The Eye

Now that my life is no longer filled with pending research papers, group projects, exams and looming deadlines, I find myself relishing in the opportunity to explore interests and hobbies that have absolutely nothing to do with school.   I’m stumbling upon interests that I never knew I had, like my obsession with reading women’s auto/biographies (okay, okay maybe that has a little to do with school); or like my love of nature, open land, outdoor activities (Hiking, anyone? How about kayaking?  Hell, just give me some cowboy boots and call me Annie Oakley). Oh, and sweet white wines. Love ‘em with dessert.  And then there’s my budding interest in photography.  I don’t just like it. I love it.  I can’t get enough of it.     

Though I’m new to the photography scene, I already have a list of favorites.  From legends like Chester Higgins, Jr. to newer photographers like Chenoa Maxwell as well as the immensely talented Annie Leibovitz.  Show me the work of a good photographer and I start frothing at the mouth.  Seriously.  It happened this weekend when, while browsing at a local bookstore, I stumbled upon a batch of postcards that each displayed a different photo by Chester Higgins, Jr.  I eagerly examined each one,  losing all sense of time and obligation.  Nothing–other than books and writing–has that type of an effect on me. 

I love portraits, but there’s nothing like photojournalism.  It’s not posed.  Not premeditated.  It’s natural.  Without a doubt, there’s something about a photograph that illuminates the beauty of the everyday-ness, the mundane, the simple.  There are also those photographs that are at once beautiful and grotesque.  They are the riveting images that capture the complextity and bitter reality of our pain and injustice.  

So, here’s to the photographers–the artists who urge us to slow down, take a pause and be present to the world around us.  

(By the way, I took this pic of a friend of mine while at Elmina Castle, just off the coast of Ghana.) 

On Survival

“what you talkin’ ’bout did I love you? girl, I stayed alive for you…”

-from Sula by Toni Morrison 

It never fails. Every time I return from visiting home during the holidays I come back in need of three things: 1) a stiff drink 2) a 2-3hour debriefing session with one of my sistafriends (preferably while sipping on that stiff drink) and 3) a week of reflection and writing (‘cause I can’t seem to do either one when I’m at home).  This year was no different.

The fact that I’m treated as though I never aged beyond my 12^th birthday while I’m home is not what drives me into the abyss after every Christmas holiday.  As hard as it is, I’ve learned to stomach such treatment for at least the holiday season. 

Nor is it having to put up with the indignant silence, interrogating questions and ignorant assumptions about my appearance (weight, hair, skin, clothing) and my love life. Not only am I confident enough in my appearance these days, I’ve also learned to constructively use my skill of answering a question-without really answering a question-in order to ward off all inquiring minds (and the downright nosy).

So, what is the source of my frustration and need for deep reflection after every holiday season?  It’s watching the plight of the women in my family and my community at home, that’s what.  I don’t think there is anything else that makes me feel more frustrated, more enraged, more depleted, more…helpless.

Like most Black women, I come from a long line of women who know what is to survive.  My mother, aunts, cousins and other-mothers have survived poverty, abuse, addictions, prison, low-down husbands, dead-beat fathers, foolish children, and all forms of illness, dis-ease, and tragedy.   Up against all of this, survival itself is a revolutionary act.  And without question, I am proud to be apart of this legacy of survival…that is, until I remember that while all of these women know how to survive, very few of them know how to live.

Before going any further I should say from the outset that I do not take for granted the legacy of survival among the women in my family.  They are apart of a larger narrative that chronicles Black women’s historic battle against racism, sexism and other systems of oppression.  Indeed, it is because of the ingenious survival tactics of Black women warriors like Willie Summerville, Ma Beck (both my great grandmothers), Eva Mae Summerville, Sarah Davenport (both my grandmothers), and other more notable Black women that I have been given the privilege to live. 

