Culture. Is. Power.
He was serious and demanding in that way that American Idol contestants would have seen as bullying. There was a saying about his studio: “You don’t just sweat. You are sweat.” But you knew if you 1/2 stepped with the drum, with your movement, you were not giving the ancestors or the culture the respect, honor, and gratitude they deserved.
Firelight Media, the film company founded by award-winning documentarian Stanley Nelson, is calling February 19th #HBCURisingDay to draw attention to the broadcast premiere of Nelson’s recent documentary Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Black Colleges & Universities on the PBS series Independent Lens.
Before the Monday broadcast the next Marvel blockbuster movie, Black Panther, will have its nationwide release staring Howard University graduate Chadwick Boseman — the #HBCU alumni of the hour who’s been gracing the covers of Vanity Fair and Time magazine. – for starters
FULL DISCLOSURE: I’ve been involved with both entities past and present: organizing a 10 HBCU campus tour for Tell Them We Are Rising (and preview screenings for ITVS, producers of “Independent Lens”); being the playwright for Iola’s Letter — based on the life of journalist, anti-lynching advocate Ida B. Wells — presented as a staged reading at Howard University exactly at this time in 1999 with then-student Chadwick Boseman (or Chad as he was known then) in the cast. The play was directed by Howard drama professor Vera J. Katz.
“I thank God and the ancestors for this opportunity.”
Chadwick Boseman in “Iola’s Letter” program 1999
It’s no surprise to me that Chadwick Boseman’s star is rising. He impressed me as Thomas Moss in the reading of Iola’s Letter. Thomas Moss was one of Ida B. Wells’ dearest friends in Memphis in 1892. Boseman became the voice of Thomas Moss in my head for a long while after the sold-out 8 performances (a 9th was added).
Much of my cultural enrichment from age 9 up came from Howard University and its College of Fine Arts. The students and professors (my sister’s classmates and instructors) trained my eyes, ears, and appreciation especially in theater of the mosaic of what some may classify as “the black experience.” I would argue for the plural in “experience”.
That PWI was Oberlin College in Ohio. It was my first PWI in my entire academic life. I chose Oberlin because it was the first to admit students of color before HBCUs were established; was in the same Ohio town with an underground railroad stop in the time of Civil War; the alma mater of the first African American woman to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree; and was [at the time] located in a pre-dominantly African American town of the same name with a sizeable Latino population in nearby Lorain the birthplace of Howard alumna Toni Morrison. During my first weeks on campus I distinctly remember the “plague of robins” as Morrision describes in her novel Sula.
I also noticed the cultural footprint of African Americans at Oberlin was not very big or not what I was accustomed to despite the college’s glorious histories. The conservatory of music at the time was committed to a European Classical music training. There were jazz classes and a class on African American music history taught by the late Wendell Logan, but these were electives. The jazz ensemble didn’t have rehearsal or performance space inside the conservatory. Fortunately Logan was a “can do” and “will do” personality. Just book the hall.
The jazz ensemble was one of the few places where I felt grounded in the way I was grounded on HBCU turf. And even with great theatrical talents like Julie Taymor among Oberlin’s illustrious alumni, theater and dance wasn’t on the level of what I saw at Howard. Those expectations were to be had in Cleveland and Karamu founded by Oberlin alumni Russell and Rowena Jelliffe where Howard professors and alumni could be seen in residence.
What Oberlin did offer me was exposure to different art forms including performance art and artists like Ping Chong and Meredith Monk. My dorm mates brought their grounding assets – El Gran Combo, Hector Lavoe, Ruben Blades, Willie Colon, Celia Cruz and other classic salsa recordings. And I got some reinforcements from visiting artists like Gil Scott-Heron, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, poet Sonya Sanchez, choreographer/performer Geoffrey Holder. My HBCU arts experience planted seeds of appreciation and found complimentary companions in new expressions including the old European Classical ones.
My college also gave students resources and space for experimentation. I’ve always been a hands-on learner. If I wanted to put up a play at my PWI college, no problem. “Here’s a space. What else do you need?” Despite some of the quips I mentioned earlier, this made Oberlin the best choice for someone like myself.
“I’d like to thank God and the ancestors for this experience.”
