This project is an exploration of my experience of harnessing in on one persona that I felt could very possibly represent what I would look like given a few other choices--choices that could perhaps more closely reflect the popularized imaginations of black female sexuality. My costume consisted of a short silver “pop” wig, barbie pink lipstick, a white fur vest, platformed sneakers, and a roundish booty wrapped in a tight gold skirt. I also carried a Sephora shopping bag which had a camera hidden in it pointed behind me, capturing strangers interactions with “my butt”. Along with two classmates, Liz and Garima on camera duty, I took this persona around Times Square and into a few shop and then back home...
When we parted ways, I decided to wear the costume as I journeyed home on the subway, which was an altogether alternative experience. Knowing that Garima and Liz were with me allowed me to ground the Times Square touring in “my” body. Though I was wearing the costume, I was able to talk to them, and their presence provided an anchor in the sense that I knew they knew who I “really was” outside of the costume.
Shame floods into being...as a disruptive moment in a circuit of identity constituting identificatory communication...Blazons of shame...are semaphores of trouble and at the same time of a desire to reconstitute the interpersonal bridge...Shame and identity remain in very dynamic relation to one another at once deconstituting and foundational because shame is both peculiarly contagious and particularly individualizing. (pg. 36)
This quote speaks to my encounter on the train with a person who I read as a young Black woman. She wore a beautiful mudcloth adinkra print skirt. Her hair was in thick Senegalese twists, and she stood “confidently” upright, her arm interlaced with a bowtied companion. When she walked into the car and spotted me, her face dropped. As she filled a spot near me, she made sure to angle her body toward her date and away from me--as if I had cartoon stink rays radiating off me that would get them stuck on her too if she got too close. Her side-eye scans when she thought I wasn’t looking kept in check my failure to be hot enough/not look trashy/cover the right parts lest it spill on to her freshly pressed blouse.
It was a great relief to arrive home. Once I was home and away from the acrid stares of strangers, I felt compelled to click on my webcam. In front of the webcam, in comparison to in front of the direct gaze of strangers in the street, I felt the type of “empowerment” I imagined possible as I drafted this character. As I witnessed myself disrobe, I shifted in, out and through multiple positionalities--being and becoming witness/seductress/voyeur/bad ass bitch/stupid hoe/ all being played out on the flesh that “I” inhabit.
In the chapter entitled “Seductions and the Ruses of Power”, Saidiya Hartman writes:
Seduction reifies the idea of submission by proclaiming it the pathway to ostensible equality, protection, and social harmony... The insinuation that the dominated were mutually invested in their subjugation recast violence in the ambiguous guise of affection and declared hegemony rather than domination by the ruling term of order. The assertion that coercion and consent characterized the condition of enslavement can be seen in the implied and explicit promises extended by the law. (pg.90)
Without drawing exacting parallels to the conditions of slavery and the law in the early 20th century, but considering my webcam play in light of the implications of seduction as a path to objects of “happiness”, we can begin to do the work of revealing the potential dangers of such a stance. Because of this legacy--the routinized rape of black women, alongside the “spectacle” of their gyrating hips-- that coercion and consent characterize the current condition of the hypersexualization of black women’s bodies continues to “recast violence in the ambiguous guise of affection.”
This video is an exploration of my experience of harnessing in on one persona that I felt could very possibly represent what I would look like given a few other choices--choices that could perhaps more closely reflect the popularized imaginations of black female sexuality. My costume consisted of a short silver “pop” wig, barbie pink lipstick, a white fur vest, platformed sneakers, and a roundish booty wrapped in a tight gold skirt. I also carried a Sephora shopping bag which had a camera hidden in it pointed behind me, capturing strangers interactions with “my butt”. Along with two classmates on camera duty, I took this persona around Times Square and into a few shop and then back home...(read more here)
Naming Theology: The Power to Interpret and the Authority to Name
Preface
I don’t think much of my name these days, other than creative ways to correct other people’s pronunciation. I was born with my name. Several months from my birth, it was decided that I would be named Moremi after it was prophesized that my mother would give birth to the reincarnation of the legendary Queen Moremi. But technically, I wasn’t actually given the name until my naming ceremony, which in the Yoruba culture happens seven days after the child is born. At my naming ceremony, I looked up at my mother from her lap as she dipped her fingers into tiny porcelain bowls. I tasted honey, palm oil, pepper, bitter kola nuts, salt and liquor for the first time. As I savoured each flavour, a prayer was said over my head. Blessing prayers; hopeful prayers; prayers in preparation. Each of these elements were to ready me for both the syrupy and unsavoury in life. Only after this warning, could I receive a name. In my family, names represent legacies. Whether spiritually divinated, or named after careful considerations, each one carries with it not only a history, but stories. Stories of survival, stories of triumph, links to the past and wisdom.
