Kwanzaa, Kwanzaa, Kwanzaa, Kwanzaa

My kids danced to the cutest Kwanzaa video all last week when we learned about Kwanzaa...they loved it! I just had to share it:



And I read them this description of Africa:

Africa is a huge, beautiful mass of land called a “continent.” Kwanzaa celebrates cooperation, but it also celebrates the land known as Africa. People who came from Africa a really long time ago live all over the world now. They live in places like the United States of America, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Barbados, Mexico, and the Bahamas. All of the Africans who live all over the world now make up the African Diaspora. Some of these people moved out of Africa on their own; many others were stolen from their homeland long ago and sold into slavery. Many people in the African Diaspora still show the greatness of Africa, no matter where in the world they are located. They show it by the music they play, the dances they dance, and the foods they eat. They show it by cooperating with other people!


I mentioned places like the Dominican Republic and Guyana because lots of my kids are of Caribbean descent, and I hoped I could give them info on the Black-Latino connection early on, before they even had time to consider the other BS that they will learn from society...


Speaking of Kwanzaa, look where I'mma be! (From facebook)

Join Us As We Celebrate
The 21st Annual LGBT Community KWANZAA

Saturday Dec 27th 2008

African Market 12:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Cultural Program 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Karamu (Community Feast) 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm
(Vegetarian selections also available)

Featuring:

Akoben Drumming Circle and various musical and spoken word artists.

PRESENTED BY:

ADODI/New York
African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change (AALUSC)
The Audre Lorde Project (ALP)
The Black Men’s Exchange – New York
Circle of Voices, Inc. (COV Inc.)
FIERCE
Freedom Train Productions
None on Record: Stories of Queer Africa
Rehoboth Temple CCC
Sistahs in Search of Truth, Alliance & Harmony (SiSTAH)
Sistas of Caribbean Ancestry (SOCA)
The Inner Child Experience (ICE)
-------------------------------------------------------
Tickets $10 (Suggested donation)
No one will be turned away - Tickets will be available at the door.

FOR EVENT INFO: lgbtkwanzaa@gmail.com

VENDORS WANTED: lgbtkwanzaavendors@gmail.com

VOLUNTEERS WANTED: lgbtkwanzaavolunteers@gmail.com

This Song is a Prayer

Each morning before the sun comes shining
I pray Jah Lord to keep me strong
To keep me far away from the wicked
And let me live clean and strong
Just let me live with my fellowman
Father oh my Father, Father, Father
Lift up my head and let me move along
Show me the way, the truth, and light lord
And let my days be long
And let my days be long

-Let My Days Be Long, the Abyssinians

I feel like a rastafarian hippie child sometimes (not unlike the the "rasta style, flower child" so embodied by ms. E Badu). I do though, because my folks raised me in such an Africentric hippie way, whether they'll admit it or not. My father used to blast the Abyssinians when I was growing up, this conscious reggae group from back in the day. And because of him, I love them. Their music is so simple and soulful, so intertwined with spirit. It's also so clearly influenced by Rastafarianism, with little bits of the Amharic language sprinkled in their lyrics alongside English and Jamaican patois, and countless references to the middle passage, zion and Africa. This song has always been one of my favorites. I was trying to explain to my partner, Seshata (she has a name! LOL) how it makes me feel, and has made me feel since I was a little child. I feel like you sing this song when you are truly, utterly content with life. When you are so grateful just for the opportunity to live and smell the flowers another day that you're not singing the popular refrain of our times, "take me now," "end this shit," or "when will it be over..."

...BUT you're praying, begging Jah to increase your shit! Increase the number of days you have on this planet. Power. To me it expresses such an ownership of your life, of your own destiny, when you have reached the maturity level to be able to be so in tuned with nature and the rhythm of the planet that you want to be here longer.

I feel that we have inherited this sad, sad legacy of colonization, unfulfilled promises and broken spirits that has made it so difficult for many of us to break through the barriers imposed by our environments and connect with the source. It's not often that you see a person just smiling because they are alive, and asking God to keep them on the planet longer. Not in our culture that is so addicted to depression. And to feeding that depression with more and more things, with more and more material products that by design and definition cannot possibly fill the cliched but all too real hole inside.

