thank you adrain piper...for everything

thank you adrian piper...for everything

Learn more about Adrian Piper at - www.adrianpiper.com






Dear Editor:

Please don’t call me a black artist.
Please don’t call me a black philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American artist.
Please don’t call me an African American philosopher.

Please don’t call me a woman artist.
Please don’t call me a woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female artist.
Please don’t call me a female philosopher.

Please don’t call me a black woman artist.
Please don’t call me a black woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American woman artist.
Please don’t call me an African American woman philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black female artist.
Please don’t call me a black female philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American female artist.
Please don’t call me an African American female philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female black artist.
Please don’t call me a female black philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female African American artist.
Please don’t call me a female African American philosopher.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female.

Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me an artist who happens to be female and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher who happens to be female and African American.

Please don’t call me a black artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me a woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me a black woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American woman artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American woman philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a black female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a black female philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me an African American female artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me an African American female philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female black artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female black philosopher and artist.
Please don’t call me a female African American artist and philosopher.
Please don’t call me a female African American philosopher and artist.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female.

Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman and black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American and a woman.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be a woman and African American.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be black and female.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female and black.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be African American and female.
Please don’t call me an artist and philosopher who happens to be female and African American.
Please don’t call me a philosopher and artist who happens to be female and African American.

Dear Editor,
I hope you will bring to my attention any permutations I have overlooked.
I write to inform you that
I have earned the right to be called an artist.
I have earned the right to be called a philosopher.
I have earned the right to be called an artist and philosopher.
I have earned the right to be called a philosopher and artist.
I have earned the right to call myself anything I like.

Thank you in advance for your consideration.
Adrian Piper

1 January 2003

blackness, art, politcs oh my!!!

By HOLLAND COTTER
Published: March 30, 2008
IN the 1970s the African-American artist Adrian Piper donned an Afro wig and a fake mustache and prowled the streets of various cities in the scowling, muttering guise of the Mythic Being, a performance-art version of a prevailing stereotype, the black male as a mugger, hustler, gangsta.

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Paul Fortin/Pope.L
The artist William Pope.L, on the cover of the catalog to his 2003 retrospective exhibition, “eRacism.” More Photos »

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On Race and Art In the photographs that resulted you can see what she was up to. In an era when some politicians and much of the popular press seemed to be stoking racial fear, she was turning fear into farce — but serious, and disturbing, farce, intended to punch a hole in pervasive fictions while acknowledging their power.

Recently a new kind of Mythic Being arrived on the scene, the very opposite of the one Ms. Piper introduced some 30 years ago. He doesn’t mutter; he wears business suits; he smiles. He is by descent half black African, half white American. His name is Barack Obama.

On the rancorous subject of the country’s racial history he isn’t antagonistic; he speaks of reconciliation, of laying down arms, of moving on, of closure. He is presenting himself as a 21st-century postracial leader, with a vision of a color-blind, or color-embracing, world to come.

Campaigning politicians talk solutions; artists talk problems. Politics deals in goals and initiatives; art, or at least interesting art, in a language of doubt and nuance. This has always been true when the subject is race. And when it is, art is often ahead of the political news curve, and heading in a contrary direction.

In a recent solo debut at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in Chelsea a young artist named Rashid Johnson created a fictional secret society of African-American intellectuals, a cross between Mensa and the Masons. At first uplift seemed to be the theme. The installation was framed by a sculpture resembling giant cross hairs. Or was it a microscope lens, or a telescope’s? The interpretive choice was yours. So was the decision to stay or run. Here was art beyond old hot-button statements, steering clear of easy condemnations and endorsements. But are artists like Mr. Johnson making “black” art? Political art? Identity art? There are no answers, or at least no unambiguous ones.

Since Ms. Piper’s Mythical Being went stalking in the 1970s — a time when black militants and blaxploitation movies reveled in racial difference — artists have steadily challenged prevailing constructs about race.

As multiculturalism entered mainstream institutions in the 1980s, the black conceptualist David Hammons stayed outdoors, selling snowballs on a downtown Manhattan sidewalk. And when, in the 1990s, Robert Colescott was selected as the first African-American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, he brought paintings of figures with mismatched racial features and skin tones, political parables hard to parse.

At the turn of the present millennium, with the art market bubbling up and the vogue for identity politics on the wane, William Pope.L — the self-described “friendliest black artist in America” — belly-crawled his way up Broadway, the Great White Way, in a Superman outfit, and ate copies of The Wall Street Journal.

Today, as Mr. Obama pitches the hugely attractive prospect of a postracial society, artists have, as usual, already been there, surveyed the terrain and sent back skeptical, though hope-tinged, reports. And you can read those reports in art all around New York this spring, in retrospective surveys like “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” currently at the P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, in the up-to-the-minute sampler that is the 2008 Whitney Biennial, in gallery shows in Chelsea and beyond, and in the plethora of art fairs clinging like barnacles to the Armory Show on Pier 94 this weekend.

“Wack!” is a good place to trace a postracial impulse in art going back decades. Ms. Piper is one of the few African-American artists in the show, along with Howardena Pindell and Lorraine O’Grady. All three began their careers with abstract work, at one time the form of black art most acceptable to white institutions, but went on to address race aggressively.

In a 1980 performance video, “Free, White and 21,” Ms. Pindell wore whiteface to deliver a scathing rebuke of art-world racism. In the same year Ms. O’Grady introduced an alter ego named “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” who, dressed in a beauty-queen gown sewn from white formal gloves, crashed museum openings to protest all-white shows. A few years later Ms. Piper, who is light skinned, began to selectively distribute a printed calling card at similar social events. It read:

Dear Friend,

I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are not black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.

I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.

Sincerely yours,

Adrian Margaret Smith Piper

Although these artists’ careers took dissimilar directions, in at least some of their work from the ’70s and ’80s they all approached race, whiteness as well as blackness, as a creative medium. Race is treated as a form of performance; an identity that could, within limits, be worn or put aside; and as a diagnostic tool to investigate social values and pathologies.

Ms. Piper’s take on race as a form of creative nonfiction has had a powerful influence on two generations of African-Americans who, like Mr. Obama, didn’t experience the civil rights movement firsthand, and who share a cosmopolitan attitude toward race. In 2001 that attitude found corner-turning expression in “Freestyle,” an exhibition organized at the Studio Museum in Harlem by its director, Thelma Golden.

When Ms. Golden and her friend the artist Glenn Ligon called the 28 young American artists “postblack,” it made news. It was a big moment. If she wasn’t the first to use the term, she was the first to apply it to a group of artists who, she wrote, were “adamant about not being labeled ‘black’ artists, though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.”

The work ranged from mural-size images of police helicopters painted with hair pomade by Kori Newkirk, who lives in Los Angeles, to computer-assisted geometric abstract painting by the New York artist Louis Cameron. Mr, Newkirk’s work came with specific if indirect ethnic references; Mr. Cameron’s did not. Although “black” in the Studio Museum context, they would lose their racial associations in an ethnically neutral institution like the Museum of Modern Art.

Ethnically neutral? That’s just a code-term for white, the no-color, the everything-color. For whiteness is as much — or as little — a racial category as blackness, though it is rarely acknowledged as such wherever it is the dominant, default ethnicity. Whiteness is yet another part of the postracial story. Like blackness, it has become a complicated subject for art. And few have explored it more forcefully and intimately than Nayland Blake.

Mr. Blake, 48, is the child of a black father and a white mother. In various performance pieces since the 1990s he has dressed up as a giant rabbit, partly as a reference to Br’er Rabbit of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, a wily animal who speaks in Southern black dialect and who survives capture by moving fast and against expectations.

In 2001 Mr. Blake appeared in a video with another artist, AA Bronson. Each had his face slathered with cake frosting, chocolate in Mr. Blake’s case, vanilla in Mr. Bronson’s. When then two men exchanged a long kiss, the colors, and presumably the flavors, began to blend. Shared love, the implication was, dissolves distinctions between “black” and “white,” which, as racial categories, are cosmetic, superficial.

As categories they are also explosive. In 1984, when Mr. Hammons painted a poster of the Rev. Jesse Jackson as a blond, blue-eyed Caucasian and exhibited it outdoors in Washington, the piece was trashed by a group of African-American men. Mr, Hammons intended the portrait, “How Ya Like Me Now,” as a comment on the paltry white support for Mr. Jackson’s presidential bid that year. Those who attacked it assumed the image was intended as an insult to Mr. Jackson.

