Some said I was the female Pac, Some said I was the female Biggie, some said I was the female Rick, and some said rappers can’t mess with me
–The Turf Chick, Untitled
I get up every day with a new goal on my mind, the same frown and the same broken spirit from doors opening and shutting right before my eyes. It feels like I’m working overtime. Overtime with no pay.
Some days I just want to give up and live a regular life, you know? Go to work, pay rent, and enjoy the rest of my funds doing the things that excite me.
But no. I was given the gift of song, and no matter how much I try to be normal, my soul releases words that move the world!
Music is the only reason I am still alive. You get me? Being a homosexual and a woman and, I may sound cocky, but extremely talented — better than some who are very well established — it’s hard! It’s hard to prove a point. It’s easy to make you listen, but when men see me they realize I’m good for nothing because they can’t get anything out of me in exchange for a deal.
Sometimes I hate being a woman. You can tell, right? Sometimes I wish I wasn’t used as a sex symbol, used to get the things I work so hard for in life. Coming up in the music industry is tough, because you have to have the mind of shark and the heart of a beast! But the soul of pure woman. Give yourself away or work harder with the same amount a faith after every door has been slammed in your face for being a woman in the music industry.
Honestly at this point I don’t wonder when I’m going to make it or when I’m going to finally get through that door… All I want to know is, when are people actually going to listen. Before they look.
On 2229
When everything was all alright, and momma held my head when I cried on 2229, I watched my brother come in and out of jail thinking how he get that phone in his cell.
On 2229
–The Turf Chick, “2229“
The realest people crossed me and now they’re fake as ever so I’m ready for whatever
–The Turf Chick, “Whateva”
I never knew my day ones, wasn’t really there for me, they wanted my dream and everything that came with it, all us eating living life was the plan for me.
–The Turf Chick, “FearFull”
About The Turf Chick
Local rising star Gabrielle Gilbert, who goes by the stage name of “The Turf Chick,” was born in East Palo Alto and raised in Sacramento since age eleven. In the beginning, Gabrielle Gilbert, with the childhood nickname “Gi-Gi” performed for her brothers, sisters, and cousins. When she was only thirteen years old, she made her first recording at a friend’s studio in South Sacramento, rapping “I GO.” From then, Gi-Gi became “The Turf Chick,” writing and rapping messages of hope, street life, and personal struggles. Inspired by music icons Lil Kim, Messy Marv, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, and Eve, Gabriel says her fans best describe her music as “urban and underground hip-hop with a mix of hard-core bursting lyrics.” The Turf Chick was the only solo hip hop performer at the 2007 Hub Choice Awards in Sacramento, performing in front of nearly 1,200 people.
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
At the close of AWP a few years ago, I took a bus ride to the airport with several writers and had the luck of sitting beside a poet I admire and with whom, over the years, I had formed some acquaintance. By that I mean, when we see each other, there’s an acknowledgement of sorts. And, for me, it’s a thing of detail that he can never remember or even pronounce my name.
On the bus ride, we engaged in the kind of trivial banter people have in elevators with one- or two-word answers. “How are you?” “Fine.” “Fine weather we’re having.” “Great weather.”
But somehow in that twenty-minute bus ride, we pushed past niceties. And, for a minute or so, talked honestly about work. He made the transition by asking about my studies.
“Where are you now?”
At the time, I was trying to take my PhD at the University of Kansas. So I said, “Kansas.”
“And, what are you working on now?”
“Oh, I don’t know! I have a manuscript that feels ready. But, I don’t know. When it comes to these things, I’m never sure. I felt good about it a year or so ago. And here I am still…”
“This is your second collection, right?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it called again?”
“I’m not sure, I’m torn between Sailing for Ithaca and Leaving…”
He didn’t even let me finish. He burst into a long laugh. Teared. Wiped his face. Begged apologies. Tried containing himself. Swelled. And broke open laughing again.
Looking around the bus, I could see a young woman in glasses looking out the window and wearing headphones. Of the other two people from the conference in the bus, one—an older man—kept his gaze straight, but looked tired. Only the last person looked on in interest at the drama of the unfolding conversation.
By this time, my poet friend had contained himself, but was still smiling a knowing smile. The kind that says, been there done that. Or, if only you’d listen to me.
I tried guessing at what was so funny, and before I could ask, he said through more measured laughs, “Okay Odysseus. Okay Odysseus.”
