Four Women - Black Girls Rock

We Collect Inspiration: Krishna

"You see, Arjuna, everyone has a duty; we all have a duty, and your duty, Arjuna, as a warrior, is to engage in battle and fight. It's your job my dear friend. But with that said, you must never engage in action or battle while being attached to the outcome of that action. Winning or losing is not what matters, since that is up to God alone to decide. What matters is that you fulfill your duty with honor, dedication, and humility."

~Krishna, Bhagavad Gita

I said I'm single

for my (single) ladies...enjoy! ;)

">

Impossible Choices

*minor spoilers ahoy*

“Learn well Jake Sully. Then we will see if your insanity can be cured.”

~Mo’at, Avatar (2010)

Overwhelmed with the need to write about Wench, I began this post on my iPod Touch notepad, on a flight from from New Orleans to Chicago. New Orleans, a city where, once upon a time, “wench” meant, as Dolen notes, “a black or colored female servant; a negress” but also where the ritual of sexual access, sexual labor, property in human bodies, domination and re/production ground to its ultimate conclusion. By the antebellum period, New Orleans hosted the largest slave market in the continental United States, an attendant continent-wide sexual traffick in “fancy” girls or light-skined female slaves, and le plaçage, a sophisticated social apparatus which paired affluent white men with local free women of color as consorts.

For years, the ghosts of slavery walked the bend of the Mississippi, whispered from the balconies of the Vieux Carré and slipped up through the steamy cement in Uptown or Marigny (they still do even though Katrina washed many into the waiting arms of their kindred at the bottom of the Gulf). I finished Part One in this context, on a weekday and in one swoop.

Afterwards, I forced myself to take a break. It was tempting to keep going because it was easy to look, hope and pray for the happy ending. But if Dolen continues to tell a story true to American history, or true to black women’s relationship to said history, then a happy ending may be long in coming.

There is a scene of visceral brutality near the end of Part One. Normally, I remember these scenes for the pose they strike within a story, the carmine brutality my mind plays and replays over and over. When this happens, the cerebral vanishes and I find it difficult to recall emotion or personality. I feel dizzy, a heavy pressure at the crown of my head. Or I want to vomit.

But I don't remember this scene for that. The physical reaction remained, yes. But under Dolen’s careful and unassuming hand, the violence of the encounter became less about the contours of a particular moment and more about the impossible choices women as slaves, as mothers, as raced bodies, as workers and as lovers, were/are forced to make over the course of their lives. Instead, the betrayal erecting the scene took my breath away as much as the result--the terrifying and impressive power of a slaveowner's retribution.

That power being necessary to maintain a system--in this case slavery--against the daily permutations of resistance and rebellion enacted against it--breaking dishes, brewing love potions, running away--but which seen in its raw form is still shocking. And effective. I empathized with Lizzie. I know that she weighed every move she made against the threat of violence against her light-skinned son and daughter back in the South. But a part of me also felt deeply for Mawu and affirmed her desperate fight to escape the regime before her stamina for resistance faded. And I know I may never forgive Lizzie for her betrayal. But I will want to. To choose your owner, your lover, the father of your children over your colleague, your sister, your friend...but don’t some of us do that every single minute of every day without feeling any need to justify it? That slavery as a legal institution in the United States ended in 1865 is beside the point. Segregation ended as a legal institution in the United States in 1964. And a contract, a law, a signed piece of paper does not unravel centuries of customary relations between white and black, male and female, mother and father and child.

Just as New Orleans “stank of the arousal of rape,” an aroma resplendent throughout the institution and which climaxed within the city's boundaries, so does the history of slavery unpack our current gender relations, sexual relations, color politics; strip us bare, naked, and raw; break the fetish down into its constituent parts--bone, teeth, hair, blood, earth. Dolen’s Wench reminds us that sex across and within color lines is never devoid of politics, never left to some amorphous feeling called love. And kinship is work, forged against all odds to save your own life because the consequence of failure is brilliant in its savagery. Love itself is political, is contested and is a battlefield.

