Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 421

Dencia’s One-Sided Beef with Lupita Nyong’o

Right before the Academy Awards, Camaroonian-born pop star and skin-lightener shill Dencia began tweeting a series of attack-mode responses to a supposed slight by Lupita Nyong’o.

What happened? Before the Oscars, Nyong’o was awarded the Best Breakthrough Performance Award at Essence magazine’s annual Black Women in Hollywood luncheon. In her acceptance speech, she talks about how she’s dealing with the cultural impact of her “first job out of school”. She also speaks about becoming aware of the weight of the responsibility that she carries as a public figure: a young girl had recently written Nyong’o a note saying that she had hated her own appearance and skin, and that she had even contemplated using Whitenicious by Dencia (a skin-bleaching line that masquerades as a “spot” remover–we wrote about it here) until she saw media images of Lupita doing post-film publicity rounds. Nyong’o's powerful ability to speak frankly, yet gently, about one of the most insidious problems black public figures have to deal with–in a room in which there was probably more than one person who had used such products–resonated enough to upset Dencia, one of the most visible spokespersons in the skin-bleaching industry.

Dencia’s response to Nyong’o’s widely publicized speech? A series of tweets worthy of #RatchetpieceTheatre:

A girl wrote u a letter?lol thru which email when I just checked ur twitter n can’t see an email address!!Ir pr tried n thanks 4 the Pub. Dencia (@IamDencia) February 28, 2014

Again I don’t watch movies unless it’s Comedy or Romance I won’t even watch anything w title “Slaves” I studied enuff in my history class. Dencia (@IamDencia) February 28, 2014

And she forgot to tell the non existent black girl that ur skin color doesn’t take u to hollywood hard work does,then again her color did. Dencia (@IamDencia) February 28, 2014

Dencia also claimed that she doesn’t even know who Nyong’o is. That’s hard to believe, considering the level of venom that these tweets contain—clearly intended to protect her brand. Next to Nyong’o's grace, Dencia’s responses on Twitter sound trashy and desperate. So why the shrill response? Obviously, Dencia’s trying to protect her brand. But on another level, I think it’s because she’s worried about maintaining the levels of insecurity, self-rejection, and inadequacy that make people with dark skin bleach their skins. Without that uncritical global cohort—driven to a level of self-critique so extreme that damage becomes an acceptable solution—how can Dencia, herself bleached to a skin shade close to albinism, stand on her feet and attempt to pass off her wounded person as a powerful, impossible beauty?

Yes, movie stars and pop stars do affect how young people imagine themselves; and this time, a movie star is actually having a positive impact on young women’s self-image. But it isn’t Nyong’o’s performance in Twelve Years a Slave that’s doing this remarkable labour; there’s no glamour attached to her film’s character—so despite the character’s strength, young women are not going to want to model their current selves on that historical character. This is about Lupita herself—or her public persona—on the red carpets. Nyong’o's beauty and poise resonated with millions  across the world—some of who are truly inspired by her, and others who inevitably exoticise and fetishise her (in a hilarious recent tweet, Frances Bodomo (@tobogganeer) noted: “‪#DearWhitePeople, don’t think I haven’t noticed the rise in your hitting on me since Lupita came along smh”).

Once she was done filming Twelve Years a Slave, and awards season came along, Nyong’o didn’t get on the red carpet scene with a weave. Most other actors in films that are deemed “gritty” do; they get dolled up, and try to look as far from their persona and look on film as possible. Remember Hillary Swank after Boys Don’t Cry, and the ball gown she wore to accept her award? Again and again, Nyong’o’s look emphasises the kind of blackness that Americans usually attempt to mask: if a woman is darker-skinned, she definitely gets the weave or the ultra-straightened hair if she is in a public position (think Michelle Obama); if she were lighter-skinned, she might “get away” with an Afro, unless she were an artist or an academic in the Humanities. But Nyong’o didn’t resort to the use of products that erase or somehow mediate her blackness for audiences accustomed to black women who do.

Of course, she got dolled up in great frocks. Nyong’o looks grand in every outfit I’ve seen her in—from the bubbly, prosecco-inspired baby-blue Miuccia Prada dress she wore to the Oscars to the glittery metallic playsuit she wore to the Independent Spirit Awards. Whoever’s her stylist is a genius, too, coupled with Nyong’o's own instincts: she wears very little jewellery, and plays with an innovative range of makeup that experiments between the “natural” and the runway/theatrical (an example of which you can see in her own YouTube video teaching people how to say her name)—rather than stick to the safety of a slash of scarlet or brownish lipstick that most makeup artists slap on black women. Her clothes for award-show runways have also been in daring colours and cuts—in fact, serious fashion writers were a little disappointed by the “safe” Prada dress and headband at the Oscars.

Part of why we adore and respect Nyong’o is because we can see that she has the grace to hold up the responsibility that is on her shoulders—one far greater than that of the average actor. If someone like Nyong’o speaks about having faced the enormity of the pressures that dark skinned people—women in particular—must face, without succumbing to skin bleaching, nose-surgery, or whatever else, it tells a slew of young women that they needn’t resort to the “solutions” offered by the beauty industry. Nyong’o's words alone may not threaten the bottom line of powerful cosmetic companies, and the magazines (like Essence) that advertise the products; they’ll keep making boatloads of cash based on the insecurities they help produce. But she does create problems for the prominent spokespersons for these damaging products: by her very physical presence, Nyong’o destabilises their positions as desirable objects. In her acceptance speech for the Essence magazine award, she remembers her own discomfort about her skin tone as she grew up in countries where her look wasn’t the accepted norm; she is fully cognisant of the significance of her difference in the public sphere created by the west, and what it means to others who feel similarly out of place. That may be partly because Nyong’o comes from a family of prominent Kenyans who are self-aware of their position as artists, doctors, lawyers and global public figures; plus, she already built her credentials as an artist and an intellectual: before her Twelve Years a Slave fame, she wrote, directed and produced a documentary, In My Genes (2009, trailer here), following the life experiences of Kenyans with albinism. She is fully aware of the politics of skin.

But really, people. No need to fetishise Nyong’o as a “different,” or a Very Special Noble Savage. Her glowing skin, shiny hair, the incredible symmetry of her features, and the flower-petal shape of her lips forming her happy smile speak volumes about her physical and psychological health, and constitutes—at the risk of universalising in the same way that people elevated white beauty via the likes of Catherine Deneuve and Cate Blanchette—a “classical” sort of beauty to which most who live in the west have never had access before, and from which those in Africa have been alienated. But Nyong’o must do the labour of translating that classic for the west (and for other Africans)—much like an artist, a writer, or a cultural critic might for those who refuse to acknowledge the conventions of their art as something of value. Like any labour, it must deplete her of energy. I hope that she is able to find ways to replenish herself, and maintain her dignity.

Cape Town’s Pretend Partnership

There have been only a few instances in my life where my reflex response to a situation has been to throw up. One of these occasions was last Monday night − and the impulse lasted almost three hours.

The Cape Town Partnership (CTP) presented a “debate” on including Cape Town’s citizens in World Design Capital projects. According to the World Design Capital website, the World Design Capital is an international biennial city promotion project that is held in a different city every two years. It highlights the accomplishment of cities that have used design as a tool to improve social, structural and economic life. This year it is in Cape Town. The debate was held at The Assembly, which on most other nights is a club.

According to the Partnership’s website, it “was formed in 1999 as a non-profit (section 21) organization to mobilize and align public, private and social resources towards the urban regeneration of Cape Town’s central city”.