Chadwick Boseman in the program for “A Rhyme Deferred,” written and directed by Kamilah Forbes
In the fantasy world of Wakanda, I still see the Howard alum’s feet firmly planted in the opportunities and experiences he draws from the ancestors. I see the bridges between past, present, and future. I knew as much seeing a video of the red carpet preview of Black Panther in Los Angeles and drummer Jabari Exum grounding the moment before Boseman emerges from the limo. In some ways I was more excited about seeing Exum, an awesome surprise appearance from DC.
I’m no Hip Hop head but I supported these creators and their movements towards a new aesthetic before “In the Heights” and “Hamilton”. I knew my love for historical drama would not qualify me to be part of this inner circle. Yet, my introduction was again through my Howard (HBCU) connection.
What Stanley Nelson gives us in Tell Them We Are Rising is a story that inspires pride and a new look at the value of HBCUs for alumni, prospective students, and persons like myself (who didn’t attend a HBCU) without leaning on the sepia-tinted, cross-fade doo-wop of Black girls in White Edwardian dresses, Black boys in bowlers, and a backup band of rich and famous alumni.
Stanley Nelson is also the filmmaker for the documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (currently on Netflix). Even that documentary kicks off with myth busting. As Nelson described during his classroom visits at Claflin in SC, he wanted the audience to see what they wouldn’t expect from a documentary about the Black Panther Party. Every one and anyone connected to the Black Panther Party had a different perspective, experience, or opportunity. And of course, you can’t capture them all in 90 minutes.
HBCU administrations have struggled with students who want to move their programs forward from the mythical past. The sepia-tinted world and American dream promises are often held up to qualify the value of the institution for preparing students to assimilate respectfully into what can be called the “social order”. Sadly the cultural and artistic assets of these institutions are simultaneously neglected, undervalued, and/or rejected and lost. This parochial house cannot stand when it is divided between limiting traditional values and new ideas.
I’ll see Black Panther on the same #HBCURisingDay before the 9 PM broadcast of Tell Them We Are Rising. I’m in that throng of ticket buyers who took advantage of advance sales. I’ll see it for Chadwick Boseman though I wish there was this much excitement around his previous films — ’42, Get On Up, Marshall. Maybe people will catch up on the stream. I’d like to think my Ida B. Wells play helped pave that trajectory. I also enjoy the comic book hero films for pure entertainment value. They’re becoming America’s 21st century mythology.
If there are any shoulders the Black Panther filmmaker, cast and crew stand on it is stories, cultural treasures, and experiences, fortunately documented by Stanley Nelson and many others. The power of the myth is strong, but making connections between myth and fundamental truths is essential.
I too would like to thank these creators, the ancestors, and the source of all creation for the gift of opportunities and experiences I’ll treasure for my lifetime. Much of it is possible thanks to my HBCU encounters. On the day I graduated from Oberlin I wore a cap and gown. Cap and gown was optional at Oberlin. Students chose not to wear them in protest of the 1970 Kent State student shootings by the National Guard. A similar incident would happen in 1972 at Southern, a HBCU in Louisiana. Their story is revealed in Tell Them We Are Rising.
I draped a long strip of woven kente (a gift from my sister) around my shoulders. I believe I was the first non-Ghanaian at Oberlin to add kente to the graduation robe. That choice was inspired by Jeff Donaldson, an art professor at Howard and a member of the Africobra artist collective in Chicago during the Black Arts Movement. On graduation day at HU Donaldson walked with the professors in his grand robe and regalia of beautiful hand-woven kente. You couldn’t miss him. I never forgot it.
I was ready to go. My first trip to Argentina and to the Latin American continent. My purpose was to do research for a documentary project that was never finished (read more in my article published in The Root). It was just before the start of the Iraq war in 2003. I was already on pins and needles. Before taking off I had a phone conversation with filmmaker St. Claire Bourne who was an informal and jovial mentor to the project at that time. “You’re brave,” he said.
