As much as I love the Brasil version, this one is the more powerful. No wonder it was banned in the US at the time (and still is?).
And bashed in the NYT. How can saying that "they don't
care about us" be bigoted. I don't understand that. To say that such an
expression is bigoted is to evoke shame in one who reveals that their
benevolent leader is less than caring.
No, "they" don't
care about "us," and if we sleep too long, no movement, no matter how
strong will keep "them" at bay from destroying "us."
Throughout
history, that is the way it is. By time, man is in loss. We have to be
constantly vigilant to protect ourselves and those we love from essential slavery,
whether it is physical, emotional or mental.
I
hear people have been playing this during marches. Some of us just now
realizing what's been going on under our noses for some time.
"Nigeria was not ready for the white man to leave."
Continuing my delve into racial politics...
My parents recently visited a cousin of ours, from my Nigerian side, no less, who was actually integral in my parents' first meeting. Dr. Nwachukwu, or Doc as they knew him, was the head of the Department of Afro-, Afro-American and Chicano Studies (or something like that) at the University of Michigan, Flint in the 1970s when my mother, a recent graduate from the University, was his receptionist for a time. My father, a young, 20-something chemical engineering student, used to visit his cousin Doc and nod to his young secretary before entering the room.
The young secretary would not pay this man much attention until they were set up on a blind date in a party in Flint years later. And the rest is history.
Anyway, after over 30 years, my family reunited with Doc, who now lives with his second wife and children on the east coast. My parents drove their with my Nigerian Uncle and Aunt.
Besides my grandfather's death, it has been a summer of reunions--reunions of brothers after 30 years (my father hadn't been back to Nigeria since 1984, so quite literally), reunion of much of my mother's family to celebrate the life of my grandfather, and now, reunion of family for the first time after my parents marriage made him family to her.
My parents had a great time at Doc's home. One of the things that he did was share his perspective of Nigeria years after independence to the state that the country is in now. And his thoughts were as above. That Nigeria was not ready for the white man to have left.
To hear that from a Nigerian, though second hand, was astounding.
After living in the United States and being not only a full professor, but a head of a department for some time, Doc decided on two occasions to move back to Nigeria. Once in 1980, but then he returned to the United States, and another time in 1989. Between those two visits, he saw what was of Nigeria's infrastructure continue to crumble and democratic governance cease (as Nigeria was well into dictatorship by the second visit).
Of all of the descriptions of decrepit infrastructure, weakening culture and fractured politics that he must have told, my mother clung to the following example:
Doc was in a Nigerian university, a full professor there, trained in the United States, everything, walking into the building. Ahead of him was a graduate-level instructor who also happened to be white. As the white instructor entered the building, the students hailed him, cheering for him, enthusiastic for his arrival. As Doc walked into the building, the students turned their backs on him.
My mother's reaction is perhaps the topic for another post. But the long version of her reaction was that...maybe he is right. If these students' reaction says anything about the sentiments of the larger society as a whole, maybe they were not ready for the white man to leave! Maybe whatever tribal divisions that lead to genocide and war in the 1960s, that continue to this day under the guise of religion, keep Nigeria from the good governance that would ultimately lead to their further development. Whatever petty issue kept the students from revering their black professor over the white TA are perhaps borne out in larger society, and if it's going to be like that, maybe things would run better if the President of Nigeria were a white man, unconnected to tribal politics and not any other type of brown person.
And coming to that conclusion is really, really sad.
However, this is the opinion of one man, one Nigerian-born professor who ultimately decided to make his permanent home in the United States.
But what is it? Was Nigeria not ready for their independence? A whole lot points to yes. And does that inherently mean that they were not ready for the British to leave?
Then there comes the key question--would it have been better for the British to have never come to Nigeria, or the Europeans never having come to Africa, colonized, anything? And if so, what would the continent look like now? What would the world look like now? Would there even be a United States of America without African slaves' backs on which to build it on?