I was excited. Here was an opportunity to engage constructively on this controversial topic with people at the top level of the CTP. The invitation, which I received via email, said the debate would be around including “people from all walks of life” in World Design Capital projects.

I wasn’t sure what all walks of life meant, but I had a feeling the bouncer outside was there to limit those walks. I walked upstairs, and was immediately struck by confusion.

First up, with the exception of about 15 of the 250 people there, everyone was white. Where was the rest of Cape Town? Granted, the majority of them live out of the city on the Cape Flats and in the Northern Suburbs, but with words like “ordinary people” and “active citizens” in the invitation, surely they would have been informed about the event through flyers and posters, and public transport would have been organized for them?

I was lucky enough to meet the project manager, Caroline Jordan, at the bar, where I was redeeming my soft drink voucher (why is Appletiser never included as a soft drink?) and could ask her the questions directly.

How was the event marketed?

Social media – Twitter, email, Facebook.

What about the people in Delft who don’t have Twitter and email?

My maid has email.

Wow.

What would you suggest as a solution?

Flyers, posters in taxis, information sharing through the many participants you apparently engage with …

Okay, we’ll think of that next time.

Why was there no public transport?

We are near two transport hubs, the MyCiTi Bus and the train station.

Would you, as a woman, go back to Khayelitsha on an empty train at 9pm? I didn’t think so.

That was the start of an unrelenting tirade of patronizing, racist and exclusive sermons that were to follow.

The panel for the “debate” was made up of mostly foreign-educated Africans, the ones whose origins white people question because they are so “well spoken”. At disgusting race-quota bars and clubs, they are the ‘right type’ of black people.

The discussion, which a friend described as a group wank, went on for two hours, and for much of it I had to hold back from rolling on the floor with laughter.

The event began with an introductory address by the Partnership’s chief executive, Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana, where she presented a video montage of “average” Capetonians looking very happy and grateful to the city for all it has provided. There were jolly beggars, most of whom have been kicked out of the city by police. The montage also showed a group of coloured teenagers in school uniform, but they were not here, and neither were their parents. The majority of the coloured population lives on the Cape Flats, where they were forcefully relocated under the Group Areas Act and in many areas on the flats, residents face the risk of death by a stray bullet every day. But that wasn’t included in the montage. The teenagers were used to sexify the diversity and harmony of races and classes in the city. They were marketing ploys; they create color, but few people see the true colors of their situation when they head home and out of the city bowl.

It was difficult to listen to the inspiring rhetoric of inclusivity and accessibility–which was just one drum short of a rousing version of Kumbaya–when a look around the room showed the contrary. This event was possibly one of the only chances the public would get to engage with the top level of the Cape Town Partnership.

Makalima-Ngewana is a town planner and was one of the key role players in developing Cape Town’s Central City Development Strategy (CCDS) in 2008. She is clearly an intelligent woman and appears to have good intentions. But she created a lack of clarity about her links to the ’hood. She reminded the audience that she grew up in a township, that she is one of the people. Yet when she was questioned on stage about why there was no marketing on the Cape Flats, she suggested that the relevant audience member stay behind to give her some contacts. It seems she’s not very engaged with the people who live in the areas with which she has a connection.

South Africans need to be more engaged in active citizenship, said Gavin Mageni, who heads up the South African Design Institute at the South African Bureau of Standards. Mageni comes from Marikana. Whatever came out of his mouth after he revealed this was irrelevant, because he is from Marikana. Are you from Marikana? No? Then shut the fuck up.

A challenge came from a German academic that in a country referred to as the “protest capital of the world”, and where there were 540 protests in 50 days last year in Gauteng alone, the statement about the lack of active citizenship in Cape Town was naturally problematic. Strikes are a form of active citizenship, probably in its purest form, as they manifest the basic democratic rights of assembly, freedom of expression and political engagement.

“No!” said Mageni. Violence (aka strikes) is not the answer! Fist shaking. Exclamation marks.

It seems that in Mageni’s opinion, entrepreneurship is the one and only key to active citizenship. Striking miners and by extension unions are thus the absolute antithesis to his value system, which is built on self-reliance and DIY citizenship. Basically, if you have to strike for your right to serve a master other than yourself, you have failed the test in his opinion. Also, as an entrepreneur, the market is ostensibly your best friend, which is why, for him, unsettling the economy through strikes is “selfish” and “anti-social”, because the market will provide. At least as it does for him.

Then there was the film director Sunu Gonera. The man has some good credentials − he was awarded a scholarship to a private school in Zimbabwe and now makes documentaries. He went on a long stroking session about how he has made it in Los Angeles. “One day I was talking to Clint Eastwood” … “I go up and down between LA” … “I have dinner with some of the best film directors in the world.”

He tells his story to “boys at Bishops” and “boys in Khayelitsha”, because he wants to show them that if he could make it, they can make it. That’s motivating in theory, although it dismisses the fact that most of the children in Khayelitsha will not receive scholarships, because their classroom windows are broken and their teachers don’t get paid much and many of them risk being stabbed for R10 on their way to school. Most of those children will not have the opportunity to excel in the classroom.

The theme for much of the conversation was that in order to be an active citizen, all South Africans need to be self-made entrepreneurs and need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps.

But if they aren’t able to do that, they shouldn’t worry, because a major benefit of the Partnership’s activities is job creation. But what kind of jobs are we talking about? Promises of jobs are irrelevant when it’s addressed on its own; having a job does not automatically get you out of poverty. What will alleviate poverty, for example, is when structural issues like the cost of housing and healthcare are addressed. But the upper-middle-class panel, with their clearly skewed politics, didn’t care to tackle the issue on such a deep level.

Anyway, Mageni, whose profile picture on the big screen looked like it came from an underwear ad with clothing superimposed on his body, looked dapper in his red tie and suit.

In order to get to where he is, “young people need to stop having this sense of entitlement”.

They should to want to live and be happy in their own area, create a community they want to be a part of, and not necessarily want to go somewhere else (read: into the white city centre).

So, they should be super chilled out in council flats in Heideveld and Bishop Lavis, neighborhoods without a blade of grass in sight, where their sons are forced into joining gangs and their daughters run the risk of rape every time they walk out the door. They are there because of history, and they will likely remain there for generations to come. But they have to fix the situation themselves, because they must not have a sense of entitlement. Entitlement? Mageni spits in the face of entitlement!

This kind of conversation about entitlement is dangerous because it ignores the structural dynamics against which poor people had to struggle daily while it propped up the middle class. But in a situation where the vast majority of the audience comprised these people, who were and remain supported by the poor, there was no challenge to this.

After the discussion was over and the panel came off the stage to be photographed and interviewed on video, I cornered Mageni. But from the get-go he was not interested in my questions and challenges on strikes, because he is From Marikana and I Am Not From Marikana. The 2012 Marikana strike, it seems, is the only example of a strike in South Africa’s history, and therefore means, as far as he is concerned, that all strikes are violent, regardless of who opens fire first. It is not because of the lack of access to and discussion with top-level management and boards of mining companies. No, it is purely the fault of trade unions.

Every challenge thrown his way was discredited because he lost 10 family members in Marikana and I have never been to Marikana. Actually, I said, I’ve spent years working in Marikana.

The non-argument ended with him shoving his finger in my face, shouting with unashamed vitriol “Who are you? Who are you? Who are you to tell me about strikes? Who are you?”

Then there was an awkward moment where we both tried to descend the narrow stairs at the same time. You first, my king, I offered. All I heard as he walked away was him mumbling about who I might have been.