Bourne’s words gave me another anxious pause. I was already concerned about being an American citizen abroad at this time. Added to that, we were both wary of the reception a woman of color would get in a country that aside from tango (which I was learning at the time), was also the land of the “disappeared” and the Dirty War. A harbinger for Nazi war criminals and their more recent offspring. The “Europe of South America.” A country with no Black people. Dr. Sheila S. Walker, who edited a collection of essays on Afro-Latino culture, debunked that last item when she gave me contact information for an Afro-Argentine cultural group. There would be at least 100 or so members still around I thought.
What was left of the African presence in Argentina? Would I recognize it? It was a twist of fate that gave me the clue. At the end of our first full day in Buenos Aires my guide and interpreter, filmmaker Ana Zanotti, took a bus back to our hostel. I got off the bus sooner than we planned leaving Ana to ring frantically to stop the bus and find me. I stayed and waited for her and we decided to walk instead. En route we heard drumming and found ourselves on a back street where young drummers and dancers – more than likely the descendants of European immigrations — were performing. It was the end of vacation and the new school year was starting the next day. The rhythm of the drums and dancers were familiar. African. Some Caribbean. Joyful. I knew I was safe.
TANGO NEGRO, a documentary by Angolan Don Pedro brought back memories of my serendipitous moments during my visit to Argentina. TANGO NEGRO reveals tango’s “African-ness” the roots of the music and the dance that has become the heart of traditional Argentine culture.
For much of the film, we follow composer and musician Juan Carlos Caceres a master performer, musicologist, and enthusiastic citizen of the world who has spent his career embracing the African roots of tango for years. Caceres was born in Buenos Aires and has been living in Paris, France since 1968. Through a combination of interviews with Caceres, musicians, musicologists, journalists, scholars with performances in the concert hall and on the streets of Argentina and Uruguay TANGO NEGRO traces the dance’s early cultural significance as a depiction of the social life of captured African slaves.
The film can be seen on screen at the DC African Diaspora International Film Festival (ADIFF) which opens in Washington, DC on Friday, August 22 at the Goethe-Institut. The festival is now in its 8th year and this year’s screening leans Afro-Latino with films (documentary and narrative) and subjects from Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil. TANGO NEGRO is also screening in New York presented by ADIFF.
TANGO NEGRO isn’t a concert film, though afterwards, you may want to find a tango compilation and listen to it more intently than before to identify the rhythms that go back to Sub-Saharan Africa. The film will appeal to anyone looking for the African presence in what was assumed an unlikely place. It definitely will appeal to the musicologist and anthropologist mindset in arts and culture. Fortunately TANGO NEGRO takes a break from the talk to go back to the music and dance, just to prove the point.
Speaking of unlikely places, at the time I was in Argentina, in addition to Buenos Aires I visited two cities mentioned in the film: Rosario near the river; and Cordoba near the mountains. Both cities were significant hubs for the trans-Atlantic slave trade bringing Africans into the South American continent. Our guide was historian and scholar Maria del Carmen Ferrer. Some would know her as “Chichina” who was the girl friend of the young Ernesto Guevara (aka “Che”) before he took off on his motorcycle journey that he documented as The Motorcycle Diaries.
Dr. Ferrer took us inside the great Nuestra Señora de la Asunción cathedral, a central part of the Jesuit stronghold and college town (to this day). The cathedral had three chapels: on the right was the chapel for Europeans or whites, the large center chapel was for Indians; and the small chapel to the left was for Africans. Later I learned Ernesto Guevara’s sister was doing research on African influences in Argentina’s architecture. African-ness was becoming big among scholars in Argentina.
TANGO NEGRO provides evidence that the subject hasn’t died. Though carnival was banned and cultural expressions of Africa-ness were more or less illegal and diluted with the immigration of mass numbers of Europeans to Argentina, tango still carried the DNA.
So what were the drums really saying that night? TANGO NEGRO may be a sign that it’s time to see Argentina again with a different purpose.
TANGO NEGRO, a film by Don Pedro (France) 2013, 93 min.
DC African Diaspora International Film Festival
Festival starts Friday, August 22 in Washington, DC
nyadiff.org/adiff-dc-2014
GOETHE-INSTITUT- 812 Seventh Street, NW, Washington D.C., 20001
“Belle” is a beautiful film to watch. I was thrilled that director Amma Asante made a guest appearance at the movie theater for a Q&A following a showing of “Belle” on Mother’s Day. Since my mother had been asking me for months when the film was coming to theaters, I couldn’t think of a better gift. Ms. Asante offered up some information: she is a huge fan of Jane Austen, she carries duel identities as a Brit and a woman of color (of Ghanaian parentage); she loves period drama; and “Belle” was made for $10 million. I would’ve guessed no less than $25 (on a shoe string).