These questions and assumptions are all fraught with problems, the main problem being that we are in the present now. Independence has been declared. The arbitrary lines have been drawn on maps and groups of people who previously had nothing to do with each other have been called Nigerians for 54 years this October 1. Not ready to be independent or not, not ready to be ruled by themselves, with all of the tribal baggage that survived 60 years of colonization, this is the present reality. And brain drain is a mug.
They weren't ready, okay, but now what? What kind of leadership is needed, what kind of reform is needed, how to you combat corruption that is near institutionalized?
Since my father left, I will always be an outsider, looking in. And while my cousins seem to be more concerned about what the existence of ISIS means about the second coming of Christ and upholding homosexuality bans for the sake of Nigeria, I'm not sure they have any concrete aspirations for elevating the political situation of Nigeria, of improving infrastructure, actually.
These are just my family members, though.
I would love to read contemporary Nigerian political thinkers and their take on the state of Nigeria and the best direction of the future. If any of my readers have some resources for me, I'd like to read them. I recognize that the disappointed musings of an ex-pat must pale in comparison to people who are living Nigeria as a reality.
Or is it really that the only way that Nigeria will work as a country is if it is run by white people?
"The one thing we did right was the day we started to fight. Keep your eyes on that prize, hold on." - "Eyes on That Prize"
I don't usually get political. On this blog or anywhere else online, really. Definitely not Facebook. But one of my co-residents posted something about Ferguson, and how we should keep talking, and while I agree, more than just talking needs to be done.
More than just media showboating needs to be done.
I posted in the Facebook comment box that we have a militarized police force that has been in full force and growing since the 1980s institution of the War on Drugs. I told her to read The New Jim Crow, which I have to read in pieces because it makes me angry. I told her that post-civil rights is a fallacy. The Civil Rights movement didn't end, it died. It died with a lot of its key leaders who were assassinated, thanks in part to our own FBI. To this day, I don't understand how more people don't know about COINTELPRO. Even if there were only evidence linking the FBI to the death of one Black Panther (and I believe there is more evidence than that), isn't that bad enough?
The movement was posthumously declared over. There was still work to be done and Malcolm X had just found Islam and that shaped the way he saw the movement, Martin Luther King had more than just a dream, he was a man of ideas made tangible and wanted to move to overall social justice and poverty next. So many leaders and non-leaders, young people, killed, so many deaths without justice.
Post-civil rights movement is a fallacy and that's exactly how Michael Brown could be shot with his arms up, feet away from the police officer so many times into his poor body and left dead in a pool of his own blood on the streets of Ferguson for hours in the sun, like a dog.
Black life is not valued in this country, never has, and if we do nothing, never will. Some black people do not value black life. That's how my cousin was murdered and left for dead in a pool of his own blood while trying to go to work to provide for his young family. For a few dollar bills. And the killer has not been found. That's how another cousin killed in cold blood and will spend the rest of his life in prison. That's how Emmit Till and thousands of other black men had their bodies destroyed for sport. That's how Eric Garner was choked to death in public and that's how Michael Brown was shot and left for dead.
Left like a dog. Or worse than that, because someone would have handled the body of even a stray dog.
I could say so much more, but this is not the only issue out there right now. This summer was a hard Ramadan for many because of injustice and death so many places in the world, most notably in Gaza. I don't like to get political mainly because I don't have time, during my training, to be part of the grander solution. I don't have time to be well read and therefore the best spoken here, and I don't put my prose to its best use, which I do not believe is an online blog that few people read. I believe that is mobilizing people who have the tools and the drive to affect legislation.
My parents have also always feared my online presence, especially as a Muslimah, because long before we knew about NSA, my mother, as a former black nationalist, knew about the NSA. In the sense that she knew after 9/11 there were most certainly governmental bodies that had the power to tap into our lives as the NSA has. Call that some old NOI conspiracy theorizing, but it was true, and now folks acting shocked.
I could say so much more, but instead, I choose to end this entry with a series of truths. This goes beyond Ferguson. This goes beyond the other string of innocent black men that were killed before Michael Brown this year and were killed after. This is about Civil Rights.
1. The militarized police are here to stay and will continue to use excessive force unless meaningful and deep rooted legislative action happens to eradicate it, much of which is firmly based in the War on Drugs. Our legislative bodies have not been in a state to affect that type of change and won't be in the foreseeable future.