And yet, as I reflect now on the lives of my mother, aunts, and cousins, many of whom have spent their entire lives “waiting on God,” living from paycheck to paycheck, and putting up with abusive men for the sake of financial and emotional “security,” I find myself wondering: perhaps Black women’s legacy of survival is a double edged sword.  On the one hand, this tradition of survival is the means through which women in my family have stayed alive.  And on the other, their natural instinct to “do whatever it takes to survive” has also undermined their ability to claim their right to live with agency, choice and intentionality. 

By no means am I dismissing the systems of oppression that leave many Black women (young and old) merely surviving on the brink of disaster, depression and despair.  But after being trained in tactics to survive and withstand these oppressions, many of us don’t know what it is to move off the brink and escape to stable ground.  Even when presented with opportunities to claim our God-given right to live purposeful, passionate, fulfilling lives, we somehow find ourselves back on the brink, convinced that we have no other option. We navigate our way through life, remaining just a prayer, paycheck, relationship, or donut away from disaster.  For many Black women, the measure of their suffering determines the extent of their faith: it’s understood that the more they suffer, the more faith they have (and thus, the more “holy” they are).  Unlike our foremothers, whose survival was a means to an end, our survival is often the end itself.

For many years I’ve chided myself for being so insensitive to the women in my family. How dare I sit in judgment when my education has afforded me the privilege of being exposed to different ways of life and living?  But the truth is I’m not all that different from my mother, aunts and cousins.  Despite the schools I attended, the degrees I have, the countries I’ve visited and no matter how much I’d like to envision myself as this independent, free-thinking young woman who lives only according to her own sense of purpose and agency, there are times (more than I’d like to admit) when I find myself crouching in a corner somewhere, settling for whatever is handed to me instead of courageously taking life by the reigns.  Perhaps this is why I’m riddled with frustration and anxiety when I visit the women in my family:  in their blank stares, their fits of rage, their fanatical pronunciations of faith, in their addictions to substances, habits and other people, in their reckless search for anything that will enable them to feel alive and/or escape reality, I not only see myself, but moreover, I see women who desperately want to live.  They just don’t know how.  

*The artwork is a piece by artist Deborah Roberts.

Pssst! Did you notice that this Clinton is a Woman?

(This is a collaborative piece I wrote with fal from Document the Silence.) 

Last Thursday night I was glued to CNN as Wolf Blitzer and company announced and analyzed the results from the Iowa Caucus.  While Obama’s rousing victory speech about “hope” and “change” made me beam with pride, it was that image of Obama’s daughters-two little black girls with puffy, unruly hair-taking the stage with him that made me want to shout.  Despite the fact that I’ve yet to decide which of the Democratic candidates will get my vote in my state’s primary, I know that this moment is a historical one.  A black man winning the Iowa Caucus?  Can America get anymore white than Iowa? If it’s possible to elect a Black man in Iowa then maybe America is r-re-ready for…

Wait a minute.  Before I get too far into adding my two cents to the political pundit banter about what Obama’s race means for the presidential election, let me stop myself.  Without a doubt, the narrative of race that is unfolding within the presidential race is important.  By no means can we dismiss Obama’s struggles with proving to Black people that he is “Black enough” while also having to prove to white people that he is not “too Black” (at least not the Jessie Jackson “Black” of ‘84 or ‘88).    Yet my identity as a Black woman, one who often teeters on that tightrope between being Black and woman, means that the racial dynamics are not the only thing I’m watching closely.  Hey, Uh, has anyone noticed that Hillary Clinton is a woman?  Going by the analysis of most political pundits and journalists, it would seem that this tidbit of information means nothing beyond the question of whether women will vote for Clinton in sweeping numbers.  But regardless of what mainstream media would have us to believe, gender, like race, presents something more to this election than the question of whose votes will go where. Clinton’s bid for president opens the floodgate of questions about what is at stake for a woman seeking a leadership position.