I left the Assembly with a broken heart. The opportunity to engage with the city’s people was not only wasted, but the charade was offensive. It was clear that it was only the people who could afford to get down town at night on a weeknight were those who were entitled to steak or veggie wraps in recyclable brown paper and a voucher for a soft drink.

I doubt the video of this event is going to go up on the CTP’s website any time soon. Maybe next time it’ll be honest and call a debate a “spiel”, and instead of “all walks of life” claim that it caters to the upper-middle class from Tamboerskloof and Newlands.

The CTP should probably just be honest about its agenda − continuing to design a more tourist-friendly European City, while keeping the unwanted and unsightly on the other side of the mountain. Or it could at least pay the poor and marginalized for their casting as extras in diversity ads. And its execs should definitely, definitely, make sure all their maids have email.

* This post first appeared on The Con. Images: Hasan Wazan.

“The passport that does not pass ports”

Not long ago I heard the philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne responding to a talk given by the literary critic Emily Apter titled “Translation, Checkpoints, Sovereign Borders.” Apter argues against the bourgeois fiction that globalization has turned everybody into ultra-mobile cosmopolitans, a myth that’s proved especially seductive to those involved in the project of writing and institutionalizing so-called “world literature,” with its array of glamorous airport-hopping protagonists. Instead, Apter points to the phenomenon of ever-intensified “checkpointization” (the word “checkpoint” has been creolized into most languages) and the way in which so-called “illegal” residents are harassed and deported even as “multi-culturalism” is lauded. A scholar of translation, Apter asks that critical thinking be refocused on “the untranslatable” — whatever cannot cross borders, whether metaphorical or concrete.

Diagne responded by recounting his own experiences of many decades traveling under his Senegalese passport. His passport, he said, is “a passport that does not pass ports” — it is a devalued document whose bearer is generally to be considered suspect. Diagne went on to outline his thoughts on the tragedy at Lampedusa in November — a crude summary below.

The story of African migrants entering the Eurozone by sea is basically indecipherable as it is told in global and national media reports, because they are described only as helpless victims, without taking into account the sophisticated understanding they have developed for negotiating international legal frameworks and European state bureaucracies. When you know long before you get there that the Europeans will want to deport you on arrival, it is imperative you do all you can to flummox them.

Baffled reporters describe “abandoned” children, apparently sent away to make the crossing into Europe alone. It doesn’t occur to them that the children have likely been carefully prepared for the encounter with European officials so that, if it comes to it, they know ahead of time that they must at all costs avoid giving any indication of their relationship to any adult on board (a father, an uncle, an elder sibling). An “abandoned” child is un-deportable.

Why risk the perilous crossing? Because if you come by sea there is no single national border across which to expel you.

Why travel without papers? Because that passport won’t pass ports; it will only answer the question of where you should be deported to. Better to come without so much as a scrap of writing on you.

Why stand in silence when questioned by officials? Because the language in which you reply will give them a clue where you may have come from. If you speak a word of French you might be flown “back” to Niger even though you’re from Mali. Say nothing at all and there is nothing to translate.

Africa has always been more Queer than generally acknowledged

On 13 January 2014, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan signed a bill against gay relationships, outlawing gay marriage, public displays of same-sex relationships, and membership in gay groups. A few days later, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni refused to sign an anti-homosexuality bill that has been in the works since 2009 on the grounds that there are other ways of dealing with ‘an abnormal person.’ Pondering the issue earnestly, he wrote: ‘Do we kill him/her? Do we imprison him/her?’ The ‘soft,’ revised ‘Kill the Gays Bill,’ as it is commonly nicknamed in the media, which has transformed the death penalty into incarceration, has caused substantial aid cuts, especially from European countries like Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands. One expects other Western countries to follow suit. Museveni is not alone in figuring out how to hang dissenters. In the wake of the trial for ‘sodomy’ of the first president of Zimbabwe, Canaan Banana, his successor Robert Mugabe spoke of homosexuals in his 2002 campaign speech as ‘mad person[s]’ who will be sent to jail: ‘we don’t want to import it [homosexuality] to our country [Zimbabwe], we have our own culture, our own people’ (quoted in the Herald, Harare, Zimbabwe, 6 March 2002). 86 United Nations member countries have laws that criminalize same-sex relations; some 37 African countries, along with Middle Eastern countries, constitute a majority of those so that it is dangerous and even life-threatening to be out in Africa.

Homosexuality, itself a slippery contender finding its roots in nineteenth-century medical literature, is still thought to be quintessentially ‘un-African’—recall Winnie Mandela’s supporters displaying for the cameras in 1991 outside the Johannesburg Supreme Court placards declaring that ‘HOMOSEX IS NOT IN BLACK CULTURE.’ However, South African Bishops were the only ones among African Anglican bishops not to defeat ‘resolutions’ (section I.10 on ‘Human Sexuality’) to improve the Church of England’s attitudes toward homosexuality at the 1998 decennial Lambeth Conference. It remains that the Church, especially in its Evangelical garb, is always ready to identify homosexuality as an abomination to God. American film-maker Roger Ross Williams, director of God Loves Uganda (2013), speculates that “Americans are behind” this Evangelical frenzy against such abominations as same-sex sex in a country that happens to be one of the top 3 in the world to assiduously watch gay internet porn.

Homosexuality is also often depicted as an import from the deviant West. But the African Continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged; it has always rainbow-hazed into such a range of sexualities that it is a matter of legitimate political and critical concern that homosexualities and African societies are read as antinomous. Also, these homosexualities fall outside of the purview of the law and even of language. The expression—‘to call a spade a spade’— entails speaking plainly without avoiding embarrassing issues. But what if the spade, while remaining a tool, is called differently in another language? While same-sex practices are rampant throughout the African Continent, claiming homosexual identity is forbidden and even condemned. The question of what constitutes ‘sex’ in Africa and, in particular, same-sex sex is still a blindspot. As the work of Marc Epprecht and Neville Hoad has revealed, not all African men or women who have same-sex sex think of themselves as gay or homosexual or bisexual or queer. They are seldom members of activist LGBT organizations and are not computed in the sexual health literature on HIV/AIDS. Also, in Africa, Latin America and other parts of the world, there is a tension between homosexual identity and homosexual practice. ‘Homosexual’ would be more likely reserved to the passive partner whereas the active partner retains heterosexual identity. In the Arab Muslim world, some thinkers like George Massad in Desiring Arabs (2007) have pitted the ‘Gay International’ against ‘the Arab World.’ What is at play here is a politicization of African indigenous or Islamic same-sex desire as a form of resistance to Westoxification. Yet, the West is not always perceived as the white peril that it is portrayed to be, as was obvious in the Arab Spring movements, during which the West and the ‘Orient’ did and continue to share the same vocabularies that spread like bushfire in the harmattan through the media, the internet, and social network sites.

However, such terms as ‘gay/lesbian,’ which reek of Western liberation struggles, and, more recently, ‘queer’, a movement generated in academe, certainly point to the globalization of sexual identities. These words were originally imported to the African continent via English, French and other Western languages and often clash with indigenous designations and their corollary practices. In South Africa, a ‘masculine man’ playing the dominant role in a relationship with another man is called ‘a straight man’ and is not perceived as ‘gay’ because he acts as penetrator during sexual intercourse. Conversely, the use of ‘gay’ is susceptible to a category crisis as some South African women self-identify as gay women rather than lesbians. Whereas the term ‘male lesbians’ is an attempt at translating the Hausa (e.g. Northern Nigerian) for ‘passive’ male partners or ‘yan kifi, who have sex with each other, ‘lesbian men’ in Namibia designate women who play the dominant ‘butch’ role in a same-sex relationship. Even though the terms ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ are not known in (Namibian) Damara culture, the various sexual practices and dress codes find some resonance in the admittedly Western butch-femme dyad. Conversely, in Kampala, Uganda, where sections 140 and 141 of the Penal Code condemn same-sex relations, some Ugandan women identify themselves as ‘tommy-boys,’ that is, biological women who see themselves as men, who need to be the dominant partner during sex, rather than ‘lesbians,’ and often pass as men.