2. The 1960s were a horrendous decade, not only because so many people were killed, but because the government lied, step by step, over and over and over again.
3. The Civil Rights movement should not have been over when it was. There were many victories but the status quo is not a victory we can declare post-civil rights worthy by any stretch of the imagination.
4. As Affirmative Action programs have ended over the country over the last 10 years, the "playing field" is still far from "level," as long as predominantly black schools remain predominantly poor, meaning the majority of black kids get substandard education to inhibit college success.
5. SCOTUS knew exactly what they were doing in voting down the Voting Rights Act, and that "country has come so far" rhetoric was a cover. Poor blacks won't be counting marbles in a jar to get the vote but there will surely be other restrictive measures popping back up, and it won't be restricted to the South.
6. Speaking of the value of black life, some black people also do not value black life, this is true. The reality of white-on-white crime aside, black self-violence is apparent not only in crimes and murders committed but in our own music, our entertainment, our leisure. This must stop because, fair or not, there is a group of people who will not value our lives because they figure we also don't value our own. And we will continue to die in our own hands and in the hands of others, on the street, in pools of blood for hours, worse than dogs.
7. Regardless of the above, it is egregious to blame the victim, and every time a young black man is killed, the victim is blamed, it is justified based on circumstantial issues that really are not worth dying over. Like Trayvon and weed. Like Emmit Till and flirting with a white woman. The latter should sound as ridiculous as reasons to die as Michael Brown stealing candy and Eric Garner selling taxless cigarette singles, except even more so because it was carried out by law enforcement.
8. COINTELPRO is real and it's declassified. And just because its now declassified doesn't mean that our government wouldn't and hasn't had similar endeavors, so to speak.
9. We talk about how our healthcare system is broken, and it is, but moreso our penal system is broken, broken and costlier than the education of our children, which further feeds into the system. The disregarded black bodies that are not slaughtered spend some time in the penitentiary, if not the majority of their lives, most of them for petty drug offenses, spending time and tax payer money in a place that has no reformatory value and leave unable to make lives for themselves because of ex-con status.
10. Injustices such as these will continue to happen, in
spite of peaceful protest and marching in Ferguson until our government
takes thing seriously enough and do as they did during the movement and
sign the needed changes into law.
I think 10 is a nice round number. There are probably others that I could include.
It's been more than a month since my grandfather passed, and I feel even more emboldened to try to take over where he left off before a stroke and an ICU stay in the 1970s changed him from the outspoken member of his local black nationalist organization to a quiet man whose memory of injustice often suffered in silence as he changed his focus to his growing family of grandchildren.
"The one thing we did wrong was stay in the wilderness a day too long."
Let's not let time pass after Ferguson, security set in, and we wander back to the wilderness.
When I was a kid, this used to be one of my favorite movies: "The Preacher's Wife," the remake of "The Bishop's Wife," which I have never seen. I'll see if it's on Netflix.
It was a musical movie set around Christmas time. I haven't seen it since I was maybe 13 years old or so, but I think it's about an angel who comes down to help mend the relationship between the preacher and his wife, but he ends up falling in love with the preacher's wife in the process. Yeah, oops.
But I used to really like the soundtrack to this movie. Here's one of the songs I thought of just the other day...this was towards the end of the movie.
This is back in more of Whitney Houston's heyday, after "I Will Always Love You," from the Bodyguard soundtrack, which was voted the best soundtrack of the 90s, I think, in one of the countdown shows that I have on VHS somewhere (another one of my favorite soundtracks from that time is the one from "Boomerang" with Toni Braxton). Anyway, this song is "I Love the Lord," with a lively reprisal of "Joy to the World," at the end which is pretty cool.
Insha'Allah Whitney Houston recovers from her addictions. She tried to come back, her voice isn't the same...and I think she checked herself back into rehab.
But my mother owns this soundtrack on CD. She used to play it in the car as she shuttled us kids around. I actually grew up on a fair amount of gospel music...not a lot like those who would go to church every Sunday, but a lot for someone who was hearing it from her Muslim mother.