More recently, when Kara Walker cut out paper silhouettes of fantasy slave narratives, with characters — black and white alike — inflicting mutual violence, she attracted censure from some black artists. At least some of those objecting had personal roots in the civil rights years and an investment in art as a vehicle for racial pride, social protest and spiritual solace.

Ms. Walker, whose work skirts any such overt commitments, was accused of pandering to a white art market with an appetite for images of black abjection. She was called, in effect, a sellout to her race.

In a television interview a few weeks ago, before he formed plans to deliver his speech on race, Mr. Obama defended his practice of backing off from discussion of race in his campaign. He said it was no longer a useful subject in the national dialogue; we’re over it, or should be.

But in fact it can be extremely useful. There is no question that his public profile has been enhanced by his Philadelphia address, even if the political fallout in terms of votes has yet to be gauged.

Race can certainly be used to sell art too, and the results can be also be unpredictable. As with politics, timing is crucial.

In 1992 the white artist team Pruitt-Early (Rob Pruitt and Walter Early) presented a gallery exhibition called “The Red Black Green Red White and Blue Project.” Its theme was the marketing of African-American pop culture, with an installation of black-power posters, dashiki cloth and tapes of soul music bought in Harlem.

What might, at a later time or with different content, have been seen as a somewhat dated consumerist critique proved to be a public relations disaster. The artists were widely condemned as racist and all but disappeared from the art world.

Eight years later, with the cooling of identity politics, a show called “Hip-Hop Nation: Roots, Rhymes and Rage” arrived, with no apparent critical component, at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. An array of fashion images, videos and artifacts associated with stars like the Notorious B.I.G., Missy Elliott and Tupac Shakur, it was assumed to be a welcoming (if patronizing) gesture to the museum’s local African-American audience. Yet its appearance coincided with the general massive marketing of hip-hop culture to middle-class whites, a phenomenon that Mr. Pruitt and Mr. Early had been pointing to.

Were Pruitt-Early postblack artists ahead of their time, offering a new take on race, as a movable feast that collided with older, essentialist attitudes? If so, they would probably find plenty of company now in artists who stake out terrain both black and postblack, white and postwhite.

Mr. Pope.L (he who crawled up Broadway) does so with a posture of radical outsiderness that cancels bogus notions of racial or cultural essence. Basically he short-circuits the very concept of what an artist, black or white, “should” be. He smiles as he inches up the street on all fours; he uncomplainingly devours news of money he’ll never have. He paints murals with peanut butter and makes sculpture from Pop-Tarts, the stuff of welfare meals. In many ways his main subject would seem to be class, not race. Yet race is everywhere in his art.

He works with mostly white materials — mayonnaise, milk, flour — but he also runs the Black Factory, a mobile workshop-van equipped to transform any object, no matter what color, into a “black” object. How? By covering it with cheap black paint.

For a retrospective at the Maine College of Art in Portland in 2003, Mr. Pope.L presented a performance piece with the optimistic title “eRacism,” but that was entirely about race-based conflict. In a photograph in the show’s catalog, he has the word written in white on his bare black chest. Were he pale-skinned, it might have been all but invisible.

Whereas Mr. Pope.L has shaped himself into a distinctive racial presence, certain other artists of color are literally built from scratch. A Miami artists collective called BLCK, in the current Whitney Biennial, doesn’t really exist. The archival materials attributed to it documenting African American life in the 1960s is actually the creation of single artist: Adler Guerrier, who was born in Haiti in 1975.

Projects by Edgar Arceneaux, who is also in the biennial, have included imaginary visual jam sessions with the jazz visionary Sun Ra and the late Conceptual artist Sol Lewitt. Earlier in this art season, a white artist, Joe Scanlan, had a solo gallery show using the fictional persona of a black artist, Donelle Woolford. Ms. Woolford was awarded at least one appreciative review, suggesting that, in art at least, race can be independent of DNA.

The topic of race and blood has always been an inflammatory one in this country. Ms. Piper broached it in a 1988 video installation and delivered some bad news. Facing us through the camera, speaking with the soothing composure of a social worker or grief counselor, she said that, according to statistics, if we were white Americans, chances were very high that we carried at least some black blood. That was the legacy of slavery. She knew we would be upset. She was sorry. But was the truth. The piece was titled “Cornered.”

And are we upset? I’ll speak for myself; it’s not a question. Of course not. Which is a good thing, because the concept of race in America — the fraught fictions of whiteness and blackness— is not going away soon. It is still deep in our system. Whether it is or isn’t in our blood, it’s in our laws, our behavior, our institutions, our sensibilities, our dreams.

It’s also in our art, which, at its contrarian and ambiguous best, is always on the job, probing, resisting, questioning and traveling miles ahead down the road.

ok can i just say, e. badu "carries" fools like tavis smiley and they don't even know it.

goodness,
read on!

Erykah Badu
original airdate April 25, 2005

Erykah Badu has been called an uncompromising, brilliant artist. Growing up on '60s and '70s R&B, the Texas native wrote her first song at age 7. Her '97 debut CD, Baduizm, went platinum and won multiple awards. After some time out of the spotlight, Badu returned in '03 with Worldwide Underground. She's established a growing film career, with turns in Cider House Rules and House of D. Badu maintains strong ties to Dallas, TX with her nonprofit group B.L.I.N.D. (Beautiful Love Incorporated Non Profit Development).





TOPICS Music





Erykah Badu
Tavis: Erykah Badu is a four-time Grammy winner who burst onto the music scene back in 1997 with her terrific debut CD 'Baduizm.' Critics have praised her music for its unique combination of R&B, soul, jazz, and funk, but she's also a talented actress who won acclaim for a role you might recall in the Oscar-winning film 'The Cider House Rules.' Her latest movie is the David Duchovny-directed 'House of D.' The film is in theaters around the country even as we speak. Here now, a scene from 'House of D.'

Lady: And if you can walk, you can slow dance. Show me.

Tommy: No. Not out here in public.

Lady: I don't see no public.

Tommy: Well, come on. There's no music.

Lady: Imagine some music. You see that pole over there? That pole? Yes, that pole. Look at the pole. Walk toward the pole. You want this pole. No. Don't start your hands down at the ass. Work your way down.

Tavis: 'Look at the pole. Walk toward the pole. You want this pole.'

Erykah Badu: Right. You want the pole.

Tavis: You want this pole. Erykah Badu, nice to see you.

Badu: You, too.

Tavis: When David Duchovny was on this program a few weeks ago, he told me a funny story when the two of you were talking about the role for 'House of D.' He said you came in with a huge Afro. He was saying to you at the end of the conversation, 'Erykah, I like the look. If you could just keep that Afro until we shoot the movie, that'd be perfect, 'cause it fits perfectly for the role.'

Badu: Or he could keep it. Make sure it doesn't change.

Tavis: Make sure it doesn't change. He didn't know it wasn't real to begin with.

Badu: Uh-uh.

Tavis: Yeah. How do you decide what you're gonna do with your hair on a daily basis? All right? You got that, Jonathan?

Badu: How do I decide?

Tavis: How do you decide on a daily basis how you gonna rock this thing?

Badu: I don't give it a lot of thought, you know. It just--

Tavis: Are you trying to tell me there's no thought put into this?

Badu: No. It's just functional art, you know. It's just saying, well, you give thought to the tie.

Tavis: But I actually plan this stuff, though. I try to match the colors.

Badu: Did you lay it out on the bed... ...last night?

Tavis: You know what? Something like that. It wasn't last night. But this morning, yeah. I get up, try to match the color with the-- And you just do your thing.

Badu: Yeah.

Tavis: I like that, though. Functional art.

Badu: That's right.

Tavis: How much--on a serious note--how much of your hairstyle is part of your whole aesthetic, part of your image? How much does it play in, do you think? 'Cause everybody talks about it all the time.

Badu: I think the people would tell me that more than I can tell me that. Because I just come as me, which is a part of, you know, the art. So I think maybe it plays a big part, because it's a little to the left sometime, and eclectic, you know. I think it's maybe fascinating to some people. But you know...

Tavis: Yeah.

Badu: I don't know. You tell me.

Tavis: Well, I ain't got a problem with it. It's fasc--It's a very good question. I'll answer it if you want me to answer it seriously. It's fascinating to me, because whenever I hear Erykah Badu is about to make an appearance, I immediately know that I want to tune in, to see what she's gonna look like. So it works. If there's any-- I mean, creatively, if there's any thought that goes behind, 'Let's my look to get people to pay attention,' then, if that was part of the plan, it works. Every time I hear you've come into-- When you came on the set today, I'm like, 'I can't wait to see her walk on, just to see what her hair is gonna be like.' So it works. But enough about your hair. Let's talk about your work. You are, you know, I assume-- I could be wrong--pretty picky and choosy about the roles you play.