Then, it occurred to me that he felt my reference to Ithaca was my attempt, as a young poet, to puff up my work and make myself sound important.
“I understand that the use of classical references, especially in a young writer’s work, is at best dangerous,” I said. “He risks being sophomoric by making noise…”
“Yes, you can’t do that, Odysseus.”
At this point, the bus pulled into his terminal, and he got down.
I thanked him for his suggestions, and I said I hoped he had a fine time at AWP. As the bus moved slowly from the curb, he yelled loud enough for me to hear, “Bye Odysseus! Bye Odysseus!”
By the time I got to my terminal and boarded my plane, I was deflated. And I couldn’t stop thinking that I should have kept my big mouth shut.
I nursed my wound for days. I watched bad television. And drank cheap wine.
My wife, used to my mood swings over poetry, let it play out.
In “Uncertain in the Wild Frontier,” I talked about my approach to poetry during my MFA years and the long road it took for me to arrive at unknowing as a chief mechanism of my imagination.
I look back on those years now and realize that one of the ways I displayed certainty was in classrooms, during workshops, where I would try my darndest not to laugh at poems that were abstract, inaccessible, or non-representational.
At the time, I felt those poems were the height of pretentiousness.
And, during classes or at the bar with friends, I wasn’t shy about making clear that the sooner the poets in question got their heads out of their high-falutin’ asses the sooner they could begin the true work of poetry.
I expressed this sentiment openly and often without regard for how the poets in question might feel, without asking what they were trying to do, who their influences were, with whom they were trying to have conversations, and how they were trying to have those conversations.
That was years ago!
I have since completed MFA and PhD programs. And, I am a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where I teach both graduate students and undergrads.
And, as a teacher, I have come to realize that it is not my place to trample upon anyone’s poems, attempts at poetry, or choice of movement within it.
Moreover, it is my job to show students, who are impatient and overly sure of themselves, the necessary compassion I was shown, when I was a student and held strong beliefs on subjects of which I knew little, often confusing passion with knowledge on the issues.
Which brings me back to my second collection.
I knew after I had compiled Sailing for Ithaca that I would get it in some quarters. I knew some would grumble or dismiss the book—”Oh big shot he thinks he is, he is drawing from Homer!”
In the end, I had to decide if I was writing to please or writing to partake of a conversation larger than myself, in order to better understand myself. The decision was easy.
Those Sore of Soul
Deal gently With those Sore of Soul
For whom Each invitation
Or word spoken Is wound to sea-salt
Or boil Cut open.
Forgive Their furrowed brows And punch of air
Their voice A treble loud
And their swell Of chest
Whose welts –
Thick and reddened For years –
Must be softly licked And pressed
Till they thaw Give off pus And slowly clear
And the sea-horses Long buried within
Overtime Begin to reveal Themselves.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month 2017
The theme of teaching and learning poetry, and our emphasis on student poets, speaks directly to the action of poetry in our country and global community. Never has the education of our students been so threatened, and never has truth been more challenged than in the current political climate. The truth emerges through education and the resistance and questions of our youngest generation, and it is their lead we absolutely must follow if they are to live in a society that fosters their achievements, liberation, and justice. Truth emerges through poetry as well — poetry bears witness to what truths seem impossible to speak any other way. Its constraints limit the temptation to misconstrue, obscure, and bury.
Indian cinema is the world’s largest film industry in terms of film production – you’ve probably heard of Bollywood, the mainstream Hindi-language film industry and Indian cinema’s largest film producer.
Bollywood, screened worldwide, with its colourful musical sets, expensive aesthetics and elaborate dramatic plots, is often considered an ambassador of Indian culture, usually generalised to stand in for ‘South Asian’ culture as a whole. Unintended or not, Hindi cinema contributes significantly to how South Asian women are perceived, a problem when women are cast in limited and reductive roles. So how is contemporary Hindi cinema scripting women?
Director: Have you read the script? This is the hero’s fight scene. You are the heroine… You just have to be the victim… the damsel in distress… That is the test of your acting.