X-Posted at Nunez Daughter

"Midday" Distraction: Remember the (wack) Times?

so, I was hella tired and mildly frustrated at work today so I went for a little internet fun (DSW is having a KILLER sale right now, FYI)...i digress.

so, i go to FB, which leads me to WUSTL's Student Life "StudLife" online publication. I run across this and article and I DIE!

Ok, first of all why is the "news" of the day (or week for that matter) some upperclassmen "sneaking" into Club 40. Now for those of you affiliated with WUSTL, but whose memory has seen greener pastures, "Club 40" is the outdoor dance party for Freshman under the S40's clock.

Among the concerns: running out of root-beer from the 3 "kegs" provided (typically there are only 2); the presence of open containers (on a veeery wet campus); inappropriate behavior.

#only@wackWUSTL

oh the memories!

*muah!*

"It's Complicated"

so, i, the long-term happily single one, has decided being "in like" sucks. i mean, think about it, being "in like" complicates everything. well, not everything (oh, stop, you know me, i'm prone to exaggeration), but a lot. for example...

...you spend all of your (previously) free time trying to figure out if s/he likes you, how much s/he likes you, how much longer before you give up the goodies, if you should offer to pay for tonight's date, if you should tell her/him that you really don't care for soy lattes, in fact, you're okay with consuming cow's milk in several varieties (therefore soy dream ice cream is unnecessary), wondering when you'll be introduced to her/his friends, if it's okay to mark your territory at her/his apartment, how to tell the cutie at the gym/grocer/school you're taken (wait, are you?!), trying to decipher what "dating exclusively" and other bullshit terms mean...i digress...

i mean, REALLY?! i'm calling bullshit. it's overrated.

boogie...longing for the simpler life (and taking suggestions on how to get it back)

101. Dozens, "Blacktags" and Other Ish Black People Do

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to report that black people use twitter.

*gasp*

Yes, chile. And their use of twitter is so fascinating that some white folks even stay up late at night to peer into the heart of darkness and chuckle at the witticisms of these little nigs Negroes blacks and enjoy their “hilarious, bizarre or profane” midnight dances conversations into the wee hours of the morning.

*sigh*

I hope that paragraph above does all the work it needs to. I hope it shows how misguided Farhad Manjoo and the editors at Slate were to even post such an ill-informed and nineteenth-century-esque article. If it doesn’t then find your way over to Because, Really, the Black Snob or Instant Vintage for a much longer, funnier breakdown (@innyvinny even has a gallery of black twitter birds for your cutting, pasting and posting pleasure--see mine?).

If and when you read it, I hope the problems with the Slate article are more obvious to you than to @fmanjoo--problems like monolithic blackness, the rap-circa-2001-generically-brown twitterbird, the preoccupation with stats say nothing but do their best to mystify something very simple: that “black people are online:”

“Yet much like discovering a country where people are already living, anytime the mainstream picks up on something that black people have been doing since forever (wasting time on the internet, shooting the shit like everyone else) it is supposed to be indicative of some larger, big, mysterious thing.”

Turn your clinical digital spotlight upon me! Make me visible and by doing so make me real! Ahh! The power of the mainstream (which you could also read as white or as emanating from a legacy of whiteness and white privilege although Farhad himself is not white) gaze!

But I'm not writing to jump into the internet swarm that is headed straight for Farhad’s twitterfeed and Facebook page. I’m anti-swarming (peace and love, yall, peace and love). And I'm upset not at the piece itself but at the way its existence obscures and butchers a phenomenon that deserves a lot more attention--and a historical eye.