From Senegal to Southern Africa, many African gay men invoke the animistic belief in ancestor spirit possession. A Shona gay man in Zimbabwe claims he is inhabited by his ‘auntie’ whereas in Senegal, the gor-djigeen (male-female in Wolof) is haunted by the primordial severance between male and female in the Creation of the Universe. In her autobiography, Black Bull, Ancestors and Me (2008), written in the safety provided by the new South African Constitution in 1996, with its ground-breaking sexual orientation (9:3) clause in its bill of rights, Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde relays her gradual empowerment as a ‘lesbian sangoma’ or traditional healer in Johannesburg. Yet, more than the famed sexual orientation clause, the ‘homosexual’ relationship between her as a sangoma ‘male woman’ dominated by her ‘male ancestor’ and her ‘ancestral wife’ is sanctioned by Zulu spiritual possession cults, which often privilege female men over male women. Upon closer scrutiny, it appears that lesbian sangomas and their ancestral wives are not united in a common identity based on shared sexual orientation but rather are distinguished from each other according to gender difference, complicated by spirituality. Ancestral wives can only function in their relation to masculine females or ‘male women,’ the way ‘dees’ (from the last syllable of the English word ‘lady’) function solely in their relation to ‘toms’ (from ‘tomboys’) in Thailand. Thai toms are capable (khlong-tua) biological women who protect and perform sexually for dees or female partners, without toms and dees being thought of as ‘lesbians.’ Even though Nkunzi Nkabinde, unlike the Thai tom, translates her gender identity into ‘tomboy’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘butch’, the Zulu label tagged onto her ‘ancestral wife,’ like the Thai term ‘dee,’ falls off the grid of a global, translational and transnational vocabulary.

That vocabulary is also expanding in Western societies where the LGBT spectrum has now become LGBTQI2. 2 refers to ‘Two-Spirit,’ the translation of niizh manitoog, the Northern Algonquin term in vogue since 1990 in Canada, which has been added alongside the Q of Queer and the ‘I’ of Intersex. Both in and outside of Africa, there is an argumentative frenzy around the instability of gender and sex and non-conforming performances of gender. This may lead to the worldwide need to re-orient sexual orientation clauses to embrace and protect a gender diversity that dare not speak its name. After all, a spade is a shovel but it is also one of the four suits in conventional playing cards.

Photo courtesy of Collen Mfazwe, a South African photographer working for Inkanyiso, a platform with a focus on visual arts and media advocacy.

The Tragedy of Justin Fashanu, soccer’s first openly gay player

With the ongoing crisis of homophobia in Nigeria, and a succession of high-profile athletes coming out in the past year, it’s well worth remembering Justin Fashanu, the first professional footballer to come out — way back in 1990 — and his tragic suicide in 1997. Our very own Davy Lane has written a rendering of Fashanu’s story that’s well worth your time, an insight into the openly racist and homophobic atmosphere that passed for public life in Margaret Thatcher’s England. Here’s a couple of excerpts:

On the morning of May 3, 1998, Justin Fashanu was found dead. He had hung himself in a disused garage lock in Shoreditch, East London, about a mile away from where he had been born in Hackney, 37 years prior. He had spent the hour before his death at the Chariots Roman Spa, a local gay sauna. His last words, in a suicide note, were “I hope the Jesus I love welcomes me home.”

And so ended the life of the first openly gay professional soccer player.

When Michael Sam made his recent courageous announcement, there was a sense of him standing on the shoulders of giants, retired gay US sports stars like Billy Bean, Wade Davis, and Dave Kopay. Justin Fashanu had no such mentors. Sam’s coming out was (largely) met with sympathy in the media. His was a highly choreographed and meticulous outing with agents, publicists and America’s premier print publications and broadcasters all onside. As he told the sympathetic New York Times, “I just wanted to own my own truth.” When Justin Fashanu came out in 1990, in a bigoted and bruising England that was staggering through the end of a decade of rule by Margaret Thatcher, Fashanu had no such allies in public relations or the English media. When threatened with an outing, Justin accepted a tabloid newspaper’s meager payoff and gave them all the tawdry gossip they wanted to hear. The truth did not matter. Justin was the first canary in the coalmine, the first to come out of the closet in a toxic era. He was never going to own his own truth.

Justin Fashanu was born in inner-city London, the son of a Nigerian barrister and Guyanese nurse. An absconding father and a mother unable to make ends meet led to Justin and his younger brother, John, being sent to Barnardo’s, a charitable British institution that prepares children for fostering and adoption. Justin was six years old when empty nesters Alf and Betty Jackson of Attleborough, in the pastoral county of Norfolk, about 120 miles northeast of London, agreed to foster the Fashanu brothers.

Justin had been a promising teenage boxer, twice a British Amateur Junior Heavyweight finalist when aged 14 and 15. He could have been a contender, but for the persistence of a scout at local soccer club, Norwich City—a quintessential small town team nicknamed the Canaries–who persuaded him he could have a career in soccer. Justin was signed as an apprentice and spent his school holidays honing his skills with the pros.

…

Gay slurs at football matches were also common in [1980s Britain]. These days there is a Proud Canaries fan club of gay Norwich City supporters. But in Fashanu’s heyday, terms such as “faggot”, “fairy” and “tart” were de rigueur, though they were hurled into the miasma of foul language and other discriminatory discourse that typified English soccer crowds, and most spheres of public culture, at the time. It simply would not have occurred to most followers of the game that a soccer player could actually be gay, let alone be built a like heavyweight boxer.

It was into this primitive social flux that Justin Fashanu flexed his muscles for his first full season with Nottingham Forest. It was to prove an unmitigated disaster. Justin failed to live up to expectations, scoring on only three occasions in 32 appearances in his first and only full season for the former European champions. There are no spectacular goals on his limited highlight reel from that season, but instead a couple of outrageous miscues, with Justin looking chaotic, uncomfortable and seemingly incapable of a meaningful relationship with a football. Fifteen months after his marquee arrival, Justin was traded at a massive loss to cross-town rivals, Notts County, for a fraction of the famous fee Forest had paid Norwich City a year or so earlier.

Forest’s boss Brian Clough wrote in his 1994 autobiography that Fashanu’s ‘goal of the season’ against Liverpool back in 1979 had “conned him out a million pounds”.

Yet the sale of Fashanu for an absurd fraction of his original fee, despite his first season failings, made no financial sense. Was Fashanu being made a scapegoat, an example to the others of the ruthlessness of the sport? Possibly. But surely Nottingham Forest’s catastrophic season could not completely be blamed on the poor form of Justin Fashanu. There were ten other players in Clough’s regular first XI that finished 12th in the 1981-82 season. Yet only Fashanu was shipped out in the off-season fire sale.

Rumours of Fashanu frequenting gay bars in Nottingham rattled Clough. In his autobiography, Clough recounts confronting Fashanu about the whispers, “’Where do you go if you want a loaf of bread?’ I asked him. ‘ A baker’s, I suppose.’ Where do you go if you want a leg of lamb?’ ‘A butcher’s.’ ‘So why do you keep going to that bloody poof’s club?’” Fashanu’s private life was now a matter of in-house ridicule. He was facing the prospect of both barrels from his employers and the crowds: racism and homophobia.