Gloria Anzaldúa once wrote, “Naming is how I make my presence known, how I assert who and what I am and want to be known as. Naming myself, is a survival tactic.” (pg.3) In a world that subjectifies and manipulates identities for the purpose of commoditization, naming is a tool for self empowerment. Though most are given names at birth, we sometimes have the opportunity to re-imagine ourselves. In the names that people call you, they choose to honor and dishonour a certain aspect to your identity. In the names that we choose for ourselves, we attempt to reflect the ways in which we hope to be connected.
I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
Song of Solomon II
King James Version
“She is as beautiful as the rose of Sharon!”
On a day that I imagine to be sunny, with the kind of rain that decorates the clouds like a beaded curtain, the tiny Caribbean island of San Salvador welcomed Sharon Antoinette Rebecca Albury. She was the first child for generations to be named by her mother, who was the first female photographer in Bahamian history. Her closest friend at the time was a French photographer who chose the name Antoinette. Her father, Preston Hilton Albury, was a proud politician leading the efforts in gaining Bahamian Independence from the British. In secret, the child called herself SARA.
I actually never liked the name Sharon because it was so common. Like in a class of twenty girls at least five of them were named Sharon.
It was until years later, she tells me from her apartment overlooking the Arabic Gulf, that she discovered the true meaning of her name.
When I did, I was ashamed I’d changed it. I guess there are no mistakes in the end, huh?
On May 3, 1977, when Sharon was thirteen, her older sister Ommath held her hand as they boarded a small plane from the small island of San Salvador to the more promising shores of Miami. In high school, Sharon was able to make some friends, but spent most of her time working on the school newspaper or volunteering as a candy striper. She found that the more she contributed to this new society, the less she missed home.
When I registered for classes at the University of Florida, I wrote my name as Shaaron and people called me Shaaron! To this day my transcripts still have that spelling. Going to College gave me the opportunity to change my name... because no one knew me.
Shaaron was very active in student government. Unlike Sharon, Shaaron sipped near-beer at parties. In her sophomore year, Shaaron thought taking Yoruba for her foreign language credit would be an easy ‘A’. It was in that Yoruba class that Shaaron discovered her connection with Africa. Though her tongue struggled to echo the flesh of the language, she felt a kinship in the culture. She found her place in the Diaspora. It was her Yoruba professor that recommended she attend a lecture on South African apartheid. Shaaron was shocked into action.
On December 26, 1984, now living in Washington D.C., and attending Howard University, Sharon Rebecca Albury held hands with her boyfriend on a chilly night. As the couple strolled, enjoying the glow on each other’s faces from the Christmas lights that were still hanging, Sharon spotted a poster for a Kwanzaa Party being hosted by the Ausar Auset Community.
At the Kwanzaa party, she learned about the seven principles of the holiday. This party landed on the second day of Kwanzaa, which its guiding principle is Kujichagulia, which means self determination. An Ausar Auset priest poured libation.
You pour libation to honour god and invite the presence of your ancestors.
As the priest poured the liquid from his gourd, so too, fell tears from Sharon’s eyes. She had never seen anything like it. She was stirred by the presence of her ancestors and decided she needed to learn more. The priest invited her to attend their next meeting.
On January, 2 1985 Sharon attended her first class is African cosmology. The meeting was opened with a libation.
My Spirit went whoosh! It was a spiritual awakening
I was taken away on a spiritual journey
I was speaking a language nobody could understand
I couldn’t speak English
It was this ancient language that was unintelligible
but I was calm...
After a pause a beat past natural, she bursts into laughter.
Fortunately those were people who understood what I was experiencing and didn’t try to get me locked up in a mental hospital.
It wasn’t until she was dropped off at home that Tet Tet Tetua first appeared. Although she doesn’t remember lighting one, a candle in the corner of the room painted shadow tapestries on the walls. Sharon laid back on her bed as the silhouettes danced before her.
