprint of needing male (sexual) attention or patriarchal protection, has a formidable skills-set, at this time of the year and every other time. So every year around now, I especially remember these women.  I certainly see and appreciate all of the listings of suggested eco/cultural/conscious gifts to buy during the holidays, but I also remember an anti-capitalist analysis of the greatest ploy in the Western world to keep today’s working class in debt.  It was young, working class black single mothers— my very own cousins who made me into the little sister who would carry their heart’s torch— who gave me this political lens.

At this time of year, I also turn my gaze to the Winter Solstice, thanks to the help of a college friend a few years back who has shared some of the most significant spiritual insights with me. Now, let me be clear. I am no Solstice Purist, Expert, or ardent Practitioner.  There have been times when I try to get out of Solstice work by seeking an astrological reading.  The results usually tell me that I’m stubborn, stank, and sometimes rather unyielding, things I already know.  I don’t get much from this information other than, perhaps, a justification for why I have a tendency to yell at folk in the NYC subway: “get…YO… a$%… out… the… way!”  (I mean, really, you canNOT stop and answer a text message on a subway stairway when 50 people are coming full force behind you!)   I have, thus, figured that I can’t really replace the opportunities that the Winter Solstice provides with an “astrological reading.”

The Winter Solstice takes place this year for four days and four nights, December 21 to December 24 (according to nautical calendars), the time when the sun is at its southernmost position. This is that time when the sun rises at the latest in the day and sets at the earliest of the entire year. The day is shortest; the night is longest. For the Ancients in Kemet, enlightenment is literally written into the cosmos, in this very movement of the sun and stars. Light gradually increases in the winter sunrise, hence, offering a kind of spiritual rebirth. This means that you can use the time of the Winter Solstice to discover your purpose and realize true spiritual power, but only if you slow down and tap into it.

9067250My ideas are shaped mostly from Ra Un Nefer Amen who makes a plea for intensive meditation during the Winter Solstice when the gates between the spiritual realm and the lived world are open (by spiritual realm, he means spirit, subconscious, or even what Jung called unconscious.)  Though I am not following his prescriptive formula for meditation at the Solstice, Ra Un Nefer Amen’s teachings seem invaluable, namely that we often live out a toxic program that we intentionally create for ourselves.  We are not passive onlookers of our own lives and instead invent and design our own programs of stunning self-destruction with the choices we make: how we spend our money, who we choose to have intimate relationships with, how we treat our bodies/our health, and how we approach or stall our work/career.  Since spirit carries out the behavior that manifests these negative things in our lives, then spirit is what we need to work on.  What makes ancient cultures important here (Amen’s focus is on Kemet) is that they believe the Winter Solstice was the time that the spirit could receive a new message and, therefore, discard old, toxic programming.  Getting rid of a toxic program is not an easy thing, a feat few people ever really achieve (and spend a lot of money on therapy for), hence, the importance and weight of the intervention of the Winter Solstice. These are all, of course, very simplistic lenses into what Kemetic philosophers like Amen believe and say, but you see where I am going here.

My Christmas TreeMy ruminations here on the Winter Solstice might seem strange or even offensive to friends who are, on one side, atheist or agnostic, and, on the other side, deeply committed to their specific church or religious doctrines.  I myself have not been fully acculturated into these belief systems and do not go any deeper than what I have said here. I intend no disrespect to anybody, only the suggestion that the ways the Ancients saw these coming days, the axes of the sun, the value of deep meditation, and the general process where you slowwww down can’t be all that bad.  I can’t see a more pressing need for exactly such a practice when all anyone seems to be doing now is spending money, accruing debt and interest on charge cards, running around frantically, or being angry at hyper-consumerism.  This seems like the best time for me to be tapping into who I am and all that I can still become.  Though I couldn’t articulate it back then, I now see the working class/working poor single mothers who cocooned my girlhood as women who must have been able to tap into a powerful site where their spirit resided.  Yes, they used their youth, radical black female subjectivity and working class consciousness to read their political environments brilliantly, but they also lived their lives from a powerful center/spirit.  There is just no other way that you can move the kinds of mountains they did without that.  As I finish my last days grading and work towards the challenge of reconnecting with my own spirit, I’ll be thinking of them.