Angry Indian Goddesses (2015)
Historically, Bollywood idealised women as self-sacrificing mothers, wives, and daughters, cast them as victims, and hyper-sexualised them as objects of the male gaze and as the popular ‘item girl’. Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) is considered a classic of Indian cinema: an epic following the piteous trials of a poverty-stricken mother who, through the ultimate act of maternal sacrifice, becomes a pinnacle of morality and Indian womanhood. Women’s roles are overwhelmingly scripted in relation to men: they are wives, mothers, daughters, romantic interests, and victims of sexual violence. The Geena Davis Institute of Gender and Media found that only 25% of 493 characters in popular Indian films were women.[1] In 77% of mainstream films screened between 2012 and 2016, women completed a romantic function.[2] Yet, there is a slow increase of women-centric films in which women are not simply plot tropes. In 2018, Veere De Wedding presented us with a female buddy movie about modern relationships, Helicopter Eela charted a single mother’s relationship with her teen son, Patakha explored two rural sisters’ tumultuous relationship, Hichki introduced an aspiring teacher with Tourette’s syndrome, Raazi drew on the true account of an Indian spy, and Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi, a historical biopic of an anti-colonialist warrior queen, is due to be released in early 2019.
Women’s roles are overwhelmingly scripted in relation to men: they are wives, mothers, daughters, romantic interests, and victims of sexual violence.
Of course, it’s not enough to count the number of women-led films if we aren’t scrutinising their characterisation. Where is women’s anger in all of this? Are women allowed to be angry? The 1980s saw the rise of the ‘avenging woman’ genre in Bollywood, which counteracted the stereotype of female passivity, and envisioned women as avenging agents appropriating violence to deliver justice for themselves. Insaaf Ka Tarazu (1980), Pratighaat (1987), and Zakmi Aurat (1988) are famous examples. Yet, the whole genre turned on the rape-revenge trope. Films like Insaaf, whilst progressive, reinforced victim-blaming scripts of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ victim, and the film industry seized on the opportunity to screen graphic rape scenes to draw in viewers. The avenging woman genre imagined a world where female rage was given agency, yet it was a world where women becamepowerful because of their violent initiation into victimhood. The unsettling message: women can only be angry if they have been subject to extreme brutal violence, and only after they have tried and been failed by the legal system.
The avenging woman genre imagined a world where female rage was given agency, yet it was a world where women becamepowerful because of their violent initiation into victimhood.
The past few years has seen the rise of films centring ‘strong’ female leads who often use their anger, aggression and violence to overcome adversary. Soojit Sircar’s Pink (2016) is a notable example, demanding a national conversation on consent and victim-blaming rhetoric. Minal, the main female lead, acts in self-defense against her would-be rapist by smashing a bottle on his head. She is championed in court: by showing women’s success within the legal system, Pink makes space forwomen’s anger. Avinash Dash’s indie production, Anarkali of Arrah (2017), similarly champions a village performer, assaulted on stage by a powerful politician, who responds by slapping him, and with further verbal aggression when he attempts to ‘buy’ her. Her eventual success in getting justice once again legitimises her rage and rejection of the passive role of the ‘good’ victim. The popularity of biopics like Mary Kom (2014) and Dangal (2016), which look at the lives of an Olympic boxer and two world-class wrestlers respectively, suggest a move away from the idea of violence, aggression and physical strength as exclusively masculine traits. Films like Mardaani (2014), which centres a female cop busting a sex trafficking ring, NH10 (2015), a suspense thriller in which a couple get caught in rural violence, and Akira (2016), where a college student takes on four corrupt police officers, all build up to violent acts by the lead women, acts which are championed by the storyline. Any other conclusion would be robbing the women, and the viewers, of narrative closure. Granted, violence and rage in films like Mardaani, NH10, and Akira are characteristic of crime thrillers and action dramas, when we consider all of these films inter-textually, we see a heightened interest in envisioning women’s rage: what it might look like, how it may be utilised, and what transformative effect, good or bad, it may have.
Of course, in a billion-dollar film industry, if the Strong Woman becomes a best-selling, profitable trope, it’s hardly surprising that films increasingly capitalise on the trend. Based on all-time box office revenues, Dangal was the highest grossing ($340 million) Bollywood movie worldwide.[3] Notably, films such as Dangal and Pink ultimately valorise their male leads, who emerge as the key agents in empowering women and delivering justice to them. Bollywood is still slow to embrace women as their lead ‘heroes’. Independent Hindi films, in contrast, have always taken more risks, and in films like Pan Nalin’s Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), we find a nuanced exploration of women’s rage.