After all, why does the hashtag fun that occurs throughout the day--not just late at night, jeez talk about fantasies of the exotic--vibrate with a kind of diasporic and urban blackness even though the hashtags themselves are fairly innocuous (his examples included things like #annoyingquestion and #ilaugheverytime)? And why do ALL TYPES and so many people participate? You wouldn't know that from the Slate article because there is no sense of diversity so there is no reason to question why that diversity exists. In fact, I'd wager Farhad’s most obvious #racefail is that he uses a monolithic blackness that obscures differences within the United States (let’s throw out some of the common dichotomies and even these are stupid simplistic and bound to be ripped apart by any given twitter including myself: urban vs. rural, young vs. old, blitterati Root writers vs. 2dopeboyz music pirates) while at the same time perpetuating and obscuring differences across global blackness. Even his first example (#wordsthatleadtotrouble) crosses the Atlantic at least once before hitting trending status and this gets barely a mention--it’s all put under the heading of “blacktag.” Because, ya know, we all the same in this piece.

What if we did? What would be a more sensible explanation or context to place the twitter hashtag game in than the one where all black people around the world are up late at night (one timezone yall) to go in on twitter? Maybe something that consider the global aesthetics of hip hop--which at this point is decidedly not limited to either the hip hop industry or people of the brown persuasion? Or the global politics of sex (which for me leads down the road of thinking about race but need not do the same for everyone)? Especially considering the examples he choose to use and his emphasis on the nastiness of it all. Or why not consider how twitter and other social media has created a public sphere, town hall AND insurgent lingua franca which people of ALL ages use to give voice to their own sexual agency, make political commentary and...oh wait, be social?

But I’ll admit, even these questions still shy away from the truly afro-diasporic resonance of the hashtag. And I don’t have the stats to “prove” that there are or aren’t legions of faceless and nameless black people using the hashtag late at night in creative and lurid ways so I won't try. Still, a little bit of cultural literacy might have gotten Slate to the underlying--and much more interesting--query of why a social media like twitter might intersect very nicely with black expressive culture writ large.

Old wine = blues, jazz, street slang, jive, playing the dozens, 16 bars

New bottles = 140 characters, a worldwide audience, a hashtag to keep the beat

Zora Neale Hurston, while doing research in the 1920s era South, described what was called “playing the dozens”:

“...which also is a way of saying low-rate your enemy’s ancestors and him, down to the present moment for reference, and then go into his future as far as your imagination leads you. But if you have no faith in your personal courage and confidence in your arsenal, don’t try it. It is a risky pleasure.”

And Robin Kelley, doing the damn thing, wrote:

“We are, after all, talking about cultures that valued imagination, improvisation, and verbal agility, from storytelling, preaching, and singing to toasting and the dozens.”

Storytelling as getting over, quips as verbal warfare, rhythmic and poly-rhythmic improvisational wordplay that has survived since SLAVERY in one form or another and has created one of the most controversial and lucrative industries in the world--besides helping generations of blacks survive the worst of the worst of the worst.

Are we surprised that it manifested again, with twitter hashtags as the clave? Well, I’m not. And I won’t be surprised when, now that the creative work of blackness has gone mainstream to the point of being RE-NAMED the “blacktag” (oh how clever), the creative juice that powers our (read: diasporic, global black Nanny maroon there if you wanna) resistance and survival re-emerges in a new form. On Tumblr perhaps? Doing its thing until the next enterprising traveler anthropologist scientist mainstream blogger or reporter decides to turn a corner down an alley they imagined in their head and see what the culluds is up to.

The fact that Farhad couldn’t see anything interesting in the hashtag phenomenon beyond its edgy sexual politics and the brown-faced twitter icons is frustrating beyond measure. His piece reeked of a kind of voyeuristic elitism and itinerant fascination that is better left in the 1920s. Especially considering there is nothing in this post that couldn’t be found online (even the quotes are courtesy of Google Books).

But ya know, that’s fine. That’s cool. After all, as Sheila Walker writes in “Are You Hip to the Jive? (Re)Writing/Righting the Pan-American Discourse:”

“Are you hip to the jive?” was a question I often heard my father, James Walker, and his friends ask when I was growing up in New Jersey. They were questioning whether or not you really understood what was really happening, as distinguished from what you only thought you understood about what might only appear to be happening--from the simplest to the most profound meanings of that understanding.”