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Power, Dominance & Acquiescence

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I often wish that I could be faster and more critical in how I respond to oppressive circumstances in my everyday life.  I admit that there are times when I am simply dumbstruck when I should be expecting foolishness and should, therefore, be able to respond much more quickly.  Instead, I just sit there stupidly wondering: what is goin on up in here?  I can forgive myself for being slow on the uptake, but I am beginning to question how many times I am not counter-acting/counter-thinking at all.

For some reason, today, my mind goes back to a professional conference that I attended at least three years ago now.  The panel discussion that I attended was designed to be a conversation about various issues related to the labor and organization of prominent college writing programs. It should go without saying, given the trends of this particular conference/ field, that the panel was all-white and predominantly male.  Like I said, I am used to those trends so this alone was not what bothered me.  One of the panelists, a well-regarded white male scholar/administrator (at least by some), who I will here call New Henrickson, rightly problematized the ways in which the teaching of writing in his program was gendered as female labor, a trend that scholars have shown to be dominant when looking at contingent/part-time labor in colleges today, especially when it comes to the teaching of college writing.  Then the scholar went on, in what he thought was a clever quip, to say that he felt like the main character from the HBO series, Big Love, Bill Henrickson (hence, the inspiration for my re-naming here).  The audience chuckled… but my jaw almost dropped to the bottom of my chair.  Did he really just say that? Does he NOT know that he is talking out loud and that, hence, people can HEAR him?  I never said anything to anyone, just sat there, with the violence of this discourse hanging over me.

I have never actually watched Big Love— I just know it was about a Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist and Republican senator in Utah and his many wives. Supposedly, there is good social commentary about male dominance and patriarchy in the series but I never sat through it long enough to find out.  The one and only conversation that I have ever had about New Henrickson’s comment at this conference was with another male scholar in the audience. This scholar was perturbed by the comment but mostly because his program was not given an award for its innovation the way that New Henrickson’s program had been.   It wasn’t a conversation that I could really relate to: such an award is not something I would ever covet if it is offered to white men who metaphor-ize themselves as polygamist heads-of-households in relation to the underpaid/under-valued women who do the bulk of the work in the U.S. of teaching college writing.  I am reminded here of Marc Bousquet’s work:

As for gender, the rendering of faculty positions to the extreme of economic irrationality (six courses a year for $15,000, eg)  assigns them disproportionately to women, especially persons–whether male or female–married to professionals and managers. The other, primary wage earner supports the economically irrational partner, a person teaching for what used to be called pin money. This structural feminizing of the job was traditionally associated with converting the positions formerly held by men (such as secretarial positions, once a high-status job) to those held increasingly by women… a “pyramid scheme” especially for women faculty.

Broadly speaking across many disciplines and institution types women still tend to disproportionately hold low-paying, low-status, insecure teaching-only or teaching-intensive jobs while men continue to disproportionately hold high-paying, high-status, secure research-intensive and top administrative positions.

When I look at Bousquet’s work, I begin to think New Henrickson’s quip— with all its attending meanings related to race, capitalism, and gender— may have been a soberly, accurate portrayal of the academy and the field.

So how did I handle this moment?  I stayed quiet and then always steered clear of New Henrickson, his mentees, and all of his homies.  All well and good, maybe, except that this is beginning to feel like selling out.  At what point does silence become the co-signing of hegemony? And at what point do women trade in this silence in order to acquire a kind of professional comfort and ease in their disciplines, even if it means they do so at the expense of their own bodies and minds?  New Henrickson is not of my generation but his misogyny is not done, especially in this world where it is rewarded (the award his program received is an accolade that surely fared him well in the institutional hierarchy in which he can now insert himself at his college campus.)  And while women of color may be reluctant to publicly critique male scholars of color for fear of the violent, black-on-black intra-fratricidal display it will offer to white audiences, women of color are not publicly criticizing New Henrickson either and it’s not always clear where the private critiques of his male comrades of color are.   Racial respect/nonviolence in white spaces is not the sole issue here.

I am not saying that I should have jumped up and slapped this fool in the mouth– either with my hands or with my words. Like I said, I am not quick enough for that anyway.   But it does seem that if I want to claim radical anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-heterosexist, anti-consumerist work, I need to reach a more definitive point where I say something, counter-theorize these very real and very everyday moments of epistemic violence, and/or set up intellectual-political shop elsewhere to really do the work that is needed.  That’s the best plan that I have for the present and future as of right now.  I am working on it!

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