Badu: Mm-hmm.

Tavis: Just as you are about the kind of music that you play. You don't put no stuff together. You work through this. Tell me how you go about deciding what roles you want to play and how you're actually navigating your career through this acting thing.

Badu: I guess first it has to be, um... To me, I like period pieces, not in this moment now.

Tavis: What attracts you to period pieces? Why do you like those?

Badu: I don't know. I can't say exactly what it is, because I've only had three roles in film. But I think it's probably the imagination of it, you know. It gives you an opportunity to be creative and pretend. And that's what acting is. If I could be from another era and another place, you know, it's a...

Tavis: Is there a particular era that you'd like to be transported to, if could you play characters... Is there a particular time you really enjoy?

Badu: Maybe from the 20s to the 50s.

Tavis: Right.

Badu: That whole...

Tavis: What about that period do you find fascinating?

Badu: The look.

Tavis: The look.

Badu: The issues.

Tavis: Mm-hmm.

Badu: The music.

Tavis: Mm-hmm. Yeah. On this particular role, 'House of D,' for those who've not seen it and didn't see our conversation with David Duchovny, tell us about the character you play in this movie.

Badu: The character I play, her name is Lady. She is a woman in a tower, which is actually a house of detention in New York. It's based on a real, from what I understand, a real house of detention that was located in the East Village. Lady happens to see the main character Tommy, the teenage boy, burying some money in the ground. Every day the women scream out of the window at people that they see on the ground. So she happens to strike up a conversation with him, and they become friends. And she becomes one of his best friends, along with a retarded Greek janitor, Robin Williams, at the high school where he goes to-- at the junior high where he goes to. So I guess her main role was, I guess, to play an angel, just as Robin Williams. You never know where they will be or who they are. So it's a film about, I guess, prejudice in a way. Yeah.

Tavis: It's also a film about, as I interpreted it-- It is about that. But it's also a film, as I interpreted it, about people who have an impact on your life.

Badu: That's right.

Tavis: That's why you mentioned those angels, people that really impact. I suspect there are people in your life who have impacted you significantly.

Badu: Sure. Sure.

Tavis: Let's talk about some of them. Your mama, I assume?

Badu: My mother. I have five mothers.

Tavis: Five of them. Let's walk through them.

Badu: Let's walk.

Tavis: Let's walk. You start. Number one.

Badu: My mother.

Tavis: Your maternal mother.

Badu: Colleen Queenie Wright. She was a young mother, had me at age 20, so she was still very much energetic and fun, and we slept with her and woke up with her and went to the park with her. She gave me the sense of humor that I have.

Tavis: I said maternal, I meant biological. That's your biological mother.

Badu: That's right.

Tavis: All right, second one.

Badu: The second one is my grandmother, my maternal grandmother. Her name is Thelma Gibson. Thelma Lois Gibson. We called her Thelma Lois. She gave me my sense of dignity. 'Close your legs. Put that down. When you get in the store, you don't want nothing. Don't ask for nothing. Don't do that.' And 'Get off the phone, let that boy call you.' You know. Those kinds of things. The manners and the sense of dignity, pretty much, morality. My third one, come on.

Tavis: You got biological mother, maternal mother.

Badu: 'Cause I need your fingers.

Tavis: Biological mother, maternal grandmother. Number three?

Badu: Number three would be my paternal.

Tavis: Paternal grandmother.

Badu: That would be my father's mother. Her name is Viola Mattie Wilson. We call her Ganny.

Tavis: Ganny.

Badu: Ganny.

Tavis: I love black folk and the names we give our grandparents. Talk to me about Ganny.

Badu: Well, Ganny gave me my sense of religion or spirituality. Ganny was a tambourine-totin', Bible-shakin' grandmother who...

Tavis: Not the tambourine-totin'-- I used to love-- I used to tear that tambourine up in my Pentecostal church where I grew up.

Badu: Did you?

Tavis: I loved playin' tambourine.

Badu: I can't imagine that.

Tavis: Absolutely. Played every Sunday. And was choir director, too.

Badu: Do we have a tambourine on the set?

Tavis: No, there ain't no tambourine, 'cause I would wear that thing out if they had one.

Badu: I don't believe that.

Tavis: Next time I see you in concert, call me onstage. I'll work it out for you.

Badu: I don't believe you.

Tavis: I can work a tambourine out.

Badu: OK, I wanna see that.

Tavis: OK, I'll do that for you.

Badu: That is my favorite instrument.

Tavis: Tambourine is? I didn't know that. You played one, too, in church?

Badu: Not in church, but around the house.

Tavis: Around the house. Yeah, OK. So biological mother, maternal grandmother, paternal grandmother--Ganny.

Badu: What Ganny gave me was a sense of spirituality. I remember she bought a piano, and I played my first song-- I wrote my first song at age 7. It went 'Baby, baby, there you are...' She came into room and said, 'What are you doing? You can't sing about that. You don't know about no baby, baby.' So she took me in the back room, so at the end of the day, the song was 'Jesus, Jesus...'

Tavis: Yeah.

Badu: So she gave me that sense of, if you're gonna sing something, it needs to mean something. It has to be about something.

Tavis: I'm laughing about that, because to this day, you know, there are still folk who do that. I mean, gospel artists who would take a secular song and switch it in a minute and have a hit with it. All right, so that's paternal grandmother. Number four.

Badu: My godmother. Her name is Gwendolyn Hargrove. She's from New Orleans, Louisiana. She was my mother's best friend. I was christened in St. Paul United Methodist Church. She became my godmother. And every summer she would take me with her to the park where she worked at a recreation center. She was the director of one-act plays. She put me in my first play, gave me the sense of the stage and performing and don't turn your back to the audience. And this is what you do, and give me more. You can do it. My first role was a character called Alligator, in 'Really Rosie.' So I tore Alligator up. And my godmother was very much responsible for me understanding and appreciating theater, and I went on to become a theater major in college.

Tavis: Wow.

Badu: As a result.

Tavis: And last but not least.

Badu: Mother Nature. That's, um, that first boyfriend that broke your heart. That's, um, your period. That's the pains from different things that give you the sense of being alive, because before that, you kind of floating through space. But once you get the first pain in your heart, then Mother Nature gives you, you're pretty much alive and aware. It's kind of like taking the red pill. Yeah., coming out of the Matrix.

Tavis: I can't imagine, since you have been influenced by so many mothers, since you are a mother, you got these maternal instincts all through you. What do you like most about being a mother now?

Badu: Having the opportunity and responsibility to be the first person to mold a person's mind.

Tavis: It's an awesome responsibility, though, isn't it?

Badu: It's an awesome responsibility. It's a big one. And it's also a gift, because at the same time in the process, I have the opportunity to re-create my own mind, you know, and create more possibilities for myself. And not limit myself at all, as I grow a child.

Tavis: Let me ask a crazy question. This may be way too personal. If it is, slap me, and I'll back up off of it.

Badu: OK.

Tavis: As a mother, since you get a chance to create other possibilities--I'm not a parent yet. Are there things about your own children that you want to help shape and mold not just differently but better than what you...

Badu: Sure.

Tavis: ...have?

Badu: I think every parent does.

Tavis: Yeah.

Badu: You know, every parent blames their parents in some kind of way for their failings, you know, as we all know. So I want to be a parent that can be ready for all of those things, and to understand my child as he and she grow.

Tavis: Talking to you is always fascinating. I could do it for hours. I can't let you go, though, without asking about the music. What you're working on, what's next on the music front?

Badu: I'm working on my album right now--new album. As you know, 'Worldwide Underground' was an EP, which was a buffer between albums, which was a writing in the process. So I gave the audience a chance to see my process.

Tavis: What you're working on.

Badu: Right. This is kinda what we're doing right now. I had to get those things out. The next album--I mean, I'm really excited about it. I'm giddy about it, I'm in love with it, you know. It's brand-new right now to me.

Tavis: Well, if you love it and it's like all the rest of your stuff, I'm sure we will love it as well. I love you, and I love your book, and I'm glad you came on.

Badu: Well before we go, let's go back for a minute. I remember, you had a whole show about "call Tyrone." What was that about?

Tavis: I had a show on "call Tyrone?"

Badu: Yeah, you did.