The power of perception may not be wholly in our hands. Farhad’s piece is already circulating on twitter and along the interwebs as a work of “serious” journalism (must be all those pesky stats). But we can still release the pressure and have a nice, hearty laugh, Ellegua/Masking Sambo style, at his expense. #ifyouainthip #youainthip bruh.

X-Posted at Nuñez Daughter

Vote for Gulf Coast Reporting Labs!

Over at PBS NewsHous, our buddy Imani Cheers is part of this project which is competing for funding via the Pepsi Refresh Project:

How is the Gulf oil spill affecting young people? What are some compelling stories that will keep people informed of what is happening in Gulf communities after the news of the spill drops off the front page?

NewsHour Extra is applying for this grant in order to fund a core group of student journalists in the Gulf Coast region of the U.S. to report on the effects of the oil disaster.

Our Student Reporting Labs connect high school students to public media mentors, who teach them how to identify, investigate, report and synthesize information, using journalism as an innovative form of purposeful learning.

These reports will bring to light untold stories, and engage youth around the world to keep track of the oil spill and reflect on the lessons presented by the catastrophe. The students who participate will become problem-solving, critical-thinking and concerned citizens, as will the millions of people who watch their stories.

Here's some video from the gallery.  Support, support, support!  Vote here!

<object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/ijsK5G1xHgw&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/ijsK5G1xHgw&amp;hl=en_US&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object>

The Obligatory Menstrual Post (or “The Diva Cup, Race and Blood”)

X-Posted at Nunez Daughter

I'm cranky. I'm horny. I'm bloated. And I'm fatigued.

It's period time.

Yeah I said it. I'm on my period. Let the blood flow.

There's clearly nothing very cerebral here. Really. I just wanted to make that announcement. But I guess my point is why NOT make that announcement? One-half (this is unofficial, give or take to factor in kids) of the human population goes through a week of estrogen cartwheels every month. Sometimes two weeks. Sometimes to the point of becoming severly depressed or having debilitating physical symptoms like intense cramps. And yet we're expected to walk around like everything is okay. Like today is just another work day.

I call bullshit. I'm not amused by the jumping jacks going on inside my body right now. I'd like it to go back to being cool, calm and familiar. And all I really want to do is take care of myself this week: run, sleep, do yoga, dance, meditate, whatever. Believe me, if you gave me a week off to do that, imagine how much more productive, happy, healthy and whole I would be once I got back to work?

In any case, the second part of my announcement is more fun. I am not only my period...

*drumroll*

...I am also using the Diva Cup!

Yeah. I'm a feminist. But I have been slacking on my commitment to women's health. By slacking I mean that I know that abortion is a right, abstinence is a perfectly legitimate choice but not good public policy, AIDS is an epidemic and we have yet to respect or understand the psychological and sociological impact of domestic violence, rape and sexual assault on our society seeing as 1 in 3 women around us have experience it (yeah. look around you. count it up. one-third of the women in the room are survivors). Given all of the above, I thought I was pretty well-informed.

Until my housemate schooled me on a few dirty little facts about the sketchy safety of long-term use of birth control pills, how you actually GET toxic shock syndrome (friction from the cotton in tampons causes tiny cuts in the vaginal walls and the TSS comes from the infection caused when that cotton gets stuck there--wtf???), how even if you don't get TSS the bleach used in the cotton is going right into your bloodstream...

In the meantime, I'd also heard about the Diva Cup before but I wasn't quite primed to take the plunge [Note: This is a link to a post on Feministe in case you are currently boycotting them for their unremitting race/class/sexuality issues. The post is on menstrual blood but there's a very instructive discussion in the comments on the Diva Cup and other alternatives to industrial tampons and pads].