Read the whole piece here.

From the Archives: Alain Resnais’s Film on “African Art” (Statues Also Die, 1953)

French film director Alain Resnais est mort. His career spanned six decades (born in 1922, his last film was premiered in Berlin earlier this year), and has been well documented. His body of work is enormous, but there’s one of his films that I want to highlight here–embedding it below. At a young age, in 1953, together with Chris Marker and Ghislain Cloquet, he made the short documentary film Les statues meurent aussi (“Statues also die”), narrated by actor Jean Négroni. The film was commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine in 1950. According to Resnais, the original intent was not to make an anticolonial film, but a film about African art and its re-presentation in Western contexts. But as he researched the film, “Renais wondered why African art was placed in Musée de l’homme (an ethnographic museum) while Assyrian, or Greek art, by contrast, was on show in the Louvre” (Emma Wilson, 2006).

In a recent and comprehensive piece, film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum introduces the work of Resnais in general and this 30 minute film in particular:

Here is how it begins, the words spoken over darkness: “When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.” And then, as if to prove his point, the film’s image lights up to show us the ruins of a few outdoor sculptures, speckled with sunlight and wizened by age and corrosion—strange botanical specimens.

What follows, over a striking montage of indoor specimens and some of their strolling museum spectators (first white ones, then a single black woman), is a kind of existential poetics of both art and history: “An object dies when the living glance trained upon it disappears. And when we disappear, our objects will be confined to the place where we send black things: to the museum.” Resnais’s Eisensteinian editing meanwhile peaks as an accelerating succession of graphic images reaches a gorgeous crescendo and epiphany in a cut to the head of an African swimmer rising from underwater to the surface of a river. [...]

This gradually turns into a remarkable duet between Marker’s literary fervor and a detailed as well as despairing political vision—a combination of speculative art history, precise journalism, and a grim meditation on the various places and functions Africa and its separate cultures have assumed within white civilization—and Resnais’s musically and rhythmically orchestrated illustration of and counterpoint to this extraordinary text. Both of these strains can be said to embody, empower, and enhance as well as accompany the other, but it would be pointless to try to synopsize either Marker’s multifaceted argument or Resnais’s elaborately composed and articulated assembly of images, much less attempt to describe how effectively they complement one another. It appears that this film took years to put together, but it moves with a fluency and directness that is never labored.

And what starts off as a fairly romantic and mute portrait of images of African objects (artefacts, idols, objects…we don’t get many geographical details, most of them are introduced as just that: l’art nègre, “black art”, which is a mimicking of the decontextualised exhibition of artefacts from Africa to this day, which become devoid of use, cultural significance or aesthetics, but merely, things), in the last third turns into a blistering attack on colonialism and white racism.

Let’s keep in mind this is 1953.

Not surprisingly, the film was banned in France for fifteen years. The first time the full version was publicly screened in France was in November 1968, as part of a programme of short films grouped under the label “Cinéma d’inquiétude” (“Cinema of disquiet”). And until its release on DVD in 2004 it was difficult to get hold of.

These days, you can watch it on YouTube, including English subtitles (turn on the captions). Looking back, this was a formidable film for its time:

Meet Bittereinder

I discovered the three-piece Afrikaans outfit Bittereinder through the internet and fell in love with them because of their live performance. Their music, a bass-heavy flurry of high-energy drops and subdued melodies, develops a different personality on stage, often in stark contrast to the studio recordings. Bleeps become filtered echoes, drum patterns change, or disappear completely. Bittereinder is Afrikaans for ‘bitter ender’. According to Wikipedia’s edited wisdom, “Bittereinders were a faction of Boer guerrilla fighters, resisting the forces of the British Empire in the later stages of the Second Boer War (1899-1902).”

Jaco Van Der Merwe, the group’s emcee, has spoken on multiple occasions of how he grew up at odds with his Afrikaner identity. He went to an English school. For a long time, he recorded exclusively in English as Ajax. For him and his bandmates – producer/vocalist Peach van Pletzen and designer/video artist Louis Minnaar – Bittereinder was a vehicle to reclaim their identity; to redefine, somewhat, what it means to them to be Afrikaner.

Their first album was released in 2010. Entitled ‘n Ware Verhaal (“A true story”), it stood apart from what noteworthy Afrikaans-rapping emcees were doing at that time, substituting Die Antwoord’s cultural appropriation with an honest exploration of their own identity, and eschewing Jack Parow‘s publicity-hungry antics for a bespoke, almost underground approach to their music-making. The album is a considered blend of Peach’s production wizardry (he also has a solo career as Yesterday’s Pupil), Louis’ striking visual identity (check out this project with his sister), and Jaco’s searing lyrics.

Jaco easily fits among the upper echelon of Afrikaans hip-hop royalty, a grand list of refined artists ranging from Jitsvinger with his glaring street poetics, to Jaak’s praiseworthy, at-times-comedic re-telling of local, national, and international stories using the most dense of Cape Flats ebonics.

He’s on a first-name basis with Toast Coetzer, the veteran journalist who also fronts the band Buckfever Underground (together they’re two-thirds of Walkie Talkie); he has two of South Africa’s most talented artists as bandmates; and collectively they put on one of the best live shows in the country. Their second album, Dinkdansmasjien (2012), takes its cue from hard-edged electronic music, something they started exploring on the first outing. The collaborations also range from genre-straddling artists like rapper Hemelbesem or this one with vocalist Chris Chameleon:

 

Issa Rae: Internet Celebrity

The outside of the Sheraton Delfina Hotel in Santa Monica was bustling with activity. A thick Autumn mist obscured the sea and the sky was grey, but the mood was warm. People milled outside the hotel lobby on their cell phones, tweeting and texting their excitement, sharing it with their invisible digital friends. Myself and my friend Chie approached a concierge, unsure of where in the hotel our conference was taking place. “Oh, you must be here for the Awkward Black Girl workshop?” We probably looked the part. Two young black people in a ritzy hotel, me in a strawberry print peak cap and Ghanaian Kente cloth sneakers. “Yep, that’s the one,” we answered.

The event we were attending was called New Media: The Next Generation – How to Create, Distribute and Market Your Digital Footprint. While there was an impressive list of new media experts, internet celebrities and Vine stars (the Twitter-owned video app) the real draw card was Issa Rae, the creator and star of the wildly popular web series The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl. Rae and her team from Issa Rae Productions were also the hosts of the event. She walked coolly through the lobby and brushed past a few of the workshop participants with an unassuming elegance. With cropped natural hair and hipster glasses, she seems a little taller in real life than on YouTube (television and film usually has the opposite effect). After a series of talks of how to create, launch, and monetize web content, including a talk by Rae herself, the participants were invited to meet and greet the speakers. I stood in a line waiting to talk to Rae, the nerves of a fan overpowering my journalistic cool. As the woman in front of me got to the front of the line she gushed, “I don’t really have a question for you. I just wanted to meet you, and to say thank so much you for what you’re doing.” Rae graciously thanked the woman for her support, shook hands, and then I was next up. I managed to keep my cool, but barely.

A few months later, I met with Rae at an apartment complex in downtown Los Angeles for a video interview. She came down to greet us in the plush marble floor lobby. I joked that the intense security and faux-Tuscan architecture was very Johannesburg. We shared a laugh about this, and later found out that this is where she is now living. She wore a self-aware sweater with ‘hash-tags’ printed around the arms and a frontal print declaring “Internet Celebrity.” Rae has a natural ease, a sense of quiet confidence very unlike her character Jae in her hit web series. “You know, now I meet people and they’re like “Oh, you’re not that awkward!” And I’m like, ‘Fooled you!’”