This is Kali, the angriest Indian goddess… Durga takes her most ferocious form to annihilate all evil so a new world order can be formed … Each of us has a Kali inside.
Angry Indian Goddesses (2015)
Set in Goa, Angry follows a group of women as they celebrate the upcoming nuptials of two of their members, Freida and Nargis. Whilst tackling sexual harassment, Angry offers a positive portrayal of women’s sexuality and pleasure, casting them as active, conscious agents rather than hyper-sexualised tropes. The film opens with a humorous montage of each character’s anger at everyday harassment and structural misogyny. Frieda, the photographer, frustrated at having to shoot a misogynoir-promoting advert for a skin-lightening product, tears up her cheque. Pam, the middle-class housewife leered at during a gym session, drops weights on her harassers. Mad, an aspiring indie musician, told to play an ‘item song’, is shown aggressively stamping off the stage towards her male hecklers. Su, owner of a mining company, in a tense boardroom scene, challenges stereotypes of mothers as incapable of being ruthless. Laxmi, Frieda’s maid and companion, catcalled on her way home, gives the perpetrator a dose of his own medicine, grabbing him by the balls. Joanna, an aspiring Bollywood actress, tasked with playing the damsel-in-distress slips out of her script and challenges the director, throwing out all the fake padding on her breasts and hips, yelling that he, and the rest of the Bollywood industry, have ‘no idea about women!’ Through this meta-fictive parody, Angry signals its challenging and rewriting of cultural scripts which regulate how a woman should behave.
Angry Indian Goddesses (2015)offers a positive portrayal of women’s sexuality and pleasure, casting them as active, conscious agents rather than hyper-sexualised tropes.
The film takes a darker turn when the main characters encounter a group of men, the Lal Topi Gang, known to harass women. The film reaches its dramatic climax when Joanna is found brutally gang-raped and murdered by the Gang. When the police arrive, the women are confronted with a justice system more invested in asking derogatory questions about their clothes, drinking, and smoking, Joanna’s career as an actress, and Freida and Nargis’ ‘unnatural’ relationship, than they are in delivering any justice. Faced with this victim-blaming discourse, the grief-stricken women, filled with rage, are propelled to take matters into their own hands.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Angry is how it simultaneously legitimises women’s rage and envisions a collective social conscience and responsibility as an alternative means of seeking justice. The climactic scene is dark and filmed with shaky angles, mimicking the women’s adrenalin-filled rage: who pulls the trigger when they shoot the members of the Gang, and who stops whom, becomes somewhat blurred. The following day, the policemen interrupt Joanna’s funeral, demanding that the perpetrators own up to their crime. The women, defiant and unapologetic, stand in admission. Then, something remarkable happens. The members of the congregation, in the presence of Joanna’s body, a visible reminder of violent misogyny and the deeply flawed justice system, all stand up one by one. Faced with this declaration of collective culpability – a complete rejection of state authority and an indictment of its inability to deliver justice to victims of sexual violence – the police can do nothing. Angry leaves us with a utopic vision of what happens when women’s rage, and a community’s collective anger and social conscience, finds expression and is utilised to combat misogynistic, violent social structures.
Faced with this declaration of collective culpability – a complete rejection of state authority and an indictment of its inability to deliver justice to victims of sexual violence – the police can do nothing.
Whilst Angry, like the 1980s avenging woman genre, validates women’s rage after a vicious act of sexual violence, it counteracts the idea that anger can only be legitimised within that context. Throughout the film, the women refuse conventional ideas of victimhood in their professional and personal lives and articulate anger for a variety of reasons. When they discuss vengeful Hindu goddess, Kali, the message is: ‘Each one of us has a Kali inside us.’ Anger is presented as being an emotion, and a resource, we can all tap into. Angry thus presents anger, and violence, as an essential aspect of women’s existence, and challenges the gendering of rage as masculine, the eroticisation of women’s passivity and the sanitisation of women’s behaviour.