This is a song you sing when you know. When you know the difference between what's real and truly valuable and what's constructed. When you can distinguish between what parades as truth but has no substance, no space for soul to enter and what truly matters, and what is soulful (soul filled).


Prayer: "...to keep me far away from the wicked..."

An especially important line to people who have had the experience of colonization. An especially important line in the wake of Thanksgiving, the holiday constructed to obscure the depths and the breadth of the horrors that happened beneath the paved roads we now walk and drive. To obscure the stories, the voices of those that lived here first. "The wicked" assumed that those voices were actually buried when those roads were paved, when they washed their hands of the blood they spilt to pave those roads but they were wrong. They were wrong and the planet is in the process of rebalancing itself. And the buried voices, the bones and the strories are being reconstituted as the flesh of songs and refrains like this, as prayers, as creative inspiration, as the simple happiness of being alive and connected despite the continuing horrors of colonization, despite the pain that continues, that started when the first river was renamed, when the first tribe was forced to relocate, when the first person was smuggled and enslaved to do work for this empire.

(Dr. Marimba Ani: to take away a person's name is to destroy that person. To rename them is to colonize them.)

I most definitely want to be far away from the wicked when the planet enters its final stages of rebalancing. LOL. (But truthfully. In all seriousness: I do.)

But I still want to be around long enough to witness it and sing this song with conviction.

Still Black (and Still doin my HW)

So I'm really doing homework though...but I've been reading for the past three hrs so I took a small facebook break...my filmmaker facebook friend Tiona M. (who I've also had the pleasure of meeting in real time and is uber cool) posted a link to a new film called "Still Black" about Black transmen. Def want to see it. Found a couple of clips on You Tube:

The Trailer:



Clip #1:



Clip #2:



The Website

AfroPunks!

It's AfroPunk Week in Brooklyn and let me just say that I am truly enjoying the festivities! I <3 AfroPunk. I first attended the festival three years ago with a couple of my friends. It's a festival that at the time was in it's second year and was spawned from a documentary of the same name and directed by James Spooner, a self-proclaimed Afro Punk. It's about race in punk rock, and specifically about Black people who are punk (and have been punk since punk was). It's now in it's fourth year and it draws Afro Punks and Afro Punk enthusiasts from around NYC, the tri-state area, and probably the country. It generates such amazing energy because there is such radical race pride and self-acceptance floating in the air during the festival alongside pure rock and roll, pure music, pure incredible intense love and rebellion and defiance. There are no apologies, no "yea I'm Black but I'm punk" or "I'm not white but I do like punk."

But there are lots of...

"Hell yea I'm punk and hell yea I'm Black! What other way is there to be?"
"Shit yea punk is the Blackest thing on god's green earth, you ain't know?"
"Where the fuck do you think the punk counterculture got it's inspiration from? This is pure Black nationalism...the piercings, the tats, the dreds, the 'hawks...that's Africa babe!"





You see folks with Black power buttons, and tee shirts with messages like "I'm Black...please don't shoot," and golden Africa medallions...

annnd lip rings annnd nostril rings annnd industrials annnd artistically shaved heads annnd ear plugs annnd hair color annnd skateboards

and the space that this festival creates to be all of that and more is so refreshing and empowering and affirming and celebratory and sexy and addictive as hell, and so COMPLETELY necessary.

But that's just a background. This year's festival has so far been amazing, and last night I saw two incredible film selections with friends.

The first was also directed by James Spooner, a "scripted documentary" about a man who rejects his Black self while exploring the punk world, since conventional, white dominated punk outlets don't typically have space for a strong Black consciousness. No, he doesn't conveniently "discover" the AfroPunk scene near the film's end but he does eventually discover himself. Brilliant film, highly recommended.