But my housemate was taking her sister to the "crunchy store" to get her a Diva Cup so I tagged along. It looked so tame! It also cost 40 bucks but the cup will hold for 12 hours (compare to the 8 max of a super tampon) and the cup itself lasts several years (the saleslady let us know that you are supposed to chuck them every couple of years but they only say that so they don't go out of business). You just boil it for five minutes after your period and tuck it in the little sack until the next month. You aren't supposed to use it if you've delivered a child through the vaginal canal (as opposed to C-section) but they also suggested you consult your physician and there is plenty of information to sift through in the FAQs on the site



Well today is Day One on the Diva Cup so here is the real deal so far. It was a bitch to put in and I chalk that up to my own ignorance about how my girly parts work. Even though the instructions said to fold the cup and insert it horizontally, I kept trying insert it vertically. I couldn't wrap my mind around the geography down there. Which just made me feel salty because I am supposed to know how to walk around my own block! Talk about socially constructed hang-ups. I also expected it to be as easy as a tampon, in the sense that you just slip it in and it does what it is supposed to do. But you also need to turn it to get the cup to unfold and "seal" around the canal. Let me tell you, chile, just doing that--unfolding and pushing aside this, inserting a finger here, turning that, twisting my body around to figure out what was happening where, freaking out when I thought I'd "lost it" in there then realizing that this is patently impossible since it is so soft all you do is insert a finger alongside it and coax it out which made me laugh out loud at my minor panic--taught me more about my own body than I ever learned in 6th grade sex-ed.

Which was probably the best part of the damn experience. It was a sweaty, fun, frustrating and triumphant time.

I finally got it to seal only after I gave up on th idea that I ever had any idea where things were down there and followed the damn directions. And it felt great. Better than a tampon because I didn't feel that scratchy string and I don't have to worry about counting hours before pulling it out. I might have forgotten that it was there except that I'm writing this post. It is that comfortable.

Of course...removing it will be a new adventure. But if I measure how much I like the Diva Cup by how much more comfortable I am (and empoweredI feel) I'd call it a win.

So why didn't I know about it before? Which brings me back to the beginning of this post--why NOT discuss these things? Why isn't this kind of information widely disseminated? I was stunned to read on the box that the Diva Cup has been around for some 70 years. I could have learned about this in 6th grade sex-ed or at least in high school at some point. Of course, if I had, would I have been as comfortable with the idea of something so tactile? Touch the cup, touch myself, touch blood--all things we are taught as little girls not to do. We are dirty, smelly, sweaty. Blood is dirty, smelly sweaty. None of this makes even the idea of a Diva Cup very attractive; I mean I turned off myself when I first read about it.

I'm going to keep it Sherrod right here and just admit it: I put the Diva Cup in the category of feminist-shit-that-only-white-women-do.

But, um, I don't know about you, but I'm not dirty or smelly or sweaty. Sweat isn't even dirty or smelly. Blood isn't dirty or smelly or sweaty either. Not even menstural blood. It is just blood. And considering the industrial strength soap we buy at CVS, believe me, it washes off the hands.

bell hooks has a great piece (I can't find the citation, please bless me with if you know what I'm talking about) about African American women, how comfortable we are with our bodies AND our bodily fluids and systemic racism which conspiraces to make us feel dirty, sweaty and smelly regardless of how many showers a day we take. The point being that from slavery, one of the undercurrents in our culture have been how disgusting we are even as that same sweat and dirt (the result of hours upon hours of field labor, mind you) left us vulnerable to the hyper-sexualizing gaze of white society, white men in particular.

Our own comfort with our bodies, like everything else, is political. It is part of how we survive in this world. Just trying the Diva Cup and seeing it as an adventure, for me, was a win on the side of righting wrongs a few centuries old. Discussing it with you here was another.