To begin, Clinton’s “likability” has often been brought into question over the course of the race.  Compared to Obama’s fresh-faced charismatic persona and Edwards’ down-home southern boy drawl, Clinton seems stiff, unapproachable and “too serious.”  But given the gendered politics of the country we live in, can she really afford not to be?  While inspirational sermonic calls for change that border on the second coming of Martin Luther King, Jr. mean likability for Obama and Edwards, such strong appeals to emotion can mean defeat for Clinton.  By virtue of being male, Obama and Edwards can make emotional appeals while their ability to be strong, aggressive, and unwavering (characteristics that Americans want in president) remain in tact. Not so for Clinton. The Hillary Clinton campaign knows that if Clinton were to tout those same sermonic speeches, she would quickly be on the verge of being portrayed as too emotional (read: too feminine), less serious, and a bit irrational, automatically forfeiting her perceived ability to govern as president.  This is why “experience” means so much to her campaign.  Because she is a woman, Clinton’s campaign must hinge on more than an abstract vision of change and a charming smile.

As I continue to follow the gendered dynamics of the presidential race, there are a couple of other things that bring this conversation about the role of gender in the presidential campaigns to the fore.  For instance, isn’t it also interesting that even when some voters are weighing the advantages of having Clinton as president, they somehow bring Bill Clinton into the picture?  Am I the only one who finds the idea that, “If we vote for Hillary, we’ll bring Bill back in office” a bit insulting? We are talking about a woman who has shown through her time in the Senate that her politics do not begin-nor do they end-with her husband.  And what about all this hoopla surrounding what bloggers and reporters are referring to as Clinton’s “most public display of emotion during her campaign” when she “teared up” during a speech yesterday at a New Hampshire coffee shop?  I don’t see anyone measuring John McCain’s level of emotion over the course of his campaign, nor did we see this same rush of news stories about presidential candidates and their tear ducts after Mitt Romney showed the same level of emotion as Clinton during a Meet The Press interview.

But, let’s be real. This post is really not about Hillary Clinton or the presidential elections.  At least, not entirely.   It’s really about the realities that most women face when in leadership positions, regardless of whether they are in politics, the academy, the church, corporate america or community organizations.  Many Black women have more than a few stories about how, as leaders, we have thought twice about coming across as too emotional, too affectionate or too assertive, too bitchy (and too Black ) in order to be taken seriously.   But at what cost?  Could it be that being a woman in leadership means sacrificing our authentic selves in order to settle for a life of wondering if we are ever good enough, better yet “man enough” to lead.

This post is apart of a larger historical narrative of Black women who have examined how both sexism and racism affect their ability to live their lives. During tumultuous and violent times, women like:  Sojourner Truth, Harriett Tubman, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells, Ruby Doris Smith, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hammer, Pauli Murray, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde all rendered critiques about what it meant to be black, what it meant to be a woman, and what it meant to be a black woman. Given their critiques often they were ostracized and chastised by the Black community for airing what most Black people considered to be the dirty laundry that sexism does exist in the Black community. It’s just not a white woman’s issue. Writing this post concerning the gender dynamics of the current presidential race pays tribute to the women mentioned above who understood all to well what it meant to be seen as a black woman when trying to lead many to freedom.

FIERCE.

Today I share one of the many works of art that inspire me to say “Yes!” to living life fully and bodaciously.  Here’s to Nikki Giovanni for helping us to imagine how fierce we really are.

Ego Tripping
(there may be a reason why)
By Nikki Giovanni

 

  i was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to Europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat’s meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can’t catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother’s day
My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
the earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission

I mean…I…can fly
like a bird in the sky…

TWIGS: reflections on locking my hair

Since cutting off my permed hair a few years ago I rarely take hair advice from my mother.  She’s the one who brags about having never worn her hair natural, let alone in the style of an afro.  She recounts this bit of information to me smugly, as though this fact is an indicator of her high standards of social respectability and class.  This used to upset me until I realized that for many women in my mother’s generation, politics of social respectability, the body, and class are all tangled up in their ideas about hair.  When I came home for the holidays with a short afro, one of the first questions my mother asked me was, “Will you promise to grow your hair back for your wedding?”  Never mind that I was single and not even dating anyone at the time.