The second was a hilARious romantic comedy called "I'm Through With White Girls." For me it was an extremely refreshing take on/celebration of Black love amidst the problematic history of race relations in the U.S., but it's one of those films that everyone is bound to take something different yet powerfully affirming from. While some small aspects of it rubbed up against my politics (and lead to a spirited phone conversation with one of my friends until 3:00 am about the biological/socially constructed nature of desire, the troubled history of race and the present manifestation of racism in a colonized world, standards of beauty and desirability that are decidedly anti-Black and anti "real people," and the politics of interracial relationships and skin color in the U.S.), overall it was just such a provocative, intriguing, entertaining, funny, well-acted, relate-able movie. And I'm not even one to really sit through and enjoy movies that don't have a documentary kind of feel to them. But this movie definitely WILL be in my collection when it's released on DVD Aug. 12th. Without a doubt. It was that good, and if you get a chance, you should really check it out.

Addendum

But hopefully I won't evolve into an afrocentric elitist. So many things to consider before getting "comfy" in any identity....

Elders, Ancestors

On my father's side, my family is a bunch of old school afrocentrics. I mean, my paternal grandmother, the person who bestowed the gift of name to me, who I intrinsically know to be beautiful even though I have no conscious memory of having met her when she was alive, was a garveyite. Mama Oya (I'll call her here) was one of my grandmother's friends in tha struggle, raising northern afrocentric babies with afrikan names, participating in the very first kwanzaa celebrations, (re)introducing afrikan dance rhythms to american negroes smack dab in the middle of the era of U.S. southern apartheid.

She (Mama Oya) called me today. Out of the blue.

Unexpected, but so wonderful, having a chance to be able to commune in real time with this living manifestation of history.

As an elder who consciously created afrocentric space for self in the midst of extreme racialized oppression, I know she has much to pass on to me, even if some of it is superficially tainted by sexual conservatism.

I honor her experience. I learned this reverence for elders from my mother, whose best friend when I was growing up was an elder, one of the earliest african/american converts to islam that we know.

In our conversation, she chuckled to me that she and my grandmother knew every other person who was like them (afrika centered) in new york city, so small was the community even in such a diverse place. I chuckled back, reflecting how not much has changed- even today, afrocentric new yorkers have, what, a half-degree of separation between us? (I learned that from my Hampton friend Nai from Harlem, who I never met growing up but who seems to know ALLLLLL the same people I do...)

Talking with elders passing wisdom gives me such feelings of *warmth,* even if I feel somewhat erased by some of what they say (she asked if I had a boyfriend; she said that too many young black women/men dress in deplorable/thuggish ways, respectively). My job, I feel, is not to burn bridges based on ideology between myself and my elders, but to build new lanes on that same bridge, expand the pathways to authentic afrocentricity so that those who come after me have even more options, see themselves reflected even more in afrocentric paradigms for living life.

Speaking about my family specifically, I feel that each generation's task is to reshape this afrocentricity, to expand it so that it is more authentic, more inclusive of folks, less oppressive. My father and my mother did it by choosing a religious paradigm *other* than Christianity, thereby granting me space to even choose other than what they chose.

I feel that I am doing it by bringing an understanding that heteronormativity and afrocentricity are not one and the same. I am expanding options, creating space for future LGBT / sexually unconservative / binary gender transgressing / womancentered afrocentrics to breathe. Later generations will take it further still.

My conversation with Mama Oya was helpful.

She said that my nana, my granma Sadie, the beautiful person who named me, is looking out for me, but that when I have a request to the ancestors, it has to be a specific request.

I needed that.

I feel that my granma respects my work, understands my worth, and does what she can to help me from the land of the ancestors.

She also suggested that when I graduate and have entered the workforce, I should take one class in any field while working, just to be continually stimulated and connected to university, which despite its problems and bureaucracy/elitism is still a place where incredibly forward thinking folks tend to connect and concentrate. Also to figure out if I do want to eventually continue my (formal) education later in life.

I can be down with that.

African Apology

This is a picture of Beninese kings offering apology to African-Americans for their ancestors' role in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, 1999. Image found here.


Sooo...yea, I'm surfing the internet...there will probably be more images coming.

Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight

Sigh. I'm clearly feeling quite race conscious today.


washingtonpost.com
A Legacy Hidden in Plain Sight
Iraqis of African Descent Are a Largely Overlooked Link to Slavery

By Theola Labbi
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A01

BASRA, Iraq

The word was whispered and hurled at Thawra Youssef in school when she was 5 years old. Even back then, she sensed it was an insult.