We Collect Inspiration: Phoenix Savage

"I was in New Orleans before the storm and I had this body of work based
on Aunt Jemima but it was castings that I had down of women in my
community when I lived in Nashville and the work ended up in New Orleans
with me and I had to leave the work behind and I moved but the work was
made out of plaster so it got destroyed in the storm and that’s what
lead me to the casting because I felt so vulnerable from that
destruction and I felt like I wanted to work in a way where my work was
indestructible.”  Savage’s desire for preservation lead to her new
practice of cast iron sculpture however the implication of preservation
extends beyond the physical. ” Casting is very difficult, it’s very time
consuming and casting iron is more difficult, more time consuming than
casting bronze or other metals and most people don’t like it because
it’s iron so you don’t get that same glory feeling from it but the iron
is who I am as a black person.”

via Zora & Alice.  Read the rest. 

Sexual Violence at HBCUs (Part 2)

Things You Should Read/Watch:

via New Black Man

Music Moment: Why Don't You Love Me?

So fun that there is this post and video following the last post and video, even if there's a lag of a month or so....



ps. I love me some Bey but beyond that seems like there is some flawed myth of the Superwoman here that might be interesting.

"I want to fall in love again"

In the fall of 2001, I said to a friend in conversation that I wanted to fall in love again. Neither of us remember the context of that statement but the pure emotion of the statement stuck with her. It was the theme of my Christmas gift that year. It's now approaching nine years since that conversation and I have yet to fall in love again. I don't know quite how I feel about that. I'm not sad nor do I feel like I've missed out on anything in the last nine years but that feeling is definitely with me right now. So as I seek to love again, I'm reflecting on what love was to me.

Love was...

• being listened to.
  
• being loved.
  
• being seen for my best, even in my worst moments.
• problem solving.
  
• encouragement.
• safety and security.
• being a priority.
• feeling beautiful.
• being cared for.
• great kisses.
• hugs that made everything better.
• understanding my struggles.
• wiping away my tears.
• butterflies.
• smiling at the mentioning of a name.
• silly nicknames.
• feeling invincible.
• wanting to share my darkest secret.
• wanting to trust.
  
• hoping for forever.
• the desire to reciprocate.
  

I have to say, at 28, love doesn't look much different than it did at 19. The difference is that I know I can get all of these things (except the great kisses) from my friends and, most importantly, from myself. The last nine years have been full of new beginnings, lessons, and growth. I've been building a foundation that will support me so that the next time I do fall in love, it will feel more like a treat than...

oxygen.

We Collect Inspiration: Tamara Natalie Madden

via Black Girls Rock:

Black Girls Rock: What has been your greatest challenge in your career?

Tamara: The sacrifice. Being an artist requires a lot of sacrifice. It requires patience, and faith. It can be a challenging journey with lots of bumps along the way. Unfortunately, in the art world, I’m not just considered an artist; I am ‘black’, then ‘woman’, then ‘artist.’ All of those titles present there own unique set of obstacles. In addition, to trying to meander my way through the visual art world, while being taken seriously, and not loosing my integrity; I have to be an educator. It’s essential that the new generation of black children learn about the arts, and the value of the arts. They need to understand that art is an investment, which will benefit them for many generations. They also need to know that art is the keeper of history in many cases; it’s an essential doorway to their ancestors.

Read the rest....

The REAL Crisis in the Black (Female) Community

So.  Me and IC were choppin it up last night and we ended up talking about boys.  To be precise, we ended up talking about women who talk about boys, or partners, or marriage or relationships or all of the above.  And I remarked on how I end up in one of these conversations with every black woman in my life: the Little Sistren (both Little and Littlest), the linesisters and the prophytes, Flava, bad black girls, the academic Fam, random twitterers.  Which can be fun but lately has gotten frustrating.  Aren't we all successful, enterprising, creative and beautiful women who are doing a PLETHORA of other things outside of the (romantic) men in our lives?  Aren't we engaged in politics and art and education?  Hell, aren't some of us readies and foodies and music or entertainment heads?  So why does it seem like we end up in these conversations over and over--or complaining about these conversations (yes, I am a case in point).