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl centers on Rae’s lead character J, a twenty-something black woman in a dead-end office job for a weight loss company called Gut Busters. Rae sums the show up as “a web series about a girl who uncomfortably navigates life, love and her job. It’s about the mundane social experiences we all have.” Her character not only has to navigate every day trivial office life (and her ingratiating co- workers) but also the modern African American female experience. One of the reasons Rae started the show was because she felt she didn’t see herself or the people she knew reflected on film and television. “Real Housewives of Atlanta and Flavor of Love… I didn’t see myself represented in those shows, I was always a spectator. So the media’s definition of black excluded me, and that’s awkward. I was awkward based on that. What they portrayed a black woman to be.”

She started a film blog where she often expressed her disappointment in the lack of relatable African American characters on screen: “The same types of black movies were coming out with the same type of humor and I was voicing that on my blog. I remember one comment was like, ‘you complain so much, why don’t you make something.’ And I was like ‘Oh… OK…’” One day Rae was watching a talk show where someone asked the question “Where is the black Liz Lemon [Tina Fey’s 30 Rock character]?”It was as if her mind had been read. Her thoughts and ideas now expressed on national television via someone else, she knew she had to act quickly. “The ‘Awkward Black Girl’ character had been swimming around in my head for two years,” says Rae. “I knew in my mind that if I didn’t shoot the first episode at that very moment, I never would.”

She called up one of her best friends from high school, Devin Walker, to do the filming, and her dancer/choreographer friend Allan James to play her office fling. Neither had any film experience. By episode four, she brought on her ex-classmate Tracy Oliver to produce the series and improve the production values of the show. By then, the series had been passed around and shared on social media, and was creating a buzz online. Through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter they were able to raise over $56,000 in donations from nearly 2000 people. And that was just the beginning. By the end of season one, hip hop star, producer and pop icon Pharell Williams (N.E.R.D.) contacted Rae and spoke to her about a new YouTube channel he was starting called I am Other. He told her he was a fan of the show, and offered to put up the money for the second season and to host it on his new channel. From there on, the show took a trajectory of its own, and was seen by an even wider audience, becoming the most successful black web series ever. “Now, it’s beyond me,” Rae tells me in near disbelief. “ There aren’t even new episodes out, but people are still talking about it and claiming it as their identity. And I love that.”

While it may seem that her star has risen overnight, finding success has been anything but a smooth journey for Rae. She recalls a day where she and producer Tracy Oliver were sitting down to figure out their Kickstarter campaign, and in order to break away from the mundanity of budget planning, she headed out for a coffee break. “I was already in the red with my bank account. I decided to go get a cup of coffee. I had $1,27 and I thought that would be enough.” When Rae wanted to pay, she was told that the coffee cost $1,37, and the cashier refused to ignore the ten cents difference. This embarrassing moment was a tough wake up call for Rae. “I just thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I doing, did I make the right decision, quitting my job, this is a web series, what did I think was gonna happen?’” However, she got back to work with Oliver and they figured out their Kickstarter strategy. “I’m prideful at the end of the day and I think that it’s weird for people to just offer you money. I think it’s nice, but I don’t have anything to show for it, in my mind.” Issa Rae’s fans felt otherwise, and with their donations, made sure that the show lived beyond a handful of episodes.

Rae rewarded her audience by constantly engaging them online, responding to tweets, sending merchandise to loyal viewers, and even going so far as to read all the YouTube comments (something which you should never normally do). In season one, Rae and her team steered the episodes towards the constructive feedback she would get in the comments, and she paid close attention to what people liked. When they introduced a once-off character called White Jay, her audience responded so strongly that they made him J’s love interest, and the entire second season followed their interracial relationship as a narrative arc.

Today Rae finds herself somewhere between ‘internet celebrity’ status and mainstream success. Through the success of Awkward Black Girl she has not only cultivated a large niche audience but also gained attention from the industry establishment. She received a development deal with ABC to produce a pilot with Shonda Rhimes of Grey’s Anatomy, which sadly wasn’t picked up. She has continued to release web content on her own YouTube channel and has directed and produced a provocative faith-based series called The Choir for award-winning producer Tracey Edmonds’ Alright TV channel. She’s currently working on a pilot for HBO with Larry Wilmore of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and writing a book of personal essays and reflections. “A stupid book that’s the bane of my existence,” she says. “I like what I’m writing so far and I’m finding my groove, but it’s really hard.”

The daughter of a Senegalese father and an African American mother, Rae grew up both in Senegal and Maryland. In Maryland in particular, she found herself at the center of a diverse group of friends “from every race and ethnicity.” In this multi-cultural setting she felt that her difference was celebrated, and that she never had to explain herself. She was just allowed to be. When she reached the 6th grade, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she attended a predominantly black school. “Those kids hated me because I was different. I mean, I spoke white, my hair was nappy and not straight like everybody else, my clothes were terrible because they weren’t name brand. It was just like I didn’t fit into this definition of what they thought was black.” The young Rae felt like she had to compensate for not being black enough, going as far as speaking differently and writing essays in ebonics. “I always say with Awkward Black Girl, most of those experiences are based off of sixth grade. Like feeling out of place then.” At times this is evident in the show, such as the high school flashback scene where Rae’s character J enters a rap ‘cypher’ on the school playground to profess her love for one of her male schoolmates. His response? “Nah, I’m good.” One of the funniest and most quoted lines from the first season of the series came from J’s boss at Gut Busters, an oblivious, middle-aged white woman known only as Boss Lady. After seeing J’s new close-cropped haircut she asks: “Is that how your ancestors wore it?” Rae says this interaction was taken directly from an experience she had with a teacher at school.

Even though Issa Rae hasn’t slowed down since the creation of Awkward Black Girl, working on other projects and constantly releasing content on her YouTube channel (my personal favorite being Ratchetpiece Theater, a tongue in cheek review of trashy rap songs) her fans are still hungry for more ABG and regularly ask her about whether there will be a third season. I can tell that this irks her somewhat. She jokes that even when she shares pictures on Instagram, people write to her saying, “this picture of this shirt is great but when is the next episode of Awkward Black Girl coming out?” So at the end of the interview, I joke with a repeat of that question which she hears all too often. She gives a loud, sincere laugh and says coolly: “I don’t know. But maybe a movie. If everything else collapses, I’ll do an Awkward Black Girl movie.” She gives it a couple more seconds of thought, shrugs and says, “We finished the story.” While this news may be a bitter pill for her fans to swallow, the significance of the show is not lost on Rae. “The show helped me come out of the awkward closet and it helped other people come out of the closet as well. They were like ‘Oh is that what I was? I’m awkward? Phew!’ It’s comforting that there’s a diagnosis, small as it is, for what we’re all thinking, or what we all go through.” Whether there will be an Awkward Black Girl movie or not, Issa Rae has impacted black television without ever being on television. Her next moves will be very interesting to watch. Let’s hope HBO doesn’t pass on her pilot.

Toronto’s Afrofuture

Toronto’s downtown core feels like a city of the near-future these days. There’s the condo boom that, as someone said to me recently, makes TO feel like Gotham City on a sunny day; more and more surfaces are being used as a canvas for the bright barrage of shiny advertising, like a futuristic cautionary tale about corporatism and consumption; and there’s buildings you’ve long suspected are alien spaceships in disguise. Point is, Toronto lends itself to sci-fi imaginings, so it’s not surprising when Danilo the Artist says that he thinks Toronto could be a capital of Afrofuturism.