Abd. Slave.

"The way they said it, smiling and shouting, I knew they used it to make fun of me," said Youssef, recounting the childhood story from her living room couch.

"I used to get upset and ask, 'Why do you call me abd? I don't serve you,' " Youssef said.

Unlike most Iraqis, whose faces come in shades from olive to a pale winter white, Youssef has skin the color of dark chocolate. She has African features and short, tightly curled hair that she straightens and wears in a soft bouffant. Growing up in Basra, the port city 260 miles southeast of Baghdad, she lived with her aunt while her mother worked as a cook and maid in the homes of one of the city's wealthiest light-skinned families.

In the United States, Youssef's dark skin would classify her as black or African American. In Iraq, where distinctions are based on family and tribe rather than race, she is simply an Iraqi.

The number of dark-skinned people like Youssef in Iraq today is unknown. Their origins, however, are better understood, if little-discussed: They are the legacy of slavery throughout the Middle East.

Historians say the slave trade began in the 9th century and lasted a millennium. Arab traders brought Africans across the Indian Ocean from present-day Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, Ethiopia and elsewhere in East Africa to Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Turkey and other parts of the Middle East.

"We were slaves. That's how we came here," Youssef said. "Our whole family used to talk about how our roots are from Africa."

Though centuries have passed since the first Africans, called Zanj, arrived in Iraq, some African traditions still persist here. Youssef, 43, a doctoral candidate in theater and acting at Baghdad University's College of Fine Arts, is writing her dissertation about healing ceremonies that are conducted exclusively by a community of dark-skinned Iraqis in Basra. Youssef said she considers the ceremonies -- which involve elaborate costumes, dancing, and words sung in Swahili and Arabic -- to be dramatic performances.

"I don't complain about being called an abd, but I think that's what provoked me to write this, perhaps some kind of complex," said Youssef, who began researching and writing about the practices of Afro-Iraqis in 1997, when she was studying for a master's degree. "Something inside me that wanted to tell others that the abd they mock is better than them."
A Long History

In the 9th century, as today, Basra was a major trading city on the Shatt al Arab waterway, which empties into the Persian Gulf. With date plantations in need of laborers, Arab leaders turned to East Africa -- Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, Sudan, Tanzania and Malawi, and Zanzibar, an island off the coast of Tanzania that gave the Zanj their name.

"By the 9th century, when Baghdad was the capital of the Islamic world, we do have evidence of a large importation of African slaves -- how large is anyone's guess," said Thabit Abdullah, a history professor at York University in Toronto.

Besides working on plantations, Abdullah said, some African slaves were soldiers, concubines or eunuchs. Arabs also enslaved Turks and other ethnic groups as high-ranking army officers and domestics.

Unlike in the United States, slaves in the Middle East could own land, and their children could not be born into slavery. In addition, conversion to Islam could preclude further servitude because, according to Islamic law, Muslims could not enslave other Muslims.

Even though Islam teaches that all people are equal before God, Abdullah said that medieval Arab slave owners made distinctions based on skin color. White slaves, known as mamluks, which means "owned," were more expensive than black slaves, or abds.

To protest their treatment, Zanj slaves working in the fields around Basra staged a revolt against Baghdad's rulers that lasted 15 years and created a rival capital called Moktara, believed to have been located in the marshlands of southern Iraq. By 883 the Baghdad army had finally put down the revolt. "This slave rebellion is so important to the history of slavery in Iraq because after that, no one wanted to take a risk by trying plantation-style slavery again," Abdullah said. Slavery continued until the 19th century, but dark-skinned Iraqis never again organized as a group to make political demands.

In a country that revolves around religion rather than race, the term "abd" may be used by light-skinned Iraqis in a matter-of-fact way to describe someone's dark complexion. Dark-skinned Iraqis say the word may or may not be considered an insult, depending on how it is used and the intent of the speaker.

"We use the word abd in the black community," said Salah Jaleel, 50, one of Youssef's cousins. "Sometimes I call my friend 'abd.' Of course he knows that I don't insult him, because I'm black also, so it's a joke. We accept it between us, but it is a real insult if it is said by a white man."