Angry’sunflinching portrayal of women’s anger is relevant particularly in recent discussions around India’s #metoo movement: whose voice and whose anger is legitimised and heard, particularly in a caste-based society? Indian feminism has historically privileged upper-caste women’s concerns and issues, often at the expense, and erasure of, lower-caste women. Most of the Hindi films cited in this essay, including Angry, centralise urban, middle class, and upper-caste characters. Angry does make space for Laxmi, the lower-caste maid, to violently express her rage and grief: witness to her brother’s murder, yet having his case pending for eight years, Laxmi takes a cricket bat and smashes his murderer’s bar, aggressively threatening him, and secretly acquires a gun. Through Laxmi, we see the complexity of anger: it is justified, destructive, powerful and powerless at the same time. At the end of the narrative, she chooses to let go of the anger which has consumed her life. Laxmi’s rage is a fitting response to the legal system which specifically fails lower-caste communities; however, the film also highlights that anger is not always the right solution for the individual.
Anger is presented as being an emotion, and a resource, we can all tap into. Angry thus presents anger, and violence, as an essential aspect of women’s existence, and challenges the gendering of rage as masculine.
Significantly, Angry chooses Joanna, a half-Indian, British national as the figure around whom the community and national media rally. The police comment that there will be heightened media attention because of Joanna’s British citizenship: a subtle but flaying indictment of how national and international outrage is limited to the ‘right’ kind of victim, and those who fall outside that category (lower-caste women, rural women, trans women, marginalised ethnic communities, sex workers, and non-binary and gender fluid people) do not qualify for the same large-scale, collective response. Angry, in conversation with other contemporary films legitimising women’s anger,can be seen as a call-to-arms. Coming in the wake of the brutal gang rape of Jyoti Pandey in 2012, which led to international outcry and public protest demanding changes in the laws governing sexual violence, Angry is an inspiring manifesto for unity and the power of women’s rage. We must push our reading further: whilst the final shot shows the community rallying for Joanna, our anger and outrage cannot be confined to high-profile cases of sexual harassment only. If, as the films suggest, we choose to embrace anger as a tool to combat social injustice, fight for democratic rights, and challenge flawed state structures, it must be inclusionary to achieve its full potential.
***
[1] Published in 2014, the study looked at popular films across 11 countries. Figures are rounded. https://seejane.org/symposiums-on-gender-in-media/gender-bias-without-borders
[2] The Irresistible & Oppressive Gaze: A Survey Report by Oxfam India. https://www.oxfamindia.org/irresistible-oppressive-gazeisurvey-report-oxfam-india
[3] As of June 2018. https://www.statista.com/statistics/282411/bollywood-highest-grossing-movies-worldwide
ANGER showcases essays and poetry featuring well-aimed anger from femme writers, writers of color, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers.
Scarlet is marked as lustful, indicative of adultery, if we were to listen to Hawthorne.
JudeoChristian hegemony marks it as corporeal, sinful, lustful, degraded.
I reject that.
Red is the color of blood, pumping in our veins. It is the hue of love at first bloom, of hot pink cheeks, sweaty palms, lips swollen and chapped after hours of kissing.
It is the color of fresh neck contusions.
Blush, indeed, the portmanteau of blood + rush, the flushing of one’s cheeks after thinking of one’s lover.
It is the hue of my wedding dress, seven steps circled around a fire.
Those vows changed everything.
It is sindoor in my Thakurma’s hair part, on her beautiful forehad, on ma and jethi and kaki’s too, signifying their shaadi bonds.
It is my red wedding bangle, nestled between two reed ones.
It is the deep burnt hue of my shaadi ki mehndi, lacy adornments on my hands and feet.
They held secrets, you see, his name was on both hands.
It is the sign of life, flowing out of my body, shedding possibility of life, with the lunar cycle.
It is the color of menses, sad cephalopodesque clumps flushed away.
It is our eyes, sore and tired after comprehending rejection.
(I should have gotten that tenure track job. I wish we had been pregnant. I lost both.)
It is the color of my Kali Ma’s tongue, signifying victory in battle, ruby droplets on the edge of her trishule.
Jai Mata Di.
It is the deep ruby hue of the root chakra. Muladhara signifies safety, grounding, rootedness, survival.
And inflammation that needs healing.
It is the lucky hue of wedding dresses, globally.
These predate Victoria’s bossy, boring, basic British Becky taste.
Dirty, colonizing beast. Who was “unsivilized” again? At least we bathe, bitch. Lotas and bidets and amla and shikakai and nariyal 4ever.
Red lights signify “halt” or danger ahead. Coupled with blue and white, they signify nationalism and bacon.
FTP.
Reclaim the laal, crimson, rojo, maroon, scarlet, ruby, sanguine.
For the gore gwei lo gueras pakehas it means ruskies or gorbachev or yellow peril.