And it was in my dream that night that Tet Tet Tetua made herself known. She told me she was an ancestor and she gave me the name Hetep Hetep Afa. I would possess her spirit.
Together Tet Tet Tetua and Hetep Hetep Afa attended the monthly drumming ceremonies organized by the Ausar Auset community. At the events, Tet Tet Tetua guided the hands of Hetep as they caressed bellies pregnant with life and worries. And they healed.
After several months, the leaders of Ausar Auset decided Hetep was deserving of a position in the priesthood, despite her short time with the group. A party was thrown at the main headquarters in Brooklyn.
“Today I’d like to introduce you to someone. Everybody please welcome Hetep Hetep Afa!”
The crowd stood in congratulations and a gentle voice rose from the back of the room. “Hetep Hetep Afa... I see sweetness in the things you do. Hetep Hetep Afa... I know there is inner peace in you”.
Several weeks later, Hetep held back her friends hands as they begged to leave the party where she’d spotted a princely drummer in a white linen outfit. Despite the vow of celibacy required of Ausar Auset priests, Hetep became gelatin against the thunderous rhythms of the djembe and later discovered she was pregnant with the drummer’s child.
I went back home to Miami to figure out what to do. In D.C everybody was telling me what to do. I went to the beach and when I was walking on the sand this woman came up to me and she said “You look like you have so much on your mind” and I said... Yeah I have a major decision to make and she said “Well my brother is a Yoruba priest and he could do a reading for you.”
The divination revealed her pregnancy and told her that there were three men that wanted to marry her but that it didn’t matter which one she chose, because the marriage would inevitably fail. The stranger told her “You will not be happy with a man until you marry for the third time.”
Sharon was married to Akinde in September of 1988. Several months into her pregnancy, she dreamt of her birthplace.
At least, at first, I thought it was the Bahamas. But then, this old woman came up to me speaking Yoruba. In the dream, I could understand her. She told me to name the child after her. She said that her name was Ayinnuola.
The news of this dream brought the drummer to his knees. Through sobs he explained, “That’s my grandmother’s name.”
At the point that I came back to Miami with Nuola she was already a couple months old. I still was not brave enough to use an African name myself. I always used Sharon when I went back to Miami. Especially around my family.
Four years later, Sharon received a phone call from her husband who had been in Nigeria for several months. While in Idanre, his hometown, he received a divination that prophesized that his wife would give birth to the reincarnation of Queen Moremi, a heroine in Nigerian history who prevented the British from enslaving her people. Nearly a year later, Sharon’s family and friends crowded into a hospital lobby to await the arrival of Moremi.
After eight years of marriage and another year of healing Sharon decided to drop the name Akinde. She also decided that she was ready to take own her own African name. She looked to Mother Taylor for guidance who ordinated that Adeyela would be the best fit. Adeyela is the Yoruba description for the purity of God.
Adeyela was initiated to the deity Obatala, and became very active in Yoruba spirituality.
In the summer of the year 2000, Adeyela held her daughters hands as they boarded a plane to Nigeria. In honor of the work she was doing to bring respect to the Yoruba culture in Miami, In Nigeria she was appointed the chieftaincy title, Iya Laje which means mother of wealth.
When Adeyela was married for the second time, she took on the last name of her Christian husband—now making her full legal name Adeyela Albury Bennett.
Adeyela Albury Bennett... is a mother...A mother of Ayinnuola, Queen Moremi, and now twins which makes me an Iyabeji. The funny thing is, when I used to call myself Sara, I had no idea that she was a biblical character who was almost 100 when she gave birth to twins! I guess you gotta be careful with what nickname you pick for yourself.
Though Sharon was raised to be a pious Seventh Day Adventist, Adeyela finds it pertinent to tend to her Yoruba statuettes and put out offerings of food for her ancestors. Though on Sundays she attends church with her husband, sometimes, behind her desk at work she’ll hum the Kemetic praise songs she was taught by the Ausar Auset society.
Years after legally changing her name to Adeyela, which is the Yoruba description for the purity of God, my mother discovered that the rose of Sharon is the Appalachian description for the purity of God.
In the end there are no mistakes.
Works Cited
Anzaldua, Gloria. "Queer Labels and Debates." TO(O) QUEER THE WRITER-LOCA, ESCRITORA Y CHICANA. N.p.: Duke University, n.d. 146-58. Web.
