Nikki Giovanni passed away at 81. May she rest in peace.
Her poetry was cool but it was no Gwendolyn Brooks and many others I could name.
Ntozake Shange forever changed my world when I first read, for colored girls. To see poem and prose play in a way that bucked at yt poetic standards, changed something in me permanently.
Toni Morrison was never my cup of tea her writing feels jealous, fetishized eyes on the dark skinned body.
Bell Hooks, her writings connected but no less so than her other womanist counterparts during that era.
It wasn’t until I read, The Spirit of Intimacy by Sonbonfu Somé, that I saw the active steps to community and love that were never there in Hooks poetic pontificating.
And yet we have made each and every one of these women singular. Dead gems of decades past who we look to lead us into future unknown.
What I find interesting is that Black women and others place these 4 light skinned Black women on a pedestal without any critical thinking skills.
These 4 aren’t even a cornerstone, and if they are being positioned as such, within the Amerikkan economy, we must critically ask why?
And if you cannot assess that their proximity to also plays into their grandness and legacy then Black futures will be a bust, too.
America runs on the hyper individual, it thrives on the fact that there are a few greats who deserve to be seperate from the rest.
It’s what the Hollywood machine is. You then use those singular few to run and rule the masses.
If we are still centering these same few persons some 50 years later, we have lost the plot, the joke has been had.
We are stuck in surface level consumptive nostalgia and believe that somehow a specific era of our past which was still orchestrated by the dominate culture, holds the keys to our freedom.
There are clues, perhaps, but the key lies in present and in those names we forget, or fail to remember because they didn’t have the positionality of being close in proximity to.
In the same way that the face of the Black Panther party became the light skinned woman with the almighty fro, one that she was manipulating to look like the hair of those whose hair sat naturally that way.
We are still eating the propaganda of all things light and bright.
My thought is always when engaging anyone’s wisdom from the past, is to always question what wisdom we were not allowed access to because the person wasn’t palatable.
How much of our truth is unknown because it was buried with those dark skinned bodies that were never going to make it to 81, no matter how hard they tried.
I often think of Octavia E Butler who for the most part has been ignored by Black culture as a whole.
She was writing and predicting Black futures while others were wallowing in the trauma porn of the past which is a prerequisite for yt success.
She was weird, seperate, and alone for most of her life.
Her books were a landscape to prepare us for what was to come and instead we were stuck looking back.
When surely this was the tech(know)logy our enslaved ancestors knew and were looking for(ward) to.
Academia is the place where Black imaginations go to die, or where your language of liberation is constantly changed to suite the needs of the dominant culture past, present, and future.
These 4 women have been given legacy upon legacy even before their deaths. Books and plays turned movies, honorary degrees and academic clout.
You can’t speak ill of their names because they are Black legacy.
But how could they be?
They are simply the legacy that the dominant culture allowed to be.
If we keep them looking back we can manipulate the present, their futures erased. And that is what has happened.
You can quote, shange, morrison, hooks, giovanni and more but applied application, turning the ideal into the literal.
Look up and at the world.
What has changed?
We are not the liberated people we claim to be.
Instead we are stuck in a nostalgic past of performative ideology.
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