These days my mother has given up on any hope that she will ever see her daughter with a perm again. But that never stopped her attempts to convince me to grow more hair on my head. And I continued to refuse her pleas…that is, up until 6 months ago when I started getting restless with my ‘fro and began thinking about growing my hair out.  It was then that I thought about a comment my mother made after she saw one of my sistafriend’s locs. Unable to recall the proper name of the gorgeous “ropes” of knitted hair that hung from my friend’s head, my mother said to me, “You should grow you some twigs like your friend.”  Though my feminist-black-consciousness-higher-educated self wanted to cringe, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at her use of the word “twigs.” After all, my friend is quite tall, very stately and has an aura of “deeply rooted-ness.” Kinda like a tree.

I always knew that I would eventually lock my hair but somehow my mother’s statement sealed the deal. So hear I am, finally taking my mother’s hair advice: like a tree, I’m growing some twigs.

Truth be told, I’ve always been fascinated with locs. Even when I had a perm I often had to resist the urge to stare at friends and total strangers who had them. But after starting the process of growing my own, my fascination soon abated. Locking is not so much a pesky hassle as it is a test of my patience and control, not to mention a quest into redefining my ideas about beauty and what’s attractive.  Anyone who has ever gone through the beginning stages of locking with short hair will tell you:  it is a TASK of sheer mind and will to convince yourself that it’s still possible to get ya sexy on when you have hair that looks like small worms standing straight up on top of your head.

I had plenty of exercises in deconstructing (western) norms of beauty when I went from wearing long permed hair to a short natural. But locking has presented even more of a challenge. Yes, it’s still been about deconstructing beauty norms, but locking has also been about trust. My close friends can attest that I was faithful, borderline obsessive, about getting my hair lined EVERY week when I had a short ‘fro. Not so with locs! I couldn’t shape them or neatly prune them…especially in the beginning stages. I’ve just had to trust my hair and whichever way it chooses to grow and knit itself together. Sometimes I take a look in the mirror and want to take a razor to my head and be done with it. And then there are the mornings when I wake up, slap on a favorite pair of earrings and walk out of the house looking FIERCE.

It dawns on me now that I’m locking my hair at a time in my life that is in itself filled with uncertainty, possibility and frustration. I find myself not only having to redefine and deconstruct my ideas about my self worth, but now, more than ever, I’m having to trust myself. Trust that though a lot about my life and sense of direction is vague and an utter mess, I will eventually figure some things out. And hopefully I’ll grow comfortable with the ambiguity of the things that I don’t.

Yeah, I’m like a tree alright.  I’m sinking my roots into who I am authentically and trusting that my twigs and branches will come along just fine.

Creating Myself a Clearing Spot

Somebody should have told me. Somebody should have warned me.  Somebody should have sat me down and explained that just as your 20s are about basking in the freedom of asserting your independence, your 20s are also about milling around in the muck and drudgery of asserting your independence.   

I’ve spent much of my life looking forward to my 20s as though this decade held the keys to the Promised Land, only to get here and wonder, “How in the heyell did I get here?”  Paying ENDLESS bills.  Struggling to hit my stride in the rat race we call the “job market.” Negotiating salaries.  Building a network, but somehow losing a sense of real community.  Realizing that the end result is not always determined by how hard you worked.  And, oh yes, finding out that while you may be smart, while you may be bright, you need a good amount of shrewdness to make it.  Some folk were confronted with all of this before their twenties.  But I’m a late bloomer.  It hit me around the age of 24, when I suddenly looked around and said to myself, “You ain’t in (Ar)Kansas anymore, Toto.”  Being a full time student all of my life has certainly had its advantages:  the longer I stayed in school and  consumed myself with abstract theory, the more I could prolong a face-off with bottom-line practicality.