Is it the crisis of the Disney Princess Generation entering its 30s?  At which point IC broke it down for me.  To paraphrase:

It is like we feel like something missing or we are unsatisfied or unfulfilled.  And instead of of focusing on correcting that or resolving ourselves, we decide that what is missing is a relationship.  So we fixate on that and decide that is what is missing and that is going to fill what is unfulfilled.

I know we keep saying stuff like this, but it is still true and still a good reminder.  This is probably why Tayari Jones post on "Penvy" resonated so much with me.  Read it but the best line is: 

"When I say get to work, I'm saying get back to you."

I'm not having a 30s crisis yet--I think.  But I am starting to get that antzy feeling--that "get to work" feeling--where I'm ready to get it poppin.  Shake things up.  Start a new project.  Six months ago, I identified that feeling with Mr. but recent events put me in a position to think twice about that.   I don't think it was him.  I think it is this transition into a new phase of life and figuring out what the new adventure is going to be.  Is it back to D.C. to do youth activism and rape crisis work?  Is it to Chicago to education work?  Is it France to work with recent immigrants?  Senegal?  Ghana?  Puerto Rico?  I'm itchy to get to work on the next step.  That is probably not the complete answer to why I don't feel completely fulfilled but at least I know that is part of it and I can start to work on the rest.  

Which is hard enough since the accepted discourse on black women's lives doesn't even give us space to even imagine it that way.  And that is a tragedy.  Imagine how many Alice, Zora, Lorraine, Lucille's we have out there who hit 30 (or more like 20, once upon a time) and convinced themselves that it wasn't a new professional, creative or economic adventure that they needed to embark upon--they just didn't have a man.  But we every update on TheRoot.com, the 5 o'clock news and our Facebook/Twitter feeds telling us what we need is a good husband. 

that is all.

The Little Town in Maine Post

(x-posted over at Puff's blog, Generalize This)



A year ago, I moved to a Little Town in Maine. Like Puff, I'm dissertating which is really just a shorthand way of saying I go wherever someone will pay me to teach/research/write until I get my advisor's stamp of approval and I'm allowed to go find a "real" job (then I'll still have to go wherever someone will pay me to teach/research/write but I'll get better benefits and a bright-eyed research assistant I can unload five plus years of pent up exploitation on. What joy is mine).

My travels led me up to the northeast edge of the country, 3 parts New England and 1 part Canada, where the population of people of color is 2% at best and composed of Rwandan, Somali and Sudanese immigrants, military folk, college students (students not faculty, and with an emphasis on athletes) and a few ancien African-Americans descended from eighteenth-century black New England families or some combination of the above. To put that in better perspective, I know all five adult black women in town and all of us are affiliated with the university.

It starts getting dark at 3 p.m. here in the winter. The town (don't blink, you'll miss it) closes shop at 5 p.m. (the really rowdy ones close at 8). Driving slow is the norm and honking is rude (for a native Chicagoan, this damn near kills me). Walking is big, running is bigger, kayaking in the summer (and snowshowing in the winter) is biggest. Everyone has partners (this a meta term that pretty much signifies long-term sexual relations whether married or otherwise) and kids. And playdates. The public radio station plays classical music 80% of the day and there is no Tell Me More or hip hop & R&B station (utter fail as far as I'm concerned and really? All day? who wants to hear classical ALL day?). Waking up at the butt crack of dawn is not only commendable but expected and if you admit you don't expect to receive the New England Look of Disdain.

I think I kind of love it.

Which is weird. Because I'm pretty much the opposite of everything above. I mean--I'm urban. The hell am I doing on the other side of the world in a little town where I can't even find good leave-in conditioner?