Tavis: Oh, back-- You know what? You really took me back. This was back on B.E.T. Years ago.

Badu: Exactly. I just turned on the TV, and you had a panel of experts.

Tavis: See?

Badu: I think it was Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson.

Tavis: You see the influence you have?

Badu: Bob Marley. Everybody was on the stage. Talking about--I was male-bashing. I think you were saying, 'Yeah, that's a shame.' Come on. Come on.

Tavis: No, I'm glad you raised this. I do not recall every aspect of that show. What I do recall was that song I think like most artists, if you write a really good song it kicks up a national conversation about the lyrics. And I was just trying to explore the fascination that people have with this song. And as you know all across talk radio, people are addressing this issue of what this song 'Tyrone' meant. So I was fascinated to have the conversation.

Badu: It was funny. It was funny. I just --

Tavis: All right. You try to read me on my own show. Erykah Badu trying to front me.

Badu: On your own show.

Tavis: On my own show. I'm glad to have you on.

Badu: I'm glad to be here.

Tavis: 'House of D' is the film starring one Erykah Badu. Go check it out. That is our show tonight. A reminder: Starting this weekend can you catch me back on public radio, on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A. Thanks for watching.

Badu: Before we go, I just want to say: Thank you. Very much.

Tavis: And keep the faith.

your job would not exist w/o me (against analysis)

"talking back" and INKHEAD on the F train to Jay St. (a poem sorta)


"talking back" and INKHEAD on the F train to Jay St. (a poem sorta)

1.

maybe all the poems i have ever written are dedicated to anna julia cooper

2.

there are children in bed-stuy who need poetry

not the poems i write for them

but the poems they craft through

silences, out bursts or purple bubblegum



they speak place like this...

and they speak truth like this...

and they speak right like this...

their poems are slightly tilted and behind the beat

on purpose

they play a phonograph

only laminated floors and

windowless walls understand

huh?

what you mean?

their resistance is not slogans on placards

or ph.d’s or worksheets or

coloring inside the line

3.

they are not fond of translation

4.

and can smell bullshit creeping up from miles away

they got highly developed sensory capabilities

5.

"the path to conocimiento" to transforming consciousness-is neither linear nor easy"

6.

bell hooks writes about "talking back"

as INKHEAD tags himself over industrial bodies

and i manuver my way back to brooklyn for

poems and awakenings

my teachers rock the flyest sneakers/ with t-shirts to match

know who is really home

and who aint really ready yet

____________________

please note: quote from gloria anzaldua found in

anna julia cooper, visionary black feminist by vivian may

writing and listening ....always

control f.r.e.a.q. ( somewhat a poem but maybe not)


control f.r.e.a.q.

for alice coltrance/ e. badu/ and q-tip

after TRACE on a Saturday Nite

(because all poems are found poems)

1.

this is your brain

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON BADU

2.

"...transition with a real slow fade..."

3.

this is a jazz poem

because linear though just

like linear movement is boring

4.

this is a jazz poem because

assata speaks across the oceans to me

her glance and foot steps reminding

me to "embrace myself"

and "love my body"

6.

this poem is a jazz poem because jazz

is a recipe for spring time sex

before the skin is scented

summer sweat or stretched by a lovers moan

5.

jazz is a recipe

like this

2. limes

4 large chunnks of pineapple

4 small cubes of ginger

juiced

sipped against the sun

8.

this poem is a jazz poem

because jazz is funk’s mama

and hip hop’s grandmama

and is the illegitimate daughter of the blues

7.

this poem is a jazz poem

not a stump speech or a letter

or an essay or protest novel

or a semi-autobiographic creative non-fiction narrative

or an elegy or an abstract surrealist experimental formalist literary work

9.

damn....q-tipislookinggoodashellicantwaittohearhisnewshit

10.

i told yall

this is a jazz poem because

three nites ago the chill broke

like my first boyfirends gold chain



this is a jazz poem cause jazz is rebirth

like an orange moon squatting low over central park wanting lullabye

11.

"and if you think about turning back i got the shotgun for yo back"

12.

this is a jazz poem

cause "lawd knows i’m tryin"

and slipping

and sinning

and singing

and running

and resting

and running

again the record skips and i dip to find the right key



12.1

this poem is a jazz poem

because the head nod is an ancestral gesture of communal

affliation and no you ain’t supposed to get the beat

variations on the same riff

you knew
when you placed that light inside me
when you licked this gold mine like you knew x marked the spot
when you stole my eyes
when you said rest here and waited three seasons
for peace to dwell in my pulse
when you measured my laughs in teaspoons of rain and breath
when you wrapped my hair in your skin
and carved an ankh on my lips
and softened the span of my hips
and charmed my neck roll
and said rest here and waited for the tides to subside in my step

you knew you knew
your face would be infinitely written on any future-brotha
your thumb print could never be washed from the inside of my left thigh
your scent would mingle in my every folicle
you knew
i would pass someone in a city you never visit and look twice and think its you
although you never visit

you knew
i would say hello hello twice like that
and wait for the sax in your voice to be revealed

hello hello

you knew how much i believe in god

and that even if i carved myself into some distant unthinkable corner of this earth
even if i went underground cause of some extraordinary revolutionary shit i got hooked up with

even if i forgot my own name cause my memory decided to swim away from me

i would never forget you

Nu Work on EryKah Badu

video.vh1.com


Greetings family,

This week I have a large task. I will be writing about body, sex, humor and the poetics of awareness/space in the work of Erykah Badu.

My project is in no way comprehensive but seeks to articulate how she uses irony, hyperbole and humor in three musical performances/site over the span of her 11 year career.

The work looks at

Anne-not yet recorded on vinyl or pressed on CD but performed for the past few years

Booty-recorded on Mama’s Gun

and

Afro/ a freestyle skit

Here are some questions I am dealing with as I move forward

1. how do elements of humor such as hyperbole and irony articulate a poetics of awareness/space in e.badu’s music and performance?

2. how does badu perform such an articulation? gestures, choreography,"funk", voice, "southernity/southerness", "style", political invocation?

3. tracing the trajectory of her career, what are the marked shifts in her usage of humor especially as expressed in Anne, Booty, and Afro/ a freestyle skit? What do these sifts illustrate?

4. what is the role of e. badu’s sex/sexuality in her performance of humor? what is the role of humor in her performance of sex/sexuality?

5. what if anything is erykah badu saying about race/ womaness/ freedom/ space/ community/ blackness through her performance

6. how does e. badu incorporate blues/ funk/ and hip hop to articulate a poetics of space?

7. what is a poetics of space and how does a poetics of space help us think about humor in e. badu’s work? what kind of space am i talking about

creative space/ space as sexual autonomy "had two babies different dudes"/ space as artistic process (reference Garage Band, online street teams, buy your album straight from me campaign/ space as expanding or maturing intellect/ wisdom "this year i turn 36"/ space as expanding body-"my ass and legs have gotten thick"

so yes...i will be bombarding you with snippets of my project and random stuff about e. badu

i usually write poems to help facilitate my scholarly process, and all processes, so do please check those out as well.

here are some to get you started

Badu Haiku

1.
in the rasp of your voice
in the twang of your scat
we find liberation

2.
"cuz im cleva" i know neo soul aint so new
like shell toes like high tops like b-girls from the "dirty d"
you bend beats and stretch rhythms through millenia

3.
if a priestess is she who carves rituals in our spirits
who clears our path with snippets of sage
who conjures a hymn to save us all
then a priestess you be


See EryKah perfrom @

http://www.vh1.com/video/play.jhtml?id=1582333&vid=213224

cheese!

sistas circle goes live!!! and you can be a part of it as well.

The Questionnaire

You thought you were too far away to participate in a performance process going on in NYC, well you were wrong.Calling all sistas who got something to say about blackness, womanness and artistic process. For more information visit www.imanotaproject.wordpress.com.


Please answer the questions below in any form you choose: a poem, letter, story, list, sketch, dance, meal, outfit or what ever!

Then send it to me at furiousflower@gmail.com along with a bio and picture or yourself and what you created.

Please note if you want your ideas to be kept private, just let me know and I will honor your wishes

So here is the assignment:

As the Gumbo Yaya Sistre transition into thinking about our personal narratives of healing and spirituality, I would like to extend this process around awareness, identification, and literary production to all the sistas who come in contact with this email.

-please complete the questionnaire below

then,

choose one of the following prompts and engage with it in your own way-

-a letter written to yourself as an infant

-a letter written to yourself as an elder

-an interview between you and a sista younger or older than you.