“Belle” is a testament to the many stories yet to be told through the ages, in the English language, featuring women of color. Compared to American production budgets, there had to be a substantial amount of commitment to this story from actors including Miranda Richardson, Penelope Wilton, Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson, among others. A film stacked with a cast like this confirms that “Belle” is an important film.
What we now know is the “Belle” story begins long before there was any treatment or script for a film. Dido Elizabeth Belle was born in 1763, the daughter of Maria Belle, an African slave and a white British naval officer, Sir John Lindsay. Lindsay sent his four-year-old daughter Dido to England to be raised by his uncle William Murray, Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice who would preside over two of the most important cases in the history of the abolition of slavery in Britain: the Somersett case of 1772 and the Zong case of 1782. This article in The Guardian UK distinguishes the movie story from the real life story – and still gives a thumbs up for the film. My assumption is Dido is a trigger for a story that tells us money can’t buy everything especially when its a matter of race and gender.
Misan Sagay saw the “Portrait of Lady Elizabeth Murray, circa 1778” as it was labeled while a student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland in the 1990s. Sagay (Anglo Nigerian) was intrigued by the painting especially because of the young biracial nameless woman on the left of Lady Elizabeth. Fast forward to 2009 when Amma Asante receives a script and a postcard of the painting from Sagay. Asante is instantly drawn to the image.
The journey to “Belle” reminds me of an assignment I had in 4th grade. Our teacher, Miss Cole, took us to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. We visited the paintings from the Renaissance to Impressionism. Our assignment was to write a story about a painting – not the true story, but the story the painting inspired. I chose a painting by the 19th century impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir: “A Girl with the Watering Can.” But I also liked his “A Girl With a Hoop.” BTW Pierre-Auguste Renoir was the father of filmmaker Jean Renoir.
I can’t remember the story I wrote, but I remember seeing myself in these “girls.” They were about my age, maybe a bit younger, though not my hue. There were no “Belles” at the National Gallery of Art. And we didn’t know the girls’ names. (Note; “A Girl with the Watering Can” is Mademoiselle Leclere; “Girl with the Hoop is “Marie Goujon”)
Around the time of the 18th century, we really were — people of color were — an accessory in a painting. We were there rather like a pet to express the status of the main person in the painting, who was always white. And for anybody who’s lucky enough to see the painting, what you see is something very, very different. You see a biracial girl, a woman of color, who’s painted slightly higher in the painting, depicted slightly higher than her white counterpart. She’s staring directly out at the painter, you know, with a very direct, confident eye. … So this painting flipped tradition and everything that the 18th century told us about portraiture.
Amma Asante, NPR
Art is essential in telling Belle’s story. As much as it’s a story about our favorite “Austenisms” of wealth, class and love, it is also about race, slavery and abolitionism. Asante says she deliberately held back the release date to avoid being boxed in with “12 Years a Slave” (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2013). She also deliberately did not show the African slaves who were sent to their watery deaths for the insurance – their story being a moment of awareness for the main character and conflict between her uncle and the man she loves. Asante assures us, the image of human slaves on screen would’ve shifted the film away from its title character and Asante’s vision. A picture speaks a thousand words.
I surrounded Belle with the funny, witty, wise women I love and write. Yet we never make light of Belle’s social isolation.
Misan Sagay, Huffington Post
Like my 4th grade assignment, screenwriter Misan Sagay saw a painting by Johann Zoffany of Dido Elizabeth Belle and her cousin Elizabeth Murray. She saw a story. Asante saw it too. Unlike my Renoirs, Zoffany’s painting is intended to be a portrait, a record, of two lives and two girls who were special to the person who commissioned the work. Had I seen this portrait in the National Gallery of Art and based on the stories I was told about black/white relations of the time, I would’ve assumed, as Asante pointed out in her post-film chat, “the black girl is the white girl’s servant.” I didn’t want to write that story. Actually, there are stories in my own family’s narrative that flip the black/white/biracial/multiracial tradition and everything we were taught in our school history classes.