My mother loves devotional music. Some Ramadans, since my mother fasts music (something that I may try to do again this Ramadan), she would just listen to gospel. There were a few artists in the 90s that she really liked...like, Fred Hammond, Dottie Peoples, reaching back and getting it with Mahalia Jackson (one of the best female vocalists of all time).
Background for those who don't know, my mother was born into a Southern Baptist family. My grandparents are from the South (from Arkansas) and traveled up here for a better life in what is known as the great migration. They had 10 children. My mother is the youngest one that remembers church...the rest of them were too young. My grandparents began investigating the Nation of Islam in the 60s and joined shortly before Malcolm X was assassinated. My mother was 10 years old when they joined the Nation with their entire family, and she still remembers the first Christmas when she couldn't tell the other children what she had gotten because they no longer celebrated. She was called "Black Moz" by one of her classmates.
And things were not the same again.
Fast forward to 1975, when Elijah Muhammed died. Shortly thereafter, when his son, W. Deen Muhammed took over things, many NOI members began to convert to Islam, or what they called "Orthodox Islam." My mother's family was one...everyone converted to Islam. My grandparents changed their last name to an Arabic last name, so everyone who was not already married, my mother downward, changed their last name. Like, they legally changed their last name. My grandfather (who was a grandfather at the time), Charley James, changed his name to Abdul Rahim. My mother, who was Patsy Ruth, changed her name to Khalilah Sabreen. My uncle, who was David Allen (a name that my mother really still likes and regrets that he changed it) changed his name to Dawud Alim. I'm not sure why my mother and uncle decided to change their first names, but at this point, my mother has lived longer as Khalilah than she did as Patsy.
I love that my mother lived in such interesting times. One of the family pictures is signed by Muhammad Ali, who of course was in the NOI before he converted to Islam. All of their names are signed with the last name X...so my mother as Patsy Ruth X. I guess at one point, he came over to my grandparents house and listened to my uncles play the piano.
I look up to my mother and her siblings...they've lived so much more life at my age than I think I'll ever live. I should ask my uncle sometimes about his trying to form a band. My uncles are musicians, and throughout the years have tried to form ensembles, but have not yet made it big. But that's another story.
And after that, my family grew in Islam, then receded. My grandparents, particularly my grandmother, were the Muslim base. You came into their home, removed your shoes and said, "As salaam alaikum." You still do, everyone did, even those who weren't Muslim. I remember my grandmother up early for salat, and then she would begin her day, making breakfast, and that short time that I lived with them, helping me make my lunch for school. That's the dominant memory of my grandmother...up, cooking, talking fast, cracking jokes, cursing yet tying her hijab around her head when it came time to go out...
My grandmother and aunt wore hijab in a way so natural, I didn't even think twice about it. And I love them for it.
Anyway, I digress. All of that to say, my mother grew up in the church. She grew up hearing records of Mahalia Jackson in their home, until they converted to the Nation and threw all of their gospel records away. But Mahalia Jackson, Sam Cooke, among others, were standard gospel that they listened to in the home. A pivotal point in my understanding of how strong of a Christian upbringing my mother had was when she played for her brothers and sisters, when we were planning our 1997 family reunion (fun times!), "Jesus Be A Fence" by Sam Cooke, and all of my older aunts and uncles and my mother (six of them remembered it) just started singing,
"Jesus! Be a fence all around me every day..."
Myself and one of my cousins were standing there, mouths agape. Then he said, "Wait, I thought we were Muslim!" Which is the grand irony for us kids, faced by our Christian classmates on a daily basis and having to defend our identity as Muslims, and here were our parents, throwing it up in their faces that they once belonged, once were like everyone else...
Because that was a challenge when I was a kid. Everyone else was Christian. I was the only Muslim in my entire school until the 7th grade, when I moved. I never really desired to be Christian or to be like everyone else. I had a little brother with autism...I was already not like everyone else, so that helped me be resolute at 11 when I decided that Islam was the religion for me, though I had already been raised in it. But that didn't meant that it still wasn't hard being set apart, being pitied because I didn't know Christ, being excluded sometimes. I was mainly afraid to go to church because I didn't know anything about the Bible, so I gleaned any information I could from those around me and learned a bit about Christianity through osmosis.