"Song of Solomon 2:1 I Am a Rose of Sharon, a Lily of the Valleys." Song of Solomon 2:1 I Am a Rose of Sharon, a Lily of the Valleys. N.p., n.d. Web. Dec. 2012.
In the essay, “From Biopower to Ethnic Difference” Rey Chow uses Foucault’s definition of bio-politics to evidence how rationales that claim to be doing anti-racist work actually contribute to the sustainment and normalization of bio-political violence on a global scale. This section ends with a recount of an incident where a student’s adviser attempted to deter her from taking post colonial studies on the basis that was only for people of color. Chow cites antimiscegenation as the reason that explains why the teacher diverted her student. Chow defines antimiscegenation as “A composite attitude that is hostile not only to the mixing of genes (biology) but also to the mixing of genres, the cross-generations of knowledge (discourse).” (Chow,p.17) While the professor’s intentions were probably guileless, the sectioning off of post-colonial studies for only students of color can not only be devastating to coalition building between varying identity groups, but can also contribute to the further obstruction of Black experiences from popular discourse. While Chow proves that anti-miscegenation can sometimes be a tactic through which biopolitical violence is enforced, that is not to say that its opposite, miscegenation, is without the potential for unsought consequences.
Rap icon, Nicki Minaj, born Onika Tanya Maraj, gained mainstream recognition with her debut album, Pink Friday, in 2010. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Minaj emigrated to Queens, New York when she was 5 years old. Though Minaj is most widely recognized for her peculiar characterizations and machine gun lyricism, she occasionally slows it down with a more serious ballad, like “Freedom”. The video for “Freedom” features Minaj in several gowns; most notably a gown that echoes popular iconography of Jesus, and another particularly gaudy gown fit only for a queen.
Throughout this account of freedom, there is also a sometimes obscured laboring body, signified by various objects and stylistic choices. Using Nicki Minaj’s “Freedom” music video and lyrics, I will demonstrate how, in this narrative of freedom, the particular miscegenation of Jesus, The Queen, and the Laborer reflect and refract the routinized violences inflicted on the bodies of Black women globally.
The video opens as we slowly zoom upwards into an ordinary wooden staircase set in an ethereal desert landscape filled with smooth stones. Some shots of Nicki’s face appear in the thunderous clouds. Quick flash of a crumbling shipwrecked vessel. More clouds. A light rain trickles as the first verse opens. Minaj appears in a long sleeve, fitted black sheath dress. A stylized gold crown of “thorns” frames her face. On top of a lofty melody, she enters:
"They'll never thank me for opening doors
But they aint even thank Jesus when he died on the cross"
Flash to a cross. Close-up on a set of keys hanging from the cross. She is now in front of the large wooden ship vessel, which lays on its side, adjacent to a set of railroad tracks trailing off into the distance. Random snippets of eagles. The sky is thunderous. A fragment of what looks like a tractor creeps in the shadows of the bottom left corner of the wide shot.
The cross is most frequently interpreted as a symbol of atonement, or the process through which the biblical Jesus made sacrifices in order to be absolved of all sin. In this way, let us consider the cross as not just the supposed location of Jesus’ death but also representative of a devastating, painful, and laborious death. This is a violent process.
The relationship between terror, freedom, and sacrifice is theoretically stabilized in “Necropolitics” by Achille Mmembe. He takes up the body of the male suicide bomber to explore the liberatory possibility of the moment of detonation. He posits, “[In] the logic of martyrdom...the body duplicates itself and in death, literally and metaphorically escapes the state of siege and occupation.” (Mmembe, p. 37) This is the logic of atonement and resurrection-- that only through the work of ruination can one accomplish liberation. If “Freedom” is drawing parallels between the biblical Jesus’ redemption and Minaj’s experiences then how does this equation inform Nicki’s sacrifices? In other words, what work is Minaj doing to earn her freedom?
The first glimpse of labor we get is the abandoned ship that appears in first few frames. For Gilroy, ships represent “the half-remembered micropolitics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialization and modernization”. (Gilroy, p. 17) Under that premise, the relationship between the ship, the railroad, and the ominous factory equipment dispersed throughout the video seems less random. Indeed, all these items very acutely stand in for the Black labor that is the literal, cultural and metaphysical foundation of modernity.