Questionnaire-

Please answer the following prompts-

-what does it mean to be a black woman to you? do you identify yourself as a black woman?

-what is black women’s art? is this important to identify? should art be universal?

-what does it mean to be an artist to you? do you identify yourself as an artist?

-what does womanism mean to you? do you identify yourself as womanist?

-if you could ask your mother one question about her journey as a black woman or artist, womanist, or spiritualist, what would you ask her?

-if you could ask your daughter or future daughter about her journey as a black woman or artist, womanst, or spiritualist, what would you ask her?

-is there anything that gets in the way of your process as a black woman artist womanist spiritualist?

-is there anything that supports your process as a black woman artist womanist spiritualist?

-what does an artistic process look like to/for you? do you have an artistic process?

-what comprises a womanist artistic process? is there such a process? should we (we being black women cultural producers) be concerned with this process?

Life and Peace,
Ebony Golden
furiousflower@gmail.com

saartji listens to poison and ponders ~~~~~a poem

saartji listens to poison and ponders


why exactly cant you trust a big butt and a smile

heat and curves do not kill

a jiggle you can feel in your throat/ is pleasure

and my lips bending into a poem is a smile not nuclear war

there was a world built here some call earth

or heaven or ocean or god

my butt and lips are not three card monty

are not watches sold on L's in the city mothered by oya

or the snap of a brothas spanish/ he wants to leave on your breast

the issue of trust does not lay here or here or here

beneath the pyramid of my pelvis

writing about writing~~~some reflections

Reflections and ripples

As I write this, I am sitting at the same table I was sitting at when I first learned to divide. This is the table I had breakfast at after I began my first period. I introduced my first fiancé to my mother at this table. Not much has changed about this table but the people who sit around it are dramatically different. My mama, the spicy intellectual, who ran a tight ship and kept me off the streets and encouraged to do great things has mellowed out a lot. In her retirement, she takes long walks and likes her house to stay silent. I am writing right now about rhodessa jones' Medea Project for Incarcerated Women. I am writing about the "power and possibility," the title of Elizabeth Alexander's most recent collection of essays, of staged embodied narrative and the transformative implications of story telling and movement. There are indeed transformative qualities.

This kitchen table used to be surrounded by yellow walls. The refrigerator is the same so is the stove. The floor is different. Large beige ceramic tiles. I can't remember what is was before, but once a mouse got in and ran so quickly across the floor to get away from us we couldn't help but laugh. The walls are now a creamy white. Once I splashed red kool aide on these walls. They are much different now. So am I.

I am writing at this table now. Trying to finish this paper, that I want to read to my mama. She knows her baby is at NYU writing and reading all the time. Writing through graduate school. Writing about women writing and reclaiming their labor for their own well-being. I am writing about how women undo time. The trauma of the prison industrial complex ages us, whether we are locked up or not. I am writing about how this goddess called rhodessa rewinds the narratives, back through the rough parts, back through rocky roads women want to forget, back through the good parts too. She wants us to hold onto the good parts. The good parts reveal a different part of the self. One that does not need to be bandaged up by drugs, bad relationships, self-deprecating behaviors and actions.

I must admit I am possessed by the narratives women write about their time here on this planet. I think a part of my life's work is concerned with how we take back the time that really is all ours. How we make our bodies bend time to our specifications. I wonder what rhodessa is doing or undoing right now. I wonder what toni Morrison is doing right now? I wonder what audre and june are doing right now. I wonder what my mama is doing right now. Oh she is playing solitaire and looking at the stacks of books I brought home to write with.

I am looking for an origin that may not exist. I want to know where cycles begin. Is it behind the wind? I want to know how cycles can be interrupted, shaken, cracked open to reveal a new sunlight. I am looking for a way to interrupt my own harmful cycles. I am looking for a way to intrerrupt the cycles of women who look like me. African women, poor women, white women, spiritual women, Houston women, women in florida. Women everywhere, who share a similar skin. I am called to continue writing and performing an intervention that shines like this little light of ours.

working our rainbows~~~another essay on performance and activism

UnDoing Time: The Medea Project for Incarcerated Women as Social Activism

Dedicated to Joan Little and Many other Sisters "Locked Up"


"…we have had to look from the outside

to make sense of a world that has not endeavored

to include us among its intellectuals."

-Elizabeth Alexander


"Let us not forget to remember that

the struggle continues for all of us."

-Rhodessa Jones


Come Into the Sun, a coalition dedicated to delinquency prevention, reports that between 1970 and 1990 the number of women offenders increased 896 percent from 588 to 5, 858 (Fraden 123). Additionally, Legal Services for Prisoners with Children reports that although black women comprise 7 percent of California's population they constitute 34.1 percent of the prison population, with Hispanic women following at 22.7 percent (124). In "Imagining Medea", Rena Fraden documents the nine-year journey of the Medea Project for Incarcerated Women. Fraden includes interviews, photographs and analysis of the successes and challenges the Medea Project encountered as the project gained momentum within the prison system.

Angela Y. Davis, Berkley scholar and noted prison industrial complex abolitionist, writes in the forward to "Imaging Medea", "One of the important contributions of the Medea Project has been to demystify the relationship between crime and punishment. As prison populations have soared in the United States, the conventional assumption that increased levels of crime are the cause of expanding prison populations has been widely contested" (xi). The statistics fail to present the social factors such as drug addiction, racism, domestic violence and poverty that heavily skew these numbers. In the following excerpt from "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women", Mama Pearl reveals why she began engaging in illegal behavior. "I got three daughters. My older daughter was born deaf and dumb. She's the reason I went to jail in the first place. You see, I embezzled some money from the company that I was working at so my daughter could get special training so that she could take care of herself, despite her handicap" (Elam 369). This monologue illustrates the choices some mothers are forced make to support their children. The staggering figures, along with Davis' thoughts and Mama Pearl's scenario, suggest the overarching sociopolitical issues affecting how and why women go to prison and speak to failed rehabilitation programs and high levels of recidivism within the California Department of Corrections.


Rhodessa Jones created the Medea Project for Incarcerated Women after the California Department of Corrections hired her to teach aerobics. The project incorporates physical theater, writing, dance, and healing modalities to "explore whether an arts-based approach [to rehabilitation] could help reduce the number of women returning to jail" (culturalodyssey.org/medea/). "The decision to use Medea stemmed from the fact that a young woman in the theater workshop, who was incarcerated for infanticide, was ostracized and taunted by other inmates. [I] told the women the story of Medea and Jason and asked the group to interpret it in relationship to their own lives, to consider ways in which they were like Medea, but also different," says Jones (Warner, 484). The Medea Project staged "Big Butt Girls, Hard-headed Women, Buried Fire, Slouching Towards Armageddon: A Captive's Conversation/Observation on Race, Food Taboos in the Land of the Dead, and Reality Is Just Outside the Window during her tenure at the San Francisco County Jail. Jones' project, subversive in creation and application, high-jacks the space of the prison industrial complex and provides a venue for women to actively engage in narratives around their incarcerations.


Beginning in 1987, Jones facilitated workshops on Wednesdays with the women. She began with twelve women who were assigned to her aerobics class. Soon, her enrollment ballooned to over fifty women once the word spread that there was a place women could heal and rehabilitate themselves through acting. The project provided time and space for the women to meditate, through the practice of performance, on the complex social factors involved in their individual journeys to jail. Jones, a trained actress, dancer, and choreographer, noticed immediately that the women desired a space to express what court systems, lovers, and family members refused to hear. Her process shows physical activity as an extension of language, and language as an extension of the body. Harry Elam notes,

"The correlation between "aerobics" and "Big Butt Girls" is not ironic nor trivial, but purposeful. Aerobics hones and shapes the body. The use and abuse of women's bodies is the center of Jones' performance piece as well. Jones reveals the pressures, constraints, degradations, and exploitations enacted on and against the bodies of these "Big Butt Girls" and "Hard-Headed Women" by their society, their lovers, their families, and even themselves" (10).


Elam's idea speaks to what Teresa Ralli teaches in her Voice of the Body workshop at Casa de Yuyachkani in Lima. In this workshop, Ralli leads participants through a series of yogic breaths and asanas, modern, improvisational and experimental dance movements to free the voice from certain blocked spaces in the body. Her workshop teaches participants about the intimate connection the body and the voice share and reveals a process of healing that happens when the voice is freed from the body. Ralli insists participants move like poetry, like water, free from silence's viscous restraints.