But the one thing I always liked about church (which I went to a few times...I have a great uncle [who has since passed] who was a preacher, and we always went to church for family reunions, except for the one hosted in Flint, since we were Muslim) was choir.
I wanted to be in a choir for the longest. I love to sing, and if my school had a choir, I would have joined it.
And my mother listened to her old favorites and new favorite gospel music in the car. She'd do this thing were she'd skip songs that were too "Jesus-y," and then in songs that made one or two mentions of Jesus, she'd usually change it to "God" or "Allah," since Allah has two syllables, since often the songs would use God and Jesus interchangibly.
But there were some gospel songs that just talked about God, which my mother felt were appropriate. She told me that if there was one thing that she missed in Islam, it was the existence of devotional music, with the spiritual catharsis that you can get from lively gospel music.
So I grew up with these songs. I still sing Mahalia Jackson songs sometimes as I go about my day. It's a perspective, I realize, my children won't have. They won't be the children of a convert. The Nation of Islam will be something their great grandparents, who will exist for them more as pictures or faint memories of really old people, did. Pictures of my family in the Nation will be black and white and yellowed artifacts that have little to do with them. So will be their story in Christianity to Islam, something to be told in the history books, likened to the moth-eaten pages of their grandmother's copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X that may or may not be on their school's reading list. And their mother's occasional affinity for old-timey gospel music will not be unlike that 90s music that she occasionally has them listen to as she drives them off to their engagements.
Maybe I'll have in a daughter or a son a kindred spirit as I was for my mother. It would be nice. She would understand and listen with rapt attention, when I was talking to her or not, the history of my family in Islam, the juxtaposition of my father's family in Christianity, and it will inspire her to be whoever she aspires to be in life, but even stronger, as my mother's, as my grandparent's story has for me.
But in the meantime, I'm childless for a while. I just listen to the music whose emotion is complex. I don't yet know God as much as I will as I struggle more through life and come to him more through life, so the catharsis is not as complete as it will be 20 years from now, as I will be a practicing physician for 15 years with my own family, worrying about my parents' health, my brother's place in the world, making sure he has as full of a life as possible while supporting my husband and raising my children. It's a complex emotion because all of this music reminds me of my mother, it reminds me of my family's story. It's emotion is complex because as self-regulating as many of us Muslims are about music in general, I will still listen to these songs and remember God as we are all called to do.
One of my favorite quotes from the movie that I've never seen all the way through, but that I heard so many people quote before:
"I don't have to do nothin' but stay black and die."
Very telling, very reflective of frustrations many of my brothers and sisters in ancestry feel. My roommate thinks that the stress pathway being used to explain why all black women, even college-educated, high income black women, have higher rates of low birth rate and infant mortality than both white women and sub-Saharan African and African-born women of the same socioeconomic status is bullshit. But she also cherishes her fair skin, the legacy of her mixed background, and has probably seldom seen or felt the racism darker-skinned black women have.
It is not bullshit. It makes me angry when she doubts that stress of racism would have anything to do with the increased infant mortality in a population that otherwise should be as healthy as our sub-Saharan counterparts, if genetics mean anything.
I'm not as fair as her, necessarily (and she actually periodically rejects the fact that I am fair at all because I'm darker than her, and she has repeatedly expressed that she is the center of the universe, so what can I do), but I see the difference. I've gone into stores with my mother where she was treated like shit and I was smiled at and told to have a nice day. By black women.
Let me make things clear. I am not my predecessors in the Nation of Islam. You do not see me talking on here about the evils of the White Man. Some of that stress of racism is internal, not only within ourselves but within our communities, from our "brothers" and "sisters" in ancestry. Maybe not even ancestry. Blood used to be thicker than water. Siblings in skin color who must despise us as an extension of despising themselves.
I don't know. I'm just speculating.
