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The Job of Black Writers

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Me + Baldwin @ a beach in Long Island, Summer ’08.

I Love Baldwin and it seems that every summer I return to his collection of essays published by the Library of America.

What is the job of Black writers? The work?

Baldwin addresses this in the essay “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel.”

I like this quote because it gets at how writing is profoundly rewarding and often a Sisyphean task as well.

The importance of a writer is continuous;?? I think it’s socially debatable and usually socially not terribly, but that’s not the point; his importance, I think, is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe. It is a function, let’s face it, it is a special function. There is no democracy on this level. It’s a very difficult thing to do, its a very special thing to do and people who do it cannot by that token do many other things. But their importance is, and the importance of writers in this country now this is, that this country is yet to be discovered in any real sense…

Baldwin doesn’t say that this is the job of Black writers, but in reading this it certainly made me think of it in these terms.
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Black people are richer than ever before, financially. More Black men and women are in jail than ever before. We also have a Black president.

As media, and the rest of our lives moves online, I am mindful that most of the popular Black websites are concerned with the lives, affairs and misery of the Black famous rather than using the space to cultivate what Dayna Cunningham calls Black voice.

Black people have continually forced the United States to live up to being the democracy that it claims to be.

What happens when Black people who are media savvy are not primarily concerned with cultivating Black voice during a time of great change?

If everything that is digital is free, and as books become digitized, what will happen to Black writers ability to sustain themselves and how will this impact Black people?

Black Men x Love x Domination

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Carry Out the Four Modernisations of the Fatherland (2007) by Kehinde Wiley

I have been thinking a lot Love + Domination + Black men.

Two weeks ago, I had a fever and couldn’t sleep so I was up dumb early, and I decided to re-read bell hook’s “The Will to Change” and I found that it offered a straight forward analysis of why Love is the opposite of domination and how patriarchy is the glue that holds this domination puzzle together.

hook’s main argument is that when we raise our boys not to feel they grow up to become men who do not know how to Love. #ummp.

I will provide some excerpts from the book below, along with some comments.

Men and Change

Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change. Men cannot love if they are not taught the art of loving.

Consider this blog post and the other post, on Black masculinity as an effort to open, and continue a conversation about Black people, Black boys + men and feeling.

On Love and Domination

To know Love, men must be able to let go of the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.

Game for Free on Women’s Unwillingness to Deal with Men in Pain

We cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed….Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire.

This kind of hit me in the gut because I asked on Twitter about men being allowed to feel. And MZ (if I recall correctly, I didn’t screen cap it:/) stated that men can express their feelings to women, but women may not be receptive nor willing to hear it.

This floored me.

This forced me to think about the times in which I did not want to deal with the man when he was in pain.? I then asked myself, did I create the space for such an expression to occur. I stay thinking about it, not just with men, but with my whole crew and with myself as well.
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Defining Patriarchy

Patriarchy is a political social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.

Gives a whole new meaning to listening to “Bitches ain’t shit but ho’s and tricks.” #ummhmm.

bell hooks on Loving a Man But Resenting His Feelings

He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want any image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was , an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because? it revealed his emotional vulnerability.

Feminist need to reflect on how we treat people too. We human. We make mistakes. We grow. #Ummhmm.

Men Women and Power

We claim our power fully only when we can speak the truth that we need men in our lives whether we want them to be or not. That we need men to challenge patriarchy, that we need men to change.

Wow. Talk about we are in this together.com. I Love when writers remind me of this.

The idea that how we raise our boys shapes the kind of men that they will be is incredibly interesting.

Isn’t this a more useful discussion than “why heterosexual middle class Black women can’t find a ‘good’ man?” #ummhmm. Peace to Negro men and women who talk about Black women to pay they mortgages and car notes.

Why is it that we force little boys to suppress their feelings then we are surprised that they turn into men who can’t feel and simply want to dominate?

For men readers, have you shared your feelings with a woman recently? Was she receptive? How did it turn out?

For women readers, to you give the men in your life space to be in pain and show emotions other than rage/anger? How does this work.

REALLY looking forward to your feedback.

How Adrienne Rich Helped Me Forgive My Ex.

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My ex contacted me a month ago. For many of my long time readers, ya’ll know that I had a torrid affair with Filthy. When you are? a#blackgirlfromthefuture and you ride with your partner, thirteen hours, while being sick, to meet and kick it with his family who is White, that’s Love on both ends.

Well, he contacted me via email a month ago taumbout congratulations on completing your first year of grad school.

We ain’t spoke since last year when the relationship ended. So, I was like ummmmm….why is the first point of contact an email? However, I found out from a mutual friend that he was considering calling but he hesitated.

The petty part of me was like the fuck?

The adult part of me was like, well, he doing what he could do at the time, I should go ahead and just let him live.

Last Sunday, looking for an earring underneath my dresser, I found a book,? “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” by Adrienne Rich, that he gave me last August. I guess it fell back there when I moved. He didn’t give me books. He let me hold them, all the time. But his books were his books, and I get that as a scholar. You be needing to go back to your copy to refer to notes in margins and what not and to clarify quotes.

In finding and re-reading this book I realized that I could not be tight with him over our recent communications. Reading this book and understanding that that he gave it to me. This man Loved me. In fact, I think he gave me the copy that he got from a garage sell.? A first edition copy. #ummhmm. #Love.

There are three sections that really get at why this book is special to me.