The inaugural production of the Medea Project, titled Big Butt Girls, Hard Headed Women "explores an underclass of women who are intentionally silenced and ostracized by the systems of power" (Elam 9). Ralli's workshop enlivens the chakras from the deep dark spaces of the root chakra to the bright spaces of the crown chakra to dislodge the voice locked inside the body. In one session, Ralli led participants through a series of vocal exercises. The call and response exercise included a series of whispers, chants, shouts, screams, and various other exclamations. During the session, several participants incorporated rhythmic hand drumming and stomping to express what the voice could not but the body could. At some point, each participant's body and voice were tuned, which tuned the voices and bodies for the entire group. Not only did each individual body and voice make music, but the entire community harmoniously connected and functioned as a cohesive entity. By exploring the sound of the spirit inside each body, each participant unravels an instinctual voice that allows the individual to listen, reinvent and revise the narratives that create the soundtrack to their personal triumphs and traumas.


The project serves as a site for exploring alternative rehabilitation modalities. Jones utilizes Brechtian and Boal methodology as well as critical ethnographic practices as espoused by Dwight Conquregood and D. Soyini Madison to engender personal narrative, thoughtful interaction, and shifts in consciousness that leave lasting impressions on those women who share these experiences. Fraden offers, "This is a case study that describes how the Medea Project creates and alternative, sometimes oppositional space, and how it reshapes theoretical and practical boundaries that mark off the aesthetic, commercial, political, moral, personal, and religious realms we inhabit at present, evaluating which methods work best at creating more permeable boundaries" (xv). Fraden's ideas speak to what she, Jones, and Davis express as the knowledge that much work has to be done to alter the lives of these women or the prison system. Her ideas illuminate the importance of teaching and rehearsing a practice that could work one woman at a time to create a massive restructuring of the prison industrial complex and possibly other institutions as well.

Jones' project uses one of the few resources afforded to women in prison. A resource even the prison can not arrest to critique women's imprisonment. Time is a major resource in prison. Sorrentina, one of the characters in "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women" exposes what doing time does to the body as she undergoes a detoxification program in solitary confinement.

Hail Mary, full of grace.

The lord be with thee.

Blessed are the fruit of thy womb.

J e s u s.


Holy Mary, mother of God.

Pray for us sinners now,

And in the hour of our death.



I'm so damn tired. I'm tired of being sick and tired. She's fucking dogmeat, man. Just one little shot. This bitch, snitches at Work Furlough. She was getting stoned, too. Piss in a cup. Piss on your family, okay. Fuck you. Count time, my ass. When will this shit end? This is the longest nightmare I have ever had.


During a brief stint as a GED instructor in a male medium security prison I learned the value of time and how time is practiced. I watched men watch the clock, ask each other about what time it was, and ask each other about how much time they had. Some of the men talked about "filling" time with reading, or completing puzzles, or various nefarious activities, but time was always a topic of conversation. Perhaps, the men where attempting to "grasp" time, to "retain" some semblance of time and their power over it. They counted minutes to lunch time. They counted days to canteen visits. They counted weeks between visits and letters to hold onto their relationship with those on the outside. I learned about how time orients society and how this orientation impacts the prison as a microcosm of society. I learned that several of my students worried if they didn't see me walking across "the yard" at a certain time every morning. They thought up all kinds of scenarios from sicknesses, to car wrecks. A few even thought that I may have been searched and detained for drug smuggling one morning. The point is time in prison creates positionality to the others "locked up", to the self, and those on the outside. Relationships are heavily affected by time. Some of the men were broken by how much time they had and felt they could never do or perform all of their time. While others, with lighter sentences, moved as if they were on vacation at a resort. Those men most always earned their GED's, increased their technical skills and stayed out of trouble. They did time, instead of allowing time to do them. Wherever one is situated in society, time is a resource and a commodity that institutions within society want to benefit from. Money is made based on time and bodies. The men talked about choosing GED courses over the road squad because they refused to let the prison make money off their labor or time. They chose GED courses because they felt they would reap the benefits of education before the prison system and in that way they resisted the prisons construction of time and labor.

The Medea Project performs a similar resistance as practiced by the men a Warren Correctional in northern North Carolina. Fraden writes, "In other words, as women's presence behind the walls continues to grow, so does their performance of the invisible labor summoned by the expanding prison population as a whole" (xi). The Medea Project serves as a model and a practice for returning the fruits of incarcerated women's labor back to those women. So much focus is placed on what inmates will do after they are released from prison, but very little attention is placed on the road to prison. It is almost as if the prison system resets time at one's admittance. But time is multi-directional and the project unravels it. In essence, Jones instructs the women on how to steal time from the jails, how to bend time to their benefit instead of letting time defeat them. This project absolutely is about destabilizing time as a method of psychically, emotionally, and spiritually escaping prison. The Medea Project serves as a site for what Angela Davis calls "theorizing on the ground" about how best to equip women with the tools needed to create their own relationships with time (past tense, present, and future) and space while matriculating through the prison system and beyond.

It is also important to spend some time thinking about what cultural business radical theatre practice accomplishes in space of the prison. Specifically, how do these virtuosic bodies and voices, occupying multiple spaces and times, under Jones' direction and tutelage circumvent the prison space? Moreover, how do the women's voices and bodies along with stealing back time, also steal the prison's space. We can think about how the women steal their bodies back from society and the prison through performance. We should also think about how the women take up prison space with their voice and performance. A large part of the performance of the prison industrial complex continues the dehumanizing social practices women experience on the outside. This practice of alienation dismantles relationships women have with themselves and other women. The destruction of these relationships possibly prohibit women from recognizing how their individual struggles comprise a larger tapestry of experiences that effect the majority of incarcerated women.


Birthing these personal narratives begins to address the stigmatism associated with women offenders and the traumas the share. Through activating the voice of the body, the space of the body transforms but also the space of the prison changes as well. Jones believes "through love, through the power of the ancestors, through the linkage of past to present and future, a body can "catch a body". The needless loss of black lives to the prison system can be overcome through collective consciousness and the formation and assertion of community" (10). Jones identifies the development of a community as a foundational and fundamental step in her process with the women. Fraden includes photographs of correctional officers smiling as they observe the women's rehearsal process. She also describes one moment when she observed one of the women's inmate identification bracelets as the performed at Theatre Artaud in San Francisco. Both of these incidents illustrate how the space of the prison was altered by the Medea Project. Unfortunately, the prison system is large enough to hold multiple narratives and the participants in the Medea Project maps another narrative onto the space of the prison.


Thiong'o's article, Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space, asks us to consider the politics of geography, "open space", "openness", "territorial space" along side issues of body, movement in postcolonial Kenya. I agree with Thiong'o's assertion that the tug-of-war occurring between the artist and the state is a power struggle in which both parties seek leverage over space and also seek to perform autonomy. Through examining the personal agency of bodies in space, or restrictions thereof, we examine the states colonial/postcolonial practices of domination, oppression, and censorship which seek to squelch community performances of resistance. Taking a cue from Thiong'o, I wonder how the Medea Project pushes the limits of the function of the prison space. Certainly, the prison is not a space for artistic training or the site of major
rehabilitation. However, we should consider the potential of the performance space that no longer serves as a site of prescribed action.

Jones reveals that "benign neglect and blind rage" make the women's problems
"too immense and too great". She says, "But I was raised in a family by a mother and a father who taught me that when you're called to something too great, too immense, you can always take it to God. Now the African in my American teaches me to take is to the Ancestors" (374). Here the Jones articulates a poetics of presence that challenges spatial frontiers. The preceding quote conceptualizes a framework, a set of tools that extends back and into the future, and is all-encompassing like faith and belief in the in the omnipresent strength and fortitude of a trans-national family. It may be helpful to read Thiong'o ideas about re-scripting space along side Jones' work. Both projects seek to replace the narrative of space created by the ruling power structure with that of the marginalized population. Their projects "fill in the gaps" as Suzan-Lori Parks describes in
an interview with Shelby Jiggetts in Callaloo Journal.


Elam notes, "She challenges audience members to recognize their personal connections to these women. "Who are these women? She's your mama. She's your lover. That women who is gonna carry your child." Jones points out that the system of crime and punishment touches all our lives and that we all have a responsibility to act for social change."(10) Jones' work urges us to reach past our comfortable or uncomfortable positions to recognize how we are all implicated in the phenomenon of the prison industrial complex. Jones writes, "In jail. A black woman artist, working in jail. I look out at all those faces. There's my mother's face, my sister's face, and my daughter's face. And I'm wondering how in the hell did they get here in the first place. And I realize that it is but for a flip of fate that it could be me in here and she out there" (367).