Yes, things are internal, but racism is external, too. I still show my solidarity for the youth movement in Egypt, I still follow the stories every day, awaiting progress and next steps as another dictator bites the dust. However, even though one struggle at a time, I guess, let's remember how we treat our brothers and sisters. I read this article on TheRoot.com, and it was unsurprising based on all I've known as I came into Islam, but still a damn shame.
"I learned something much different from what I believed," said Bala, a native of northern Nigeria and a graduate student at the American University in Cairo, who lived in Egypt for six years. "I thought [the Arabs] were our brothers in Islam, but they don't bother about that when you're black. ... They pretend that you are a brother in Islam, but this is different from what they hold in their hearts and in their minds." - Sunni Khalid, Egypt's Race Problem.
I read this and I can't really get angry. I was saddened at some of the sub-Saharan Muslims leaving Islam because of the racism they faced in Egypt. I feel for Khalid's wife, Zeinab, who gets treated like a prostitute because of her skin color, but I can't play like I haven't rode my fair skin in places where black people were disparaged. *cough*Dominican Republic*cough*. I can't get angry because it's the same story, every day, every time...
We know this to be true, the racism that inhibits the growth of Islam. We may have more babies than people in other religions, but we need to stop focusing on quantity and more on quality.
I was disillusioned long ago. It's not even a thing. Like that Nigerian student said, I thought we were all siblings in Islam, but then I discovered that people don't see us that way when we're black. So much for the interracial nature of Islam, the thing that brought me to Islam in the first place. So much for the Qur'an and the Prophet's last speech.
Staying black and dying is never enough for me. No racist can take my relationship with Allah (swt) away from me. So excuse me, I'm going to stay a black and Muslim until insha'Allah...
And I pray that, whenever I am so blessed, I carry my beautiful, black babies to term.
Last night, I talked to B. I didn't realize that I had fallen asleep, and then my body somehow turned on the phone, and I suddenly heard "Hello?" I tried to play like I wasn't just asleep, but he can always tell. He doesn't want to talk to me late because he doesn't want to wake me. Even though we're past the stage where I'd sleep with the phone by my bed and wait for him to contact me in the middle of the night, I still would talk to him at whatever hour of the night.
I miss him. The last time I saw him was Saturday, and I won't get to see him until Friday, meu Deus! If we're doing dinner, we'll have to figure out well in advance where we're going so it won't be the same fiasco as last time...choosing a place for nearly 2 hours. I don't want to keep a hungry man from his food.
One day, we should cook together...but I think that should be a weekend and not a weekday. Two grad students tired from a week of work will not produce a good product.
I woke up this morning to a not-impressive blizzard that will soon turn to ice, if it hasn't already. Oh well. The snow was pretty while it was just snow. The snow we got yesterday, I felt, was more meritorious of the term blizzard, even though it was nothing like what we got in January. I took my Advil, which I must take religiously on the first and second days of my cycle, but I feel less hormonal and can probably actually leave my room tomorrow without getting annoyed at my roommate.
...then I picked up my Kindle to read the news.
I haven't decided if I'll have time (or the money) to subscribe to any news source on my kindle when I can read the website for free (though with difficulty on the Kindle). However, because of reading the news, I've been up on so many things that I usually would have gotten second hand...like, I followed Tunisia and I caught Egypt's uprisings from the beginning. This is something I haven't done, really, since college and the first year of medical school.
I have my intended to thank for this, partially.
He's like me, and very socially conscious. But he is more so than me. One of the things that kept my attention when I first met him is how incredibly well-read he is in history and current events, not only of the United States and Nigeria, but the entire world. He knows a freakish amount about these things for someone who didn't major in history because in college, he self-educated himself.
So he's been watching Al-Jazeera English before all the cool kids jumped on the bandwagon to watch it for Egypt.
He's been busy with research for a while and hasn't gotten to read as much as he wanted to, but he still keeps up with current events...compulsively. He has an opinion about everything. The only thing that's different between us is that he has a bitter, disillusioned baseline about the world, and I guess mine is bittersweet.
There is a lot of bad and evil in the world, but there is also tons of good.