It’s one of the reasons he curated Black Future Month 3014 at Daniels Spectrum in Toronto’s Regent Park neighborhood. It is the first ever Afrofuturism group show in Toronto, bringing together artists who may or may not see their work as Afrofuturist. Coined in 1993, it’s often a retrospective label, something used to corral together disparate projects.

For Danilo, it is the only movement with which he identifies his work. A lover of science fiction from childhood, much of his artistic work consists of, in his words, “space shit.” On the other hand, Javid Jah, another featured artist, considers Afrofuturism an external, curatorial label. Yet Danilo identified in all the artists an “Afrofuturist flavour” which compelled him to include them in the show.

The nature of an Afrofuturist flavour was up for discussion during the artist panel. Moderated by Hillina Seife, it included SoTeeOh, Komi Olaf, Samson Brown, Quentin Vercetty, Chris Ak, Chanel Kennebrew, Javid Jah, Ola Ojo and Danilo, whose works are either featured in the show or who have been otherwise involved. What came through was the future as a canvas on which to project visions culled from black history, contemporary society and fantastical technology. Afrofuturism: where the future is mythological.

As Quentin Vercetty commented, those futuristic visions are often more about ideology and spirituality than technicalities. Jordan Clarke’s “Balance,” for example, is set nowhere and notime in particular. The figure’s yogic pose, meditative calm, open eyes and the halo around her head suggests holy transcendence firmly rooted in the space she occupies. It’s got the flavour. The Terra Archipelago Infrastructural Commune (TAIC) Project by Ola Ojo, on the other hand, is set in a very specific location. It is architectural planning to address desertification in North Africa. Ojo took architecture to be a biomimetic technology, potentially with a life of its own. The project looks futuristic, but it’s meant for implementation now. TAIC may be the exhibition’s response to one panelist’s observation that any vision of the future depends on what we do now.

Large-scale forward planning is an especially relevant topic in Regent Park, where the exhibition is held, as the neighbourhood’s future is under construction. Originating in the late 1940s, the area was Canada’s first social housing project, and is currently about half-way through a 15-year revitalization project.

I recently spoke to SoTeeOh, a Toronto street photographer and one of BFM 3014’s artists and panelists, about what’s going on in Regent Park and how to understand BFM 3014 within it. Originally expecting a short response to use as research for this article, it was soon clear there was no point in rewording what SoTeeOh said so well.

***

Netta: I’m writing you because I’m at an impasse. I’m trying to place the BFM 3014 exhibition within the context of Toronto, and specifically the Regent Park revitalization, but all my research pretty much amounts to the usual story of crime and violence with a strong sense of community (which may not be wrong, but seems incomplete), and either the revitalization is the answer to all the area’s problems or it hasn’t changed anything. During the panel you commented that the revitalization doesn’t necessarily work for Regent Park’s original community, and you were the first to bring out Afrofuturism’s political implications. I guess I’m wondering if you can shed some more light on Regent Park’s history and community. Sorry if this is kind of vague. I’m trying to capture how BFM is not just about the far future, but also about the here and now, and how that might be a potent topic when the exhibition is physically located in a historically POC [people of colour] neighbourhood that is in transition.

SoTeeOh: I’m just speaking from personal experience. I’ve made a number of connections both socially and in my role as a youth outreach worker. Recently I’ve spent a lot of time in the area documenting the changes through my photography.

From an urban planning perspective, Regent Park was a mistake. It’s a horrible design for a neighborhood (it’s modeled after US style social housing projects and that’s a whole essay in itself), but the bottom line is that many of the area’s problems stem from that design. Now while the revitalization does address some of these issues, the timing is questionable. Why now? Why after almost 50 years of community development? Many of the residents that helped build this community and have made lives and raised families in Regent Park will be displaced by this process. They’re told they can come back and find space in the affordable housing units which are structured in to all the new developments. But to move out of Regent is an expense, and to move back is an expense, and when the Coffee Time in the neighborhood turns into a Starbucks, and the No Frills becomes a Metro, the cost of living in the neighborhood goes up. All this means many of the families that leave will never return. It’s more of a gentrification than revitalization, and going back to the question of “Why now?”, is it really out of concern for area residents? Or is it just part of the overall trend in Toronto which is vertical development to cash in on rising property values? And how this all connects to Afrofuturism for me is the parallels it draws between being written out of a context and writing oneself back in. Most of the families being displaced by Regent Park’s ‘revitalization’ are POC. The script of the neighborhood is changing and POCs simply have a smaller role in this new narrative. Historically POCs have been heavily underrepresented in all political and administrative roles so it’s not surprising that when neighborhoods go through transitions like this, the interests of POCs are often compromised. Similarly, POCs in pop/sci-fi culture just don’t have a very big role. Afrofuturism is a response where artists of color attempt to write themselves back into the script. Unfortunately it’s not quite as clear how POCs in Toronto’s new ‘revitalized’ neighborhoods will do the same.

It’s great to have a more concrete possible answer about why the revitalization is happening, rather than a vague “The municipality decided to.” I wonder what your sense is of Regent Park before the revitalization/gentrification project began or was in the works. I grew up in the suburbs of North York, but as a teenager spent a lot of time at Carlton and Parliament and would occasionally explore the surrounds. I remember one time when I was around 15 years old, I was walking around and figured out I was in the middle of Regent Park. Nothing shady was going on, but I started to feel unsafe because I realised I was in Regent Park, and I started walking faster to get out of there. I thought about it later and realised that I couldn’t even pinpoint how I got a sense of the neighborhood’s reputation–it hadn’t been in the news, of the people I knew who grew up in TO’s poorer neighborhoods none of them were from there. I still don’t really know where those impressions came from that made me rush out of there, but it was definitely widespread (some guys in high school once bragged about how they had gotten drunk and walked around Regent Park, as if it was the most badass thing to pass through an area where people live permanently). Now with the place being bulldozed, and the most accessible stories about the area being far from complete, it’s probably going to be difficult to actually get a sense of what Regent Park was like beyond its reputation.

Regent before the revitalization has two aspects to it. There’s the myth of Regent Park which is generally constructed by people that don’t live there, and then there’s the reality for the residents of the area. Both the myth and the reality involve a number of issues, but I think the implications of those issues are what’s important. The myth of Regent is that it’s dangerous, it’s a hot bed for murder and drug dealing and prostitution. And the implication is that people outside of Regent feel threatened. In reality, though, it’s not like stray tourists and innocent passersby were wandering into Regent and disappearing.

The reality for the residents, however, is that the buildings were in horrible shape. Also as part of the revitalization they’ve built an aquatic centre, fixed up the school (Nelson Mandela PS) and fixed up the community centre. But prior to the revitalization the basic resources that a lot of neighbourhoods take for granted weren’t available to Regent Park residents. Now add to this the fact that the neighbourhood itself was poorly designed (it’s completely inaccessible except on foot which makes for a lot of secluded areas where bad things can go down) and yes, there was an extremely high concentration of low income families living in the area. What you get is a neighbourhood with a lot of social issues. But to me, these issues could be addressed without displacing so many people. You could start by fixing the existing buildings and bringing in better resources for the existing residents. They could have put a better community centre there and fixed the school 20 years ago. If the revitalization was only about the residents of Regent that already live there, the solutions would be much different. I think the myth of Regent Park though, that it’s dangerous, makes everyone feel better about levelling an entire community and displacing so many people. The thing is this approach works quite well for the city as a whole. Other than the people that live there, who wants to see large scale social housing projects sitting on valuable real estate right next to the downtown core? Toronto is going through a “Manhattanization” process. We’re looking at large scale development and a drastic increase in density and it’s gonna get harder and harder to exist in the core of the city unless you’re wealthy. I think ultimately these ‘revitalization’ efforts (it’s not just Regent, it’s gonna happen in Alexandra Park, too, and a number of other areas) are just part of this process.