Belle is portrayed by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, a relatively newcomer to the scene and I can assume to period drama as well. (Mbatha-Raw does appear in the 2008 Romantic comedy mini-series “Lost in Austen” about a present-day Jane Austen fan that swaps places with Elizabeth Bennett.) How many opportunities are available to an actor to portray a free aristocratic biracial woman in the 18th century, and the title role at that? This would pose a challenge for both Mbatha-Raw and Asante to make her and the audience believe when there is only one reference of that status and story – the portrait that inspired the filmmaker. And Dido is not Jane or Elizabeth Bennett, Elinor or Marianne Dashwood in hue or status. Even with her fortune, Dido can’t claim the social status of Mr. Darcy’s sister Georgiana or his intended sickly cousin Anne De Bourgh. Dido is under a different kind of scrutiny. She can’t be seen and heard at table by the company her family keeps. Her very appearance is unappetizing to society. But the money helps. And her uncle and aunts maneuver these social obstacles to the best of their abilities, sensibilities, and intentions – though not always with success.
In the final analysis society makes Dido fully aware that she is “not one of us.” She isn’t even “one of her own.” But she finds her way home to her mother in a very tender scene where a free black servant combs her hair in the way hair of her texture should be combed. This for me, this intimate scene was one of the most definitive moments of Dido’s story.
Last year I made a special trip to Baltimore to see an exhibit “Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe” at the Walters Art Museum.
I was
anxious to see this exhibit. For all the period drama I loved and watched over many years that included adaptions of the novels of Alexandre Dumas — whose grandmother, Marie Cesette Dumas was a slave in Haiti and of African decent — it was important to see where did someone who kinda or looked like me and persons in my family fit into the dominant Eurocentric narrative and genre. And not just the slavery and servitude narrative. Misan Sagay and Alma Asante must’ve had similar yearnings; as did Dido. And I’m happy to say yes, there is “Belle” and there are more paintings to see, and stories to tell.
I want to take this opportunity to talk about beauty, black beauty, dark beauty. I received a letter from a girl and I’d like to share just a small part of it with you: “Dear Lupita,” it reads, “I think you’re really lucky to be this black but yet this successful in Hollywood overnight. I was just about to buy Dencia’s Whitenicious cream to lighten my skin when you appeared on the world map and saved me.”
My heart bled a little when I read those words, I could never have guessed that my first job out of school would be so powerful in and of itself and that it would propel me to be such an image of hope in the same way that the women of The Color Purple were to me.
Lupita Nyong’o
February 27, 2014
Essence Magazine’s
7th Annual Black Women in Hollywood Luncheon
Not a day, hour, minute or second goes by on my social media without a Lupita Nyong’o posting. Tonight all eyes will be looking out for her on the red carpet at the Academy Awards aka Oscars as she’s up for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Patsy in “12 Years a Slave.” If I invert two of the letters of the title (Slave to “Salve”), it brings me to the theme of this post. Lupita’s beauty, brains, culture, talent, and impeccable style have been a salve to so many Black women. For some reason I thought the trials of dark-skinned Black women would have come to an end in the 21st century, but I have been sadly wrong. As they say, these things adapt to their times. “Colorism” has been tossed around. Zora Neale Hurston’s generation would call it “color struck.” The road to Lupita is long and peppered with potholes.
We see Lupitas every day. We really do. But her beauty is only affirmed on this scale only a few moments in a lifetime. Where as white and light beauty is our social and aesthetic default and standard. But somehow it’s decided by something when a generation will have a “Lupita moment.” For the highly visual digital age, she has been the gift that keeps on giving especially to young women of a certain hue and (let me not forget that other standard) hair texture.
Lupita has been a feast for women who have been living in their social famine. I thought I’d pull together what I call a few “Lupita” moments starting with the days when “Black Is Beautiful” was supposed to be the “salve” of the decade. This time I would like to measure the impact of the “Lupita factor.” This time will it stick? Feel free to post your “Lupitas” to this blog post.
1968
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000 – 2009