I just had a revelation a few months ago. The best among us, the heroes among us, are people who do good to reverse the bad that other people have put in place or are actively instituting. In the grand scheme of carnage, injury, starvation, destitution, assault, rights violations, natural disasters play a small part. People are suffering daily in the hands and policies of everyone from dictators to democratically elected individuals.
What does this discovery mean? For every bad thing that's happening in this world, there's probably a little person, or little people, on the ground, springing forth in grassroots operations, doing for self, working for their people who are suffering, and we've seen instances where that can make a huge difference and creep up to the policy level so there is still hope for everything.
Some are saved, some are not. Some problems have more activists than others. But it's not impossible. That's what I get from history and current events. Change is not impossible...
...all by the grace of God, but I don't push that with B, because I know that my belief in God is different than his belief, because of where I've been, the challenges I've faced and the resolution I've seen.
But it is refreshing to talk to him about anything happening in the news and he already has encyclopedic knowledge about it because he reads it in his free time, because he knows the history of the region, or if he doesn't know he's already up on learning it.
It's cool to be made a little bit better by someone. This is something that's within me, that I always wanted to do, and he's helping me to get back to that by being my partner in following the news.
Yesterday, I was so inspired, since I didn't have any reading for my Community Health Centers class, to translate the lyrics to the song, "Haiti" by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. So I did. It's probably rough in parts because I don't understand nearly any of the references in the third stanza. All with the help of Google translate.
Here's my favorite version of the song--the long version with Caetano Veloso only:
And here are the lyrics:
If you’re ever invited to ascend up to the courtyard Of the House of Jorge Amado Foundation*
To see the front row of soldiers, almost all black Wringing the necks of black delinquents, Of mulatto thieves and others, almost white
Treated like blacks Just to show the other almost-blacks, (And they’re almost all black) And the poor almost whites like blacks How it is that blacks, the poor and mulattoes, And the almost white/almost black that the same poor, are treated
And it doesn’t matter if the eyes of the whole world Could, for a moment, rewind to a time Where slaves were punished And today, a drumming, a drumming With the purity of uniformed high school kids On the day of a parade And the epic grandeur of a developing people Attracts us, dazzles us, stimulates us
Nothing matters: Not the trace of excess Nor the lens of Fantástico**, Nor a Paul Simon CD Nobody, nobody is a citizen If you are going to see the party in Pelô***, and even if you’re not
Think of Haiti, pray for Haiti Haiti is here Haiti is not here
And on TV if you see a congressman in ill-concealed panic Presenting any, but really any, any, any Education plan
That sounds easy That seems easy and fast And it will represent a threat to democracy On primary school level And if that same congressman defends the adoption of capital punishment And the venerable Cardinal says he sees so much spirit in the fetus And none in the criminal And if, while running the light, the old light, red, habitual You notice a man pissing on the street corner over a glossy bag of garbage from Leblon**** And when you hear the smiling silence of São Paulo
Before the massacre:
111 defenseless prisoners, but prisoners are almost all black Or almost black, or almost white/almost black that are the same poor
And the poor are like the rotten and everyone knows how blacks are treated And when you go, turn towards the Caribbean And when you fuck without a condom And submit your intelligent participation in the blockade of Cuba...
Think of Haiti, pray for Haiti Haiti is here Haiti is not here
*Jorge Amado was a Brazilian author whose works dealt mainly with the poor black/mulatto populations of Bahia. His estate is preserved in Salvador and its supposed to promote the culture of Bahia.
** Fantastico is a popular Brazilian newsmagazine that shows up on their superchannel, Globo. It's like a week-in-review.
*** Pelo is a neighborhood in Salvador (as it's known to people in Bahia) that is a popular tourist attraction. It's the Historic Center of the Salvador, one where slaves were publicly beaten. The neighborhood is home to the first slave market on the continent.
****Leblon is the richest neighborhood in Rio. That's why the trash bag is glossy. It has the highest property values in all of Latin America.
I love B because I can translate this song, send him these lyrics, and he'll absolutely appreciate this more than anyone else I know. This is from an email I sent him yesterday. And of course, that's not the only thing...but it's little things like this that make us realize how much we make sense...