But there is something refreshing and familiar--in a Northside Chicago sense--about the blue collar, laid back townspeople. I won't describe them here because I'd have to think and choose my words and this was supposed to be a quick morning post. I'll just say that I got here and I knew them. They were my Polish-Italian immigrant descended neighbors in Chicago's Lincoln Square, they are my mother's overworked and underpaid co-workers, hell, some of them are my mother with her stubborn and loving belief in equal opportunity. And I appreciate that they don't come laden with the same oppressive baggage that I found in, say, St. Louis or Atlanta or D.C. Oh, they have their own issues, and put some of these folks in those cities for a few years and I'll bet white privilege will have its way with them. But their issues aren't the same. Time, place and historical context has given them a willingness to engage you.

And a willingness to leave you alone to do your own thing since their sense of self doesn't revolve around oppressing you.

So to everyone who ever looked on my move to a small town in the Arctic circle with disbelief--yo, it's cool. Give it a try. Life is grand.

AHHHH!!! e. badu!!!

"Over time I have become comfortably numb; purposely dumb. I have been programmed to move on command, to long for animated fairy tales that resemble nothing familiar to my experiences. I think I've always lived in my head, more than out here in the 'real' world. It's been the lab where much of my anxiety was first created (what to think, how to think, what to believe, what to be happy about, waht to be sad about, what is appropriate what is not accepted by the ground, how to speak, what is proper, how to love, how to dream and so forth). Yet and still, (one of my grand mama's terms) I am a bundle of light energy looking out of myself from the top hovering over myself with the compassion of a good mother for a child learning a thing for the first time. This is where it gets good. I have somehow managed to stay woke even in the warm womb of complacency..."

Erykah Badu, "Liner Notes," New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh (2010)

Mmm....

So I'm sitting at home, burning my Oshun incense (mmmm mmmm mmmmmMMM!) and reminiscing on my lovely spring break.  And considering searching out a hot tub spot somewhere in southern Maine.

In loving memory:





Thanks again to Cornflake Girl for hosting.  I hope everyone slipped back into the Real World with no harm and no foul. 

boogie, Maven--see you in a week or so.

Why I Still Read the Root (sometimes)

gems like this:

Bad Black Girls are Vain Too

 
"I want to go down in history in a chapter marked Miscellaneous because the writers could find no other way to categorize me/in this world where classification is key.  I want to erase the straight lines/so I can be me."  ~Staceyann Chin





X-Posted at Nunez Daughter under "Womanism Month"

California Love

Countdown is TOO official...



...be on the look for Cali love of the week over the next 4 weeks. Who's got next?

Erykah Badu – Window Seat

Erykah Badu &#8211; Window Seat

new isht from one of me favs. glad she's bringing her sound back from "the deep end" aka, New Amerykah Pt 1. enjoy...

you got kids?

so, new boo potential on the horizon. nothing major...cool dude, tall enough, good job, well-educated, chill. it works for the moment and we have good convo. it's easy so, purpose is being served.

now, during one of our chill conversations, he asked me if i had kids. my first thought was, "hell no." then, i thought, "why the hell would he ask ME that?" then..."duh, genius." it occurred to me tonight in the shower(don't hate on that good thinking time) that the lead question isn't one that even enters my consciousness to ask. i mean, it kinda makes sense, i don't have kids, therefore, why would it occur to me to ask someone else if they do? (okay, i know the answer to that).

however, it reminded me that no matter how many years i can count on this earth, no matter how much i look at friends' pics on FB and drool over their children, no matter how much i will REALLY want kids someday, I am NOT READY.

but, it also made me think about what i want from a potential mate. i think i'm okay with kids. (egh.) i also think i don't want to be bothered. my child walks herself, eats when she wants to, and sleeps 80% of the day...and doggonit, i like it!

age old convo, but one worth having since i say i'm looking for more (with an open heart) in 2010.

wish list for 2010...

yo, my girls had it right in '93. just sayin'...



you're welcome...

;)

in a sentimental mood

consider this a "redux" of the previous post.

i just realized...i get really sentimental/moody/needy around this time of year. i could attribute it to any number of things. however, i am sure it has to do the high frequency of bbg b-days between dec-feb (therefore celebrations) and the reunions we were previously so damned good at creating.

immense amounts of love and miss.