The first is:

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence grappling, with hard work….It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. ~from Claiming an Education

The second is:

Women and men do not receive an equal education because outside of the classroom women are not perceived as sovereign beings but as prey…. the capacity to think independently, to take intellectual risks, to assert ourselves mentally is inseparable from our physical way of being in the world, our feelings of personal integrity. If it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library because I am a woman and I can be raped then, how self possessed, how exuberant can I feel as I sit and work at the library? How much of my working energy is drained by by the subliminal knowledge that as a woman, I test my physical right to exist every time I go out alone. ~from Taking Women Students Seriously

This line killed it for me, “because outside of the classroom women are not perceived as sovereign beings but as prey.”

The third? is:
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I think of myself as a teacher of language: that is, as someone for whom language has implied freedom, who is trying to aide others in freeing themselves through the written word, and above all through learning to write it for themselves. I cannot know what it is they need to free, or what words they need to write; I can only try with them to get an approximation of the story that they want to tell. ~from Teaching Language in Open Admissions

“I cannot know what it is they need to free” #ummhmm. Her pedagogy weighs a ton.

Rereading this book, I realized that I was tripping because the communication didn’t happen the way that I preferred.

HA! Thats life.

More than anything, this book helped me to make sense of this last year of school, of my process of claiming my education and my voice in the classroom, on THIS blog and publicly, in real time on Twitter.

How can I be tight with a person who helped me do that? #Ummhmm.

When its time for us to chat we will. Until then. God bless him. Change me. #ummhmm.

Besides resentment and Love can’t live in the same heart, and if? I’m tight with him I am impacting my ability to see new Love awesomeness on the horizon.

I felt vulnerable writing this. But I posted it anyways.

#wingsup.

You forgive anyone lately?

Why or why not?

You know Adrienne Rich’s work?

Appreciation for Martha Southgate

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This one is for Jonzey and all the Black girls in the world who live to tell stories.

I reread Martha Southgate’s Third Girl From the Left this week and I was moved by the fact that I read this book in 2005 when it came out, but I think that the fact that I am five years older, have lost and gained loves, lost and gained apartments, broken hearts and got my heart broken, lost and gained careers. I just look at the book, the importance of the narrative differently now.

The book is about a Black woman from Oklahoma who moves to LA in the 70’s with dreams of making it big in Hollywood. What follows is a story about Black women’s dreams, Black women desiring and loving Black women, constructions of family outside of the nuclear, and what happens to your dreams when they don’t turn out the ways you expect them to.

Real Talk.

Here? are of couple of excerpts that jumped off? of the page:

Tamara Muses on the Politics of Getting her Film Made and her Film School Boyfriend

They made up. They didn’t have time to keep fighting anyway. That as the other thing between them; the money and the time. They never talked about it. He was able to get enough money from his parents to hire a professional cinematographer. And she couldn’t. She didn’t have anyone to shoot for her. She had grabbed every grant possible, begged for every loan imaginable. Nothing had come through.? She could not afford a crew. They were talking about it again on this night. Colin knew she was upset, even though her eyes were resolutely dry…..

Tamara Meets her Grandmother at Nearly 28 Years Old

“Well, I never. A black girl making movies. I never thought I’d see such a thing. I love the pictures. Your mama ever tell you that? We used to go every Saturday, rain or shine, no matter wht. We saw everything. You ask her.”? She stopped again briefly. “Whenever we wasn’t fightng, we was at the pictures. We saw everything. Ask her about Carmen Jones.” ….”I don’t know why you’d want to make a movie about an old woman like me. But you sure can….”

Honestly, we need to pool the money together to make this book into movie.
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Cast who we want or who Martha Southgate wants, and screen it in our living rooms, lounges, screening rooms.

Ms.? Southgate has given us a gift in this book. Rather than gripe and moan about new ways in which Nina Simone is being disrespected or Tyler Perry’s latest iteration of normalizing violence against us, only when we control how our stories are told will we be allowed to be human in our art.

Speaking of Black peoples stories, my homie James just cut a trailer for his new film, The Bicycle. Check it out here.

Have you read Martha Southgate’s work?

What are you reading now?

Crowdsourcing Black Women’s Stories?

#ummp. #ummhmm.

What Should I Write About?

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I have a bit more time on my hands, so I wanted to reach out and ask

you all what you want me to write about.

Here are some of the ideas that I have:

1. Quick Post on Joan Morgan and David Ikard’s interview in the academic journal, Beats, Words and Life. They talk about rap music, the erotic and sex.

2. The history of Hip Hop Blogs post. I interviewed 10 HH bloggers in 2008, and I waited to do the post until I was writing under my own name. #Ummhmm. Its dated but still relevant, in that we get a since of how much the game has evolved from 2005-2008 then 2008-2010.

3. A post on Dating a Giver. I have stumbled across someone who is a giver and a sharer. Part of me was shook by it, part of me enjoyed it. I want to write about that tension.

4. Post on how a Hip Hop Blog showed me that most top 40 Rap music, hates Black women.? in 2009 really don’t give a fuck about Black women, and in many ways Black men as well. How I had been holding on, but I needed to accept that one to the face.
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5. Post on Ice Cubs Death Certificate and Chris Hedges Empire of Illiteracy. The two, in my mind, complement each other.

6. The Crack Project proposal. I wrote a proposal for class on examining the social impact of crack on East Oakland using oral histories and homicide and labor statistics. I wanted to post a version of it here.

Any other ideas?

Let me know.

Ya’ll still down for the book club?

I know I was talking about it way back in 2008.

Oh, and I hope to have an update for 100 Visionaries in a month.? Soon come.