I find when I'm stuck in front of a book, studying for hours, I have a lot of ideas for journal entries...of course, because I am studying and not at liberty to write whenever I want. I mean, I could...but then I'd never get any studying done.
So this is one I've been thinking about for a while.
Yes, Cult of the Black Mama. Let me explain.
So, back when I was at Michigan, I took a bunch of classes on race and history in Latin America. The first one I took was called "Writing Race and Nation in Latin America and the Caribbean" or something like that, and it was my first exposure to race in Brazil...the country that would later become a veritable love of my life.
Anyway, it was through this class that I learned a little bit about the Cult of the Mulata. In Cuba and Brazil especially, the mulata, specifically someone of mixed African and European heritage, has a specific space in culture. The mulata is a woman of unmatched beauty, sensual, graceful, the one that people always look for in dance, in front during the desfiles of the samba school, whatever. The mulata is also often objectified as a sexual object. Not as much in Brazil but in the Caribbean you also have the negra, that I feel exists more as an object than the mulata does.
But then again, the things coming to my mind right now are "Una mulata en la Habana" by Adalberto Alvarez and "Yo quiero un vacilón" by Toño Rosario ("yo quiero un vacilón con una negra sabrosa [...] negra, mueve la cintura").
It's not just Brazil and Cuba that have a bit of the Cult of the Mulata going on. The black community in the US has gone through waves of it, when you'd only see "light skinned" curly haired people on the cover of Ebony. These days, you're more likely to see a more mixed-looking woman on commercials than someone with chocolate skin and either natural or straightened hair.
And you know what, I'm actually not mad at any of that. I'm just going to do my own thing, so excuse me while I start the Cult of the Black Mama.
Because in these Latin American cultures and at least historically, not so much the case anymore, the way you got the mulata was through the black mama. Seriously, I read in my Latin American history classes so many eulogies for the mulata and how this was the perfect form for a woman...brown skin, curves with European features, all of this, and nothing about where these women came from. What about their black mothers? Not even worth a mention? They were good enough for these leaders and stuff to get with at the time but now only their daughters get the shout out?
I'm also not mad at that, either. In my Cult of the Black Mama, the black woman shall not be objectified. No moviendo de la cintura, no shaking ya a** and watching yourself, dropping it like it's hot, none of that. No Daisy Dukes and no apple bottom jeans.
For me, my black mama is the absolute matriarch. She is earthy, she lives organic, she is quintessential beauty. She is real, through and through, accepting her imperfections as coolly as she wipes sweat from her brow with her forearm. She is the cornerstone of family, she is loving, accepting, children under her arms and at her feet. She is unrecognized and gorgeous.
I've been part of the black woman fan club for a long time. As a result, all of the protagonists of every story that I've written have been black women. So, and this is probably as much of an intro to this new site as I'm going to give, it will become apparent as I explore about what it means to me to be black, a black Muslimah, whatever else, my feelings about the unique existence of the black woman in society.
So a roda da saia mulata não quer mais rodar, não senhor... The spin of the mulata's skirt doesn't want to spin anymore, no sir...
Welcome to Invisible Muslimah, The Cult of the Black Mama, and other such social anecdotes by Chinyere! It will be a fun trip.
Oh, by the way...smoke from 50 burning Canadian forest fires obscured the Boston skyline on Monday...it was pretty cool. The whole place smelled like smoke. You could have told folks it was the end of the world and they would have believed it.
Time to sleep. I work out in the mornings now, and given I'm on a diet I'll probably sleep again like a hog tonight.
Invisible Muslimah is not a new concept. It actually has nothing to do with Invisible Man. In fact, after people kept asking me about it, I read Invisible Man. At the time it had an impact, but I must admit, I don't remember what it was about. No, I'm mainly carrying the name over from my old site. But I continue to be invisible, in the simple sense that people may know I'm Muslim, but they don't know how I'm Muslim...and I guess this blog has always exposed that about me in a kind of stark naked way. Oh yeah, 30! blah blah blah attending family physician blah.