When I lamented not being told about the tumultuous twenties to a wise a woman I know, she pointed out that even if I had been told in my late teens about what it would be like in my late twenties, it’s likely that I would not have understood the warning nor would I have taken it seriously.  Truth is, she’s right.  Somebody probably did tell me.  But I was too busy buying the first ticket out of my parents’ house to listen.  Some things you just don’t “get” until the rug has been pulled out from under your feet. 

Moreover, it occurs to me that no one could have adequately warned me back in the 1980s about what it would be like to be 20something and woman and black in 2007.   While paying bills and stumbling through the rat race has wreaked havoc on my sense of comfort and security, what has really knocked me off my feet and left my head spinning is taking on these new responsibilities while also navigating my way through a world that uses mass media, technology, religion, politics, music, violence and the ole’ fashioned good ole’ boy network to demean and dehumanize black women.  

Oh, but don’t be fooled. I’m not so naive to think that the dehumanization of black women is anything new.  It is so woven into the American historical and cultural tapestry that it is just as American as baseball and apple pie.  But what makes the 21st century mass dehumanization of black women so distinctive is that it has become like a staple crash crop within the black community.   We feed off of it as uncritical patrons of mainstream media and, at rates unlike any other in history, black folk are participating as purveyors of this dehumanization. We package it in music videos, books, television shows, sermons, movies, clothing lines, etc. We profit from it and give it names like,  ”entrepreneurship,” “creativity,” and my personal favorite, “a word from the Holy Ghost.”   The dehumanization of black women is so insidious within the black community that we don’t even recognize it when we see it…even when it glares at us in the face (daring us to call it out). 

No. No one could have warned me of what it would be like to become a critical thinking, independent, assurred black woman in the midst of all this.  

I often find myself searching for an outlet.  A way to process, confront (and escape) what I see and experience as a young black woman.   As an avid book reader, I naturally turn to books for solace and wisdom, particularly my “sacred texts” written by black women writers.  Writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde and Pearl Cleage give authentic voice and texture to the complexities of black women’s lives.    In their work I find insight, inspiration and… healing.  And just as movie buffs have their favorite scenes from their favorite movies, I have favorite “scenes” from books written by these women. 

Recently, when I was in a particularly self loathing and defeatist mood, I reread one of my favorite “scenes” from Toni Morrison’s  Beloved.  In this passage she describes what occurs among a community of former slaves in a place called “the Clearing”: 

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got all mixed up.  Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath.  In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart.

 She did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more.  She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

 She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.  That if they could not see it, they would not have it.

 

For the 19th century former slaves in Beloved, the Clearing was at once a ”wide-open place cut deep in the woods” and a site of community and communion.  At the urging of Baby Suggs, an elderly woman who had a Harriet Tubman-like presence, the people gathered at the Clearing to laugh, dance, cry and validate their collective humanity.  There, in the midst of an oppressive and dehumanizing existence, they cleared for themselves a space to hear the prophetic words of a wise woman. ”The Clearing” was a space to confront reality and re-imagine a new one. It was a space in which to be made whole.

After reading this passage in Beloved, it dawned on me: That’s it. That’s what I need in the midst of all the responsibilities, craziness and foolishness that characterize my life and social context: a “clearing” spot of some kind in which to respond to and make sense of what it means to be a 20something Black woman.  While I have various places and relationships in my life that I consider clearing spots, I wanted a place to ”record” my responses, critiques and laments in a creative way.   So here I am.  As virtual as it may be, I’ve cleared for myself a spot in the blogosphere in which to not only navigate my way through the joys and pains of newfound independence, but to also actively confront problematic and oppressive realities by re-imagining new and liberating ones.  And maybe, just maybe, I’ll  stumble upon my own authentic voice in the process… so that I, too, can be made whole.