I must say I’m all for mixed income housing. But at the same time you don’t see efforts to bring social housing to Rosedale or the Beaches [two of Toronto’s wealthiest neighborhoods]. Imagine the outcry if the situations were reversed and people were displaced in one of those communities to make room for affordable housing units. My issue is that the most vulnerable members of society end up paying the heaviest cost for the efforts to fix these communities. At the end of the day, the new communities will probably function way better than the old ones, but getting there is a painful process and the people experiencing the majority of that pain probably won’t be around to enjoy the end results of that transition.

I definitely see what you’re saying in terms of that externally-created myth being solidified in the official narratives about the revitalization/gentrification. It’s basically taken off the pages of municipal statements and reproduced in Toronto’s media coverage. The story about the dark, threatening past that necessitated the glorious future. That brings me back to the exhibition and what Danilo said in the panel–that BFM 3014 this time was purposefully curated to have optimistic visions of the future. But I think the optimistic future in the exhibition has a different logic than the optimistic future in the revitalization narrative, if only because the Afrofuturist label connects the art works to more complicated engagements with black history. What you’ve been saying makes me think about how to reconcile Afrofuturism’s presence in Regent Park when it maybe conflicts with its gentrifying location, and I keep coming back to something else Danilo said when he was talking about his “Dream Guardians” series, that they are portraits of figures that have “ephemeral conversations” across space and time. Isn’t that how art works, maybe how this exhibition works–the art and the neighborhood having an ephemeral conversation with each other? Or is something more concrete going on?

I think you hit the nail on the head with art being an ephemeral conversation. That’s all it really can be in the realistic sense. As I said before the only other connection I feel that exists is the idea of POC being aware of the social scripts they are written in to (and out of) and taking on the role of writers, as opposed to being content with simply being a character. Artistically this happens when someone like Sophia Stewart creates a pop culture vision of the future that portrays POCs as integral characters. Socially and politically it’s a little bit trickier but the mentality needs to be the same. Attain positions of influence to ensure that the interests of POC will be protected.

* Image: Danilo McCallum. Freedom. Collage/Oil on Wood. 3014. @DaniloTheArtist.

Azonto Soca in Your Area

It’s Carnival time again! Besides being one of my favorite annual excuses to party (although I usually partake in August, as I’m usually stuck in the northern cold at this time of year), it always gives me an excuse to catch up on the musical output of many of my favorite scenes from around the Atlantic world.

Yesterday, when listening to a new soca mix from Hamburg-based DJ duo So Shifty, I couldn’t help but get (over)excited about some of the connections I heard being made between Africa and the Caribbean. The first song that immediately stood out was Chuku Chuku by Denise Belfon, which interpolates “Ashawo,” a continental smash by Nigeria’s Flavour. His version was already being covered on the continent in places as far removed as Benin, Ethiopia, and Zambia:

Flavour’s original version of “Ashawo”was meant to pay homage to and reinvigorate the highlife styles that had lost out to the more Hip Hop and Dancehall inflected styles that had become popular starting in the 1990′s.

However in the end Dancehall won out:

The original Nigerian version was written by Rex Lawson, whose own version was a continental smash itself, covered by many of his international contemporaries.

The legacy of “The Peanut Vendor” continues to make it perhaps the world’s most influential composition. Afropop did a great audio documentary on the legacy of the Cuban original, and its mark on popular music.

That’s all exciting in its own right, but it wasn’t what excited me most about So Shifty’s mix. The song that deserves that distinction is one by Olatunji Yearwood (shout out the Nigerian OG). This is the tune that caused me to proclaim via Twitter the arrival of Azonto Soca:

To me, besides the clear rhythmic similarities of the Stag Riddim to Azonto, Olatunji is clearly channeling the singing styles of Ghanaian and Nigerian pop singers, making the connections explicit.

I’ve been aware for some years that contemporary Afropop styles were becoming popular in Caribbean scenes. Decale Gwada or Madinina Kuduro show how connected the French Caribbean islands are to the Francophone capital, and some of those explorations have crossed over into the smaller neighboring islands. In the past I’ve even heard Kuduro tunes played at house parties during Brooklyn’s West Indian day parade. During last year’s Labor Day festivities in Brooklyn, I had to have a laugh when at a Soca fete at an auto shop in East New York, the DJ threw on Puerto Rican Don Omar’s cover of a Portuguese singer’s misappropriation of an Angolan dance style, and gave a massive shout out to Venezuela.

But these incarnations for me are outliers, often intrepid explorations into the outer realms of the African electronic diaspora by experimenters or progressive-minded DJs – or maybe just quirky fads. The arrival of the influence of Afropop styles on the Soca mainstream didn’t become clear to me until this January when while I was DJing, one of New York’s biggest Soca DJs, Dlife, approached me to talk about the Afrobeats tunes I was playing. It was then when he told me about Machel Montano’s Carnival remix of Timaya’s “Shake Yuh Bum Bum”:

I imagine my Sierra Leonean father and his friends, who used to take me to the Caribana Fesitval in Toronto as a child, would be quite tickled if they attended the celebration this year. You have to understand, for decades Africans have been consuming Caribbean music, merging our musical cultures with theirs. In Sierra Leone especially, Calypso-influenced styles such as Palmwine are part of our national heritage. Because of this, and because of my experiences going to Carnival-like celebrations in North America, I’ve always felt that Anglophone Caribbean culture from places like Jamaican and Trinidad was part of my own cultural heritage. For me it is a great source of pride to see some explicitly African contributions coming to the fore in Dancehall and Soca circles. Every year, amongst the roll call of Caribbean nation flags waving on Eastern Parkway, every once in a while you might see a Ghanaian or Nigerian one. This year they might wave just a little higher!

After a couple of initial tweets, the great Wayne and Wax chimed in, and asked my why I heard the songs as Azonto. We had a quick exchange where we discussed the rhythmic breakdown that identify it as Azonto or not, and Sidhartha called us nerds. Alexis Stephens chimed in with Busy Signal’s version of U Go Kill Me, and pointed out the connections that DJs in London like Hipsters Don’t Dance are making in their work. So Shifty responded with Yung Image’s cover of P Square on the Alingo Riddim, and Iswayski submitted a mix by Brooklyn-based Guyanese DJ Speedydon. Erin MacLeod loved it, and overall grand time was had by all.

Later in the night, as almost if to settle the issue @RishiBonneville submitted this video from St. Vincent:

Tempering my excitement for a resurgence of some kind of 21st Century Pan-Africanism, it tells me more a story of a unitary global cultural pop ascending. This global pop rides the waves of neoliberalism, and aspirational cultural output. However, it also accompanies the increased phenomenon of South South connections, albeit mediated often via immigrant populations in Northern capitals – but also new economic relationships, and the Internet. The fact is this is more proof we’re living in a hyper-connected world in which the differences between Rio, Port of Spain, Accra, London, and New York are melting away to reveal one giant mega city…inside of which the divisions between classes may tell us more about international society than national borders. It’s also doing crazy things to culture.

However, let’s not dwell on the dark side of globalization too much, after all this is Carnival! The only time in many former-slave/colonial societies that racial, class, and cultural barriers are temporarily lifted in the service of universal revelry. So go ahead, dive into Azonto Soca, and imagine the possibilities of our new world!

Top image by Blaine Harrington.