In many ways, the low visibility of dark-skinned Iraqis has been a blessing. During his 35 years in power, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party government killed and tortured thousands of people based on ethnic and religious affiliations. Ethnic Kurds in the northern reaches of the country, and Shiite Muslims -- particularly the so-called Marsh Arabs -- living in the south all suffered. The dark-skinned Iraqis were spared Hussein's wrath.
'Proud of This Color'

Awatif Sabty, 47, is ambivalent on the subject of skin color. A secretary at Basra Agricultural College, she is more apt to talk about Hussein's wrongdoing than about her own caramel-colored skin or her marriage to a lighter-skinned man, Salah Mousa, 47.

Her mother was disappointed in her choice. Her husband's mother objected to the union. Sabty said Mousa's family even tried to intimidate her with threatening phone calls. Now she shakes her head and dismisses it all as long-ago history.

"Objections and barriers exist, but in the end it's all solved," she said in her soft voice, smiling.

Her middle-class home in Basra's Abbasiya district has painted concrete walls and two televisions and is immaculate. Sitting on a couch draped in white protective cloth, Sabty explained that intermarriages like hers are common in Iraq: "We don't have a problem with color, and we don't deal with someone based on color."

For instance, she said, her older sister married a light-skinned Iraqi and has a daughter with blond hair. Her brother married a dark-skinned woman and their child is dark-skinned. Sabty's two young children have olive complexions and straight, shiny hair, showing no trace of Sabty's caramel coloring.

Suddenly she paused. "In the coming generations we will have fewer dark-skinned children, and this pains us," she said. "We are proud of this color because people of this color are a minority in Iraq. Maybe DNA will bring us the color again."

Hashim Faihan Jimaa, 78, is more concerned with survival than color. He has no income and lives with his ailing wife, Dawla Shamayan, 68, who recently had gall bladder surgery.

Jimaa says he believes in the African-inspired healing ceremonies. He used to participate many years ago when they were more frequent; the number of ceremonies has decreased since the start of the U.S. occupation because of fear of performing outside.

"These came from Africa and they are very important to us, the abds," he said. Just as he used the Arabic word for slave to refer to himself, Jimaa sometimes referred to light-skinned Iraqis using the term for a free person.

His wife, sitting across from him with about a dozen of their children and grandchildren, gingerly suggested that perhaps his grandfather or another relative had been slaves from Africa.

Jimaa glanced down at the back of his dark-brown hand. "You can't depend on someone's color, because maybe a black man married a free woman and the children will come out lighter than me," he said. To seal his argument, he pointed to his caramel-colored daughter and then his granddaughter, who was darker than her mother.

Jimaa's wife and others continued to probe Jimaa's answers. He grew exasperated. "I have nothing to do with Africa, I don't know where it is or even what it is," Jimaa said. "But I know that my roots are from Africa because I am dark-skinned."

Few local government leaders in Basra, some of whom were selected by the U.S.-led occupation authority, are dark-skinned. In Hakaka -- a poor neighborhood of 600 families, about 100 of them dark-skinned -- town council members elected last August vowed to make changes. All of the eight council members are light-skinned.

"People applied to be members, and no one black applied," said council President Abdullah Mohammed Hasan, 54, in the narrow sandwich and snack shop that serves as the council's headquarters. Hasan has two wives, one of them dark-skinned.

"They have good manners and are very easy to deal with," Hasan said of dark-skinned Iraqis. "It would be better if they were members."

Youssef, the doctoral candidate, grew up in Hakaka. When she was a child her family did not have much money, but the modest neighborhood was clean. Now it lacks a septic system and reeks of waste because there is no garbage pickup.

Youssef goes back at least once a month to see her 74-year-old father, who sometimes needs her help because of his failing eyesight. She also visits with her brother, Sabeeh Youssef, and his family.

Sabeeh Youssef, 47, dropped out of school early to help support the family. He works fixing broken lighters since losing his job at an oil company in 1989. But he is a self-taught carpenter, capable of carving elaborate antique cars and miniature ships. He proudly showed the objects lining the walls of his modest home, which lacks running water.