For us it signifies revolucion.
It is Fenty Stunna lip paint.
#Rihanna #BBHMM
It is M.A.C.’s Ruby Woo and Russian Red and Viva Glam IV and Urban Decay’s shame.
It is life, love, heat, breath.
Fright Night
Do you like being scared by books, films, and surprises? Describe the sensation of being scared, and why you love it — or don’t.
Fear is profitable. Fear operates on the assumption of power inequity. For some, fear is thrilling. To most, fear is undesirable. To walk into a movie theater, to watch a film about fear, without fear of being murdered, is a privilege. To make films or write about fictional narratives centering fear is a privilege. Since we have an orange, egomaniacal narcissist as our current POTUS, I am in a constant state of fear.
Fear is profitable. Fear operates on the assumption of power inequity.
We celebrate Stephen King’s oeuvre of fear. We revel in the discourses of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. We hunger for the phantastic Dementors, revolted by Voldemort but also fascinated by the Death Eaters. Jordan Peele recently penned and debuted the brilliant Get Out, an astute commentary on the cultural hegemony of whiteness, of the traumas of colonization and infections that whiteness and conspicuous consumption and the quite literal “eating the Other” has on marginalized communities.
I hate being scared by real life, actual, worldly surprises. I know some people revel in the sensations of fear and relish spine tingling and gut wrenching, but I am not one of them. When I get scared, I go into shock. I retch. I shit enormous amounts of fecal matter, several healthy, runny bowls worth. I dry heave. And worst of all, I get cold. My body shuts down. No matter the time of day or temperature, I need to crawl into bed, covered by multiple blankets. Ideally, my husband is nearby to tuck me in. Ideally, my cats are nearby, burrowing under the duvets with me, purring on me for comfort. They know. Animals always know.
My latest brush with gut-wrenching fear took place on October 7, 2017. I received an email that was time stamped 7:55 AM, PST. It was supposedly from one Cheryl Merryfield. The email was poorly written. Cheryl claimed to be formerly known as Brian, formerly a cishet white dude bro working at a construction company. Cheryl supposedly had a cousin named Heidi who took a gender studies course at an unnamed University. Cheryl was writing to thank me for teaching about toxic masculinity and white male privilege, as they had seen the light and were changing from Brian to Cheryl and wearing wigs, fake eyelashes, taking hormones, and attending protests. Cheryl wanted to know my thoughts on all of this. The tone walked the fine line between mockery and contempt.
A less astute person or intellectual might read it as complimentary, an invitation to self-congratulate. Alarm bells rang for me, though. There was nothing specific about the email or my courses, which do address white privilege, toxic masculinity, and gender politics. I surmised, correctly as it turned out, that this kind of email is usually part of a wider phishing or scam net. I suspected it was the kind of drivel produced by the scum-sucking rodents at 4chan and Reddit, perpetuated by the far right, the alt-right, Men’s Rights’ Activists, and Pick Up Artists. My husband, a straight cishet white computer scientist, looked at the headers and told me the message was from a Russian (!!!) server.
I do not have the privilege of safety. I did what any vulnerable nontenured person would have done… I made sure to tell them I was scared for my safety and well-being.
My work email address may have been scraped at random from the web. I do not speak to newspapers about my political opinions; I am not safe. I do not have the privilege of safety. I did what any vulnerable nontenured person would have done: I sent it to my department chair. She then sent it up the chain. I could not wait for their responses. I sent the message to two deans, the associate VP of academic affairs, and re CC’d my chair. I made sure to tell them I was scared for my safety and well-being.
One must be careful when sending out emails like this, if one occupies a precarious position in the academic industrial complex’s unsteady food chain. One needs to tone police oneself. Be humble but deferential. Be firm but polite. And always, always make oneself invaluable to the space. I have been a lowly adjunct for over half a decade, my teaching labor overlapping with finishing my dissertation. My one attempt at a tenure-track position was self-sabotaged by my lack of a curated publishing archive. How can one publish when one is teaching ten classes a year simply to survive? Publish or perish, indeed. For a die-hard tenure advocate, I’ve died, lost in the mise en abyme of the academic industrial complex.
One needs to tone police oneself. Be humble but deferential. Be firm but polite. And always, always make oneself invaluable to the space.
For the teaching purist, I have thrived, earning countless devotees who enroll