Fraden includes a monologue from Slouching Towards Armageddon that works to vaporize these boundaries. She writes, "A white prisoner, Angela Wilson (Confusion), delivers a piece that speaks about her frustration with landing in jail. Wilson describes her rage at finding herself in jail as a kind of second jail, her "own personal lockup." She recognizes, as the monologue progresses, that she is responsible for herself: A killer I've allowed myself to be—of me. Here, all locked up in this place. Heart, mind, body, and soul, all agree, we can't wait, to be set free, of this prejudice against—me." Wilson describes a prison not comprised of brick and mortar but prison as an experience or set of experiences, an embodied prison she "can't wait to be free of". This monologue highlights the psychic "lock up" women can experience on "the inside" or in society. In this sense, prison is an invisible state of being that affects and is affected by a series of personal and
social events. Again, Jones' turns the spotlight on the audience members and calls for everyone in the room to participate in the work of imagining their own prisons. In an odd and uncomfortable way, Jones builds a community in the safe space of the theatre that diffuses notions of identity and space through the performance of private narratives in public. Again she reiterates, we are all involved and implicated in the stark increase in women going to prison and living on "lock down".

This monologue alongside Jones' dramaturgical practice of conflating classical mythic texts and street language or aerobics and theatre therapy builds on a larger legacy of black women's cultural practices of healing around the kitchen table or on the front porch. Jones' project destabilizes the canon and allows diverse voices to express similar issues that take place in classical texts. In this respect, we maybe able to read Jones' work, in part, as a project against genre. Elizabeth Alexander talks about reading as a poet in her most recent collection of essays Power and Possibility.

I assume I have always "read as a poet," which is to say, there are various shapes of poetic argument in prose. Reading as an African-American woman intellectual poet? Reading, as my lodestar Audre Lorde would have it, with all of my selves active and present and vigilant and alive. The great utility
of so much black feminist theory was the guiding truism that black women have blazed alternative routes to making sense of the world, that regardless of our differing circumstances, we have had to look from the outside to make sense of a world that has not endeavored to include us among its intellectuals. Alexander reminds us how poetry, specifically black women's poetry, conceives alternate configurations for black women in this world. Alexander's ideas engender thoughts about the social and political work theatre must accomplish for black women. It must create new avenues, wide enough for black women to walk down. It must allow for our full citizenship in the world. It must be a space where we can explore the totality of our being. Her ideas in some ways, talk about poetry more as an interwoven series understandings and performances that are larger than genre.

Actually, her ideas refute genre as Suzan-Lori Parks performs in her anti-genre essay "New Black Math". A project that challenges the silence and the disease resulting from traumatic life styles and the trauma of the prison industrial complex cannot be bound by genre. It would be a re-manifestation of the restrictions placed on them by society and the prison system. Possibly, we could understand Jones' work as one to dismantle the prison industrial complex but also we would think about it as one that dismantles the prisons that stratify communities of women, that render us unrecognizable by our sisters, mothers, daughters, and friends locked up, locked down, or locked away. We are all co-participants in this madness called a world.

One performance of "Big Butt Girls, Hard-Headed Women" is performed as a one-woman show in which Jones performs the poems, stories, and monologues written
with Regina Brown, Mama Pearl, Lena Sorrentina and Doris to reveal the porosity of identity. Jones transitions between the four characters and herself as the artist, diminishing the frontiers separating women by infusing one narrative into another. She embodies and performs the question that creates the working hypothesis of the Medea Project: Can a body catch a body? The choreographed falls and recoveries, swirls and facial manipulations show a merging of bodies and narratives that make each individual story a part of a larger healing narrative.

Sara L. Warner writes about her experiences observing the process in her essay "The Medea Project: Mythic Theater for Incarcerated Women". In one of the sessions she observed, the incarcerated women demanded to know more about Jones and the other facilitators. Warner writes, "I soon learned that what separated the women on the outside from the women on the inside was for the most part circumstantial. The volunteers' histories were similar, if not the same, as the women in orange: sexual abuse, foster care, drug addiction, domestic violence, and poverty (489). Jones requires that the participants are honest with themselves and with the group. In order for her to require this, she must also practice full disclosure. Her honesty shows the women that there are other choices for the same circumstances. In what is commonly referred to in southern black communities as a "come to Jesus" session, everyone reveals who they are and relationships can be built on equal solid footing by all the participants.


The violence of the prison industrial complex insists on the hierarchical construction of power and domination that systematically marginalize oppressed women. While Jones' project makes this crystal clear to Medea Project participants, she also makes them aware that the prisons are not only at fault. The project emphasizes the amount of women who are trapped by circumstance or limited opportunities for advancement. Jones makes it apparent that at any point in time anyone could be backed against the wall and may end up sitting right where the participants are sitting. In an NPR interview she talks about how art has made the difference between her and some of the women "locked up" in the San Francisco County Jail. Lesley Yalen and Cynthia Cohen make known in "Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work" that, "Arts and culture are important means through which people and communities come to understand, express, and communicate their ideas, emotions, needs, hopes, concerns, and memories". I agree. Art elicits a process by which we can bring memories from the corners, from the forgotten spaces of the past to the present. But that process extends past the present, it must. Artistic and cultural practices also serve as tuning devices. Tuning individuals into themselves and their communities. Just as two drummers will eventually breath in unison, it is possible that a community that creates art together will eventually be tuned into each others needs and desires for social and civic movement.




Bibliography

Alexander, Elizabeth. Power & Possibility. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Cultural Oddyssey. http://www.culturalodyssey.org.

El Grupo Yuyachkani. http://www.yuyachkani.org.

Elam, Harry and Alexander, Robert, eds. Colored Contradictions: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Plays. New York: Penguin Group, 1996.

Fraden, Rena. Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones & Theater for Incarcerated Women. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

National Public Radio. "Medea Project Brings Hope to Incarcerated Women". Oct. 2007. www.npr.org.

Parks, Suzan-Lori. "New Black Math". Theatre Journal 57:4. December 2005. pp. 578- 583.

Thiong'o, Ngugi. "Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space". TDR. Vol. 41, no. 3. Autumn, 1997. pp. 11-30. Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Warner, Sara. "The Medea Project: Mythic Theater for Incarcerated Women". Feminist Studies, no. 2. Summer 2004

Yalen, Lesley and Cohen, Cynthia. "Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work". Complementary Approaches to Coexistence Work: Focus on Coexistence and the Arts. July 2007.

Ebony Awarded Grant for Current Project

Peace family!!!

So most of yall know I am working on a ethnographic healing process with a group of women here in nyc and in nc. Well I have been awarded a small grant to continue this oh so important process.

I am very thankful to NYU for supporting this work in this way. Here is more information about the grant.

Sistas, you are still welcome to participate if you wish...

peace,

e

The -Ism Grant http://www.cmep.nyu.edu/ism.html

Racism. Capitalism. Individualism. Feminism. What is an "–ism?" They surround us. We live them. We embrace them. We resist them.

Accordingly, the –ISM Project, provides a venue for students to critically examine the complex ways –isms permeate their lives, especially in regards to diversity and in-tolerance. The objective of this program is to provide an opportunity for students to engage in an education and professional project, which encourages creativity, freedom of expression, and free thinking.



What is the –ISM Project?
This unique program encourages students to analyze various –isms in our communities as it relates to race, culture, class, gender, politics, religion, and other existing social constructs. Beyond critical analysis, the participants create artistic platforms to creatively express their research and personal understanding of their selected -isms. The resulting projects' shared goal is to incite introspection, open exchange of ideas, and social change in the NYU community and beyond.



Coming from all academic disciplines, past participants have focused on the "conventional," like Colonialism and Sexism, to the unique and personal, like Buckwheatism, Hip Hop Feminism, and Outofthebox-ism. No matter the subject, the participants' objective is to creatively explore and challenge their own ideologies while initiating meaningful discussion, which encourages diversity, understanding, and critical thinking. Students are encouraged to use a variety of media available to them, such as photos, paintings, audiotapes, videotapes, journals, or skits, to portray their –ISM project.



In the fall semester, students go through a competitive application process preparing and presenting their -ISM Project proposals. Receiving a grant commensurate with project expenses, selected students work throughout the spring semester researching their –isms and creating their original artistic pieces. During the creative process, the students have the option of collaborating with faculty and local community members. All participants share their work with the NYU community at CMEP's annual -ISM Gala.

performed violence--on black womens body

Anarcha
The Mother of Gynecology



Anarcha was an African American slave woman. She was one of the seventy-five slaves who worked the Wescott plantation, just on the outskirts of Montgomery, Alabama.