“Man I’m birthing these artists,
and I’m starting to show”
Minaj asks us to look at her body, notice her capacity to bear life. This laborer is not only a black body, but also a birthing body. Beyond the physical potentialities, she is making explicit her contributions of (re)producing cultural and artistic life. Now the hook:
“I feel free, I feel freedom”
As the second verse opens, we are formally introduced to the glamour shots which teased through the introduction. Now wearing a luxurious black and white fur jacket, Nicki Minaj sits ostentatiously on a gold-cast baroque throne. This is her redemption. The sovereign state of the queen is the realization of freedom, the reward for her sacrificial labor.
“Bible, queen is the title
And if you are my rival, then that means you suicidal”
This is Minaj’s second reference to death in this song. Earlier, in the first verse, she brags:
“Oh shit my commercial’s on
Did I really body bitches with commercial songs?”
These lyrics explicitly couple her success with the total demise of others, almost as if it depended on it. Almost as if it that was the success in and of itself. Taken literally, she could be referring to how her success has impacted other female rappers’ careers, however, if we return to our consideration of the way this video speaks to the material production of The Black Atlantic, we can begin to trace a congruence between her “bodying” of “bitches” by way of commercial success, and the ways that the success of neoliberal capitalism has been (and is) absolutely contingent on the economically, culturally and politically laborious deaths of black and brown bodies.
Within this plantation economy, an apparently sovereign black female body, such as Minaj’s, seems to evidence a restoration of humanity-- a return of the crown to its rightful owner. With her humanity restored, the former slave laborer is now free from sovereign rule, right?
Jared Sexton uses Saidiya Hartman to present the notion that “attributions of ‘humanity’ and ‘agency’ [are] key components in the racial domination of blacks.” (Sexton, p.35) Formulations of the idea of “agency” are central to all projects of subject making. Therefore, under colonial power, the recognition of an “I” is already tainted with empirical projections. For this reason, we must scrupulously investigate any instance that one makes declarative statements about freedom. After all, it is “...on the soft fibres of the brain [that] the unshakeable base of the soundest of Empires [is founded].” (Foucault, p.103) In the microcosm of a 4 minute music video, even the smallest detail is pregnant with signification.
The first shot in full color features Minaj in a twinkling floor length ball gown with a giant belabored brooch adorning the front. A close-up highlights a 15th century style crown (think Burger King ). These color shots also reveal Minaj’s startlingly pale skin complexion along with her light pink lipstick, and baby doll expression framed by a head of pin straight Nordic blonde hair (think Marsha Brady).
Minaj has dramatically altered her very flesh to reference Eurocentric ideals of feminine beauty. This sacrifice, the obstruction of her physical blackness, serves to reinforce standards of beauty that have been the standards by which Black life is negated. In this way, this is a choice of life and death. Teasing out both the normative and utopic potentialities of “Freedom” reveals an intricate pastiche of bodies and power. There are a million other details that connect to the material relations of the Black Atlantic (the shout outs to Macy’s, the eagle, the smoothness of the crown of thorns, the recurring visual obstruction of black labor) Despite their intention, perhaps, to redeem or recognize black labor, the placement of these objects within the context of the aforementioned details serves to reinstate the already established economic relations that places blackness at the bottom of a violent hierarchy.
As Sexton puts it, “[It] goes without saying that the slave also suffers the exploitation of her labor, the expropriation of her land, and resources, the loss of her political sovereignty, and disruption of her cultural heritage, but she suffers all of this as contingencies of her captivity, rather than as the essence of her dominated position.” Minaj’s laser focus on the reversal of economic relations obscures the also essential minutiae of colonial domination. If imaginations of the ultimate realization of Black autonomy remains uncritical of how anti-blackness has provided the base for dominating ideas of successful humanity, then it is doomed to return time and time again to the slaughtering house that is imperial white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
WORKS CITED
Achille, Mbembe. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): p.37.
Chow, Rey. "From Biopower to Ethnic Difference," The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press (2002)
Foucault, Michel “The Body of the Condemned” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan trans. New York: Random House (1977): pp.3-31.
Gilroy, Paul (1993). “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” from The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp. 1-40.
Taking up Nicki Minaj’s music video for her song “Freedom”, this project traces how the miscegenation of Jesus, The Queen, and the Laborer speak to the routinized violences inflicted on the bodies of Black women globally.(READ MORE)