He would love to have his own shop, "but I don't have the materials and I don't have the money to buy them," he said, as his daughter Duaa Sabeeh, 5, grew restless in his lap.

"I'm very happy and proud of my sister," he added. "She did the things that I couldn't do, or that my father couldn't do. She did it."
A Link to Africa

Each time Thawra Youssef returns to Hakaka, well-dressed in pressed clothes and a loosely draped black head scarf, she looks like a queen visiting for a day among the poor families in house clothes, who hover at their doorways and call out to Youssef by name.

"I don't feel like a stranger here," she said one day, stepping carefully to avoid the sewage as eager children followed her. "I have something deep inside of me that is connected to the local Basra ceremonies. I can't abandon them."

The practices, she said, came from "the motherland where we came from: Africa."

In her dissertation, Youssef mentioned seven open fields in and around Basra where ceremonies take place. The field in the Hakaka section is a dusty, hard-packed courtyard with houses clustered around it. Drums, tambourines and other instruments are stored in a closet. Youssef said that only a local leader named Najim had a key. Youssef had to seek his permission to write about the ceremonies.

Najim declined to talk about them.

In her dissertation Youssef describes a song called "Dawa Dawa." The title and words are a mix of Arabic and Swahili. The song, which is about curing people, is used in what Youssef calls the shtanga ceremony, for physical health. Another ceremony, nouba, takes its name from the Nubian region in the Sudan. There are also ceremonies for the sick, to remember the dead and for happy occasions such as weddings.

"The ceremonies are our strongest evidence of our African identity," she said.

Youssef said she was raised to be a proud Iraqi and Muslim, but that her mother also stressed the family's roots in Kenya. Her grandfather and his relatives came from Africa through slavery, her mother said.

"I knew that the word abd was used to refer to black people, and I know that it was something embarrassing that my mother was working in a white person's house," Youssef said. "I remember that if their son hit me, I couldn't even push him. So that hurt me, that stuck in my mind."

When she was 9, her mother sent her to stay with an aunt, Badriya Ubaid. She lived in a more upscale neighborhood and was the lead singer in the nationally acclaimed band Om Ali.

"My aunt, she was the first one pushing me to study," Youssef said. "She said, why do we let them say that black people can only do dance and music? Why don't we show them that they can be an important part of the community, that they can study? She wanted me to answer this question."

In college and graduate school, as she studied theater and dance, Youssef also sang with Om Ali. If someone said that the dark-skinned Iraqis were only good for entertainment, Youssef said, her aunt was quick to point out that her niece was in graduate school studying for an advanced degree. When Ubaid died, Youssef sang regularly in the band but quit in 1999 to pursue her doctorate full time.

Youssef also danced with a local arts troupe. She found the moves reminiscent of the dances in the ceremonies. She wrote her master's research on body movement, and when it was time to pick a topic in 2000 for her dissertation, she decided to look at her community's healing ceremonies.

"It's not only going to give ideas about dark-skinned people, it will give an idea about our inherited ceremonies, which we have to protect," said Youssef. She wants to teach and to publish her work in a book.

"The most important thing is that I started it," said Youssef. "People will come after me, God willing."

Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Argh

Independent condemned for promoting African inferiority myth

Whatwhatwhatwhat

This family didn't know slavery was over until 1961

Yesterday I was in Barnes and Nobles reading about the Crusades. And I wondered: did white folks get the *brilliant* idea to enslave Afrikans from Arabs, who had already been doing it for centuries before? Cultural diffusion sometimes sucks.

Like it is.

Yesterday I was listening to snippets of Dr. Joy DeGruy Leary on Like It Is.

In an effort to draw parallels between oppressions and illustrate the fact that the white folk who used to attend lynching parties were your everyday, average whitefolk (indeed, lots were respected community members who attended lynching parties in suits), she cited a study that found that 75% of average-joe type everyday men said that they would commit rape upon a woman if it could be any woman of their choosing and there would be no consequences for the rape.

Look at how oppression harms the psyches of both oppressed and oppressor. Can I please find the 25% of men who said no? What a noble, relatively unharmed population of people in a patriarchal, white supremacist (to quote bell hooks) society.