Anarcha went into labor one day. Three days later, she was still in labor. Dr Marion Sims was called in to assist the delivery. He writes in his autobiography that he used forceps on the fetus’s head but that he really didn’t know what he was doing since he’d had so little experience with the device. We don’t know whether the baby survived the ordeal. We do know that the mother experienced several vaginal tears from the birthing. She became incontinent afterwards due to the damage.

A few days later, the master of the plantation sent Anarcha to Dr Sims hoping he could repair the damage to his slave, as she could not hold her bowls or bladder. As her master’s chattel, her condition reduced her value considerably.

Sims took in the patient reluctantly. He put her up on his examination table, on her hands and knees and, using a modified pewter spoon to expand the walls of her vagina, he accidentally released the pressure that held her uterus in an awkward position. Anarcha felt immediate relief as the change in air pressure helped her uterus to relocate back into its proper position.

Through an agreement with her master, Anarcha became Dr Sims's guinea pig. She regularly underwent surgical experiments, while positioned on Sims’s table, squatting on all fours, and fully awake without the comfort of any anesthesia. It was commonly accepted that African Americans had a higher tolerance for pain than their white counterparts. Commonly accepted but utterly wrong.

Anarcha’s fistula (from her vaginal tears) was repaired by Sims. Sims thus became the leading expert in repairing this damage that seemed to occur in a good number of births by slave women. Though Sims was sent many slave women with fistulas, we know from his biography that he experimented repeatedly on Anarcha, as well as two other slaves, Betsy and Lucy.

Anarcha was experimented upon, and drugged up later, not to ease her pain as much as to stifle her moans. It has been calculated that she had been operated on, perhaps, 34 times. She, Betsy, Lucy, and countless others helped Dr Sims hone his techniques and create his gynecological tools. Though on display in museums, many of Dr Sims’s tools have modern counterparts that are used today.

Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy left no written legacy. Slaves were forbidden to read and write, a crime punishable by death.

And though science today looks back on Sims’s work ambiguously, truly unsure as to his level of success, or whether he should be credited as the father of gynecology, we now know who the mothers of modern gynecology were: they were the nameless and faceless slave women upon whom Dr Sims experimented.

Today we have just three names: Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. It is our hope that these names will never be forgotten.

Pioneer in Performance Studies Transitions

By Yasmin Anwar, Media Relations | 06 December 2007
BERKELEY – VèVè Amasasa Clark, an associate professor of African American studies
at the University of California, Berkeley, and a literary scholar who coined
the term "diaspora literacy," died Dec. 1 at Alta Bates Hospital in Berkeley
after being found at home in a coma. She was 62.

VèVè Amasasa Clark


During her 16 years on the African American studies faculty at UC Berkeley, Clark
became an expert on such topics as African oral expression and the Francophone
novel. She was instrumental in helping create at UC Berkeley the nation's first
doctorate program in African diaspora studies.
"Her theorization of 'diaspora literacy' has functioned as a model for numerous
scholars in the field, here in the United States and in the Caribbean. She will
be sadly missed," said Suzette Spencer, an assistant professor of African American
studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a former student of Clark's.

Clark's urbane manner was reinforced by her multilingualism. She spoke fluent
French, Spanish and Creole and had a fair understanding of Wolof, a language
spoken in Senegal, Gambia and Mauritania. She co-edited "The Legend of Maya Deren"
(1985), a biography of the avant-garde filmmaker and theorist; and "Kaiso! Katherine
Dunham: An Anthology of Writings" (1978), about the iconic dancer and choreographer
who died last year.
"She was the epitome of a brilliant scholar, passionate thinker, gifted writer
and master teacher," said Ula Taylor, chair of UC Berkeley's Department of African
American Studies. "As a colleague, she was a woman of integrity who was committed
to encouraging younger faculty to embrace their own intellectual voice."
As a mentor and champion for black scholarship, Clark worked on the retention
of African American students and sought to provide a support network for graduate
students in African American, African and Caribbean studies. What many students
loved most was how she challenged them academically and intellectually.
"She could think so far out of the box, it was mind-blowing," said Lisa Ze Winters,
an assistant professor of English and Africana studies at Wayne State University,
Detroit, and a former student of Clark's. "Even as she pushed you, told you that
your work could be better, you knew she really wanted you to succeed, to exceed
your own expectations. In her mind, there were no limits."
Clark was born Dec. 14, 1944, and grew up in the New York City borough of Queens.
She was the only child of Alonso Clark, who was from North Carolina and belonged
to the worldwide historic Freemasonry fraternity, and of her Caribbean mother.
VèVè Clark was extremely close to her father, friends said. Both her parents
are deceased.
As a child, Clark first contemplated becoming a doctor and then a musician, according
to an interview she did in 1996 when she became the inaugural recipient of UC
Berkeley's Social Sciences Distinguished Service Award.
As an undergraduate in Queens College at the City University of New York, Clark
majored in romance languages. After receiving her bachelor's degree in 1966,
she continued her language studies at the Université de Nancy in France, where
she received a certificate d'études supérieures. She returned to Queens College
and received her master's degree in French in 1969.
During the 1970s, Clark headed west to UC Berkeley, where she worked as a teaching
assistant in French and then as a lecturer in what was then called Afro-American
studies. She also taught French at an experimental collegiate seminar program
on campus that was known informally as Strawberry Creek College.
Daphne Muse, director of the Women's Leadership Institute at Mills College in
Oakland, met Clark in 1973, when they were both teaching at UC Berkeley. The
two quickly became close friends, and Clark officiated at Muse's wedding.
"She would have me on the floor in tears with laughter. She had an uncanny ability
to mimic, and she was just brilliant," said Muse. "She was also incredibly generous,
both spiritually and financially."
In 1980, Clark was hired as an assistant professor of African and Caribbean literature
at Tufts University in Massachusetts. During that time, she worked on her Ph.D.
thesis in French and ethnology for UC Berkeley and received her degree in 1983.

In 1985, she received a faculty research award from Tufts to attend the United
Nations Conference for Women in Nairobi. A year later, Clark was promoted at
Tufts to associate professor of African and Caribbean literature.
In 1991, she returned to UC Berkeley as an associate professor of African American
studies. That same year, Clark won recognition for coining the phrase "diaspora
literacy" in a paper titled "Developing Diaspora Literature and Marasa Consciousness."
She defined the term as the ability to understand multi-layered meanings of stories,
words and folk sayings in African diaspora communities through the knowledge
and lived experiences of the community members' cultures.
Her method of using literature to convey experiences inspired students to look
beyond dry surveys and interviews for their research. That was the case for Erin
Winkler, who took Clark's "Diasporic Dialogues" course during her first year
in graduate school at UC Berkeley.
"As a social scientist who researches children's developing understandings of
race, I was not sure how a literature course would speak to my work," said Winkler,
an assistant professor of Africology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

But Clark encouraged Winkler to use coming-of-age novels in her research, said
Winkler, "because they speak to experiences of race in ways that sometimes go
unspoken in surveys or interviews. What she modeled in her own scholarship had
a profound impact on my development as an interdisciplinary scholar."
During Clark's career, she received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship
for research on choreographer Katherine Dunham and a graduate fellowship for
study at the Université de Dakar, Sénégal. She also was a Rockefeller Foundation
fellow-in-residence at Brown University,
In 1996, after winning UC Berkeley's first Social Sciences Distinguished Service
award for "service that benefits undergraduate and/or graduate students," Clark
explained to an interviewer her passion for fostering a new generation of black
scholars.
"We're all trained in something else: English, political science, French, sociology,"
she said of her own generation. "How many Ph.D.s do we have who actually came
though in African American studies or African diaspora studies? So, it's exciting
to me that we are about to develop a generation in this field."
Trica Danielle Keaton, an assistant professor of American studies and global
studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, fondly refers to Clark's
adages as "VèVèisms."
"'Joining the ancestors,' a precious VèVèism, is not an ending, but rather a
transition, something that feels akin to one of VèVè's 'zen moves' to higher
and safer ground," Keaton said. "I am humbled by the love that she bestowed on
us, her 'intellectual daughters and sons.' Indeed, I am honored to be but one
of so very many touched by her genius and generosity."
Clark is survived by a wide circle of friends, colleagues and students. A memorial
gathering in celebration of her life and legacy will be held on Friday, Dec.
14, from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the Lipman Room in UC Berkeley's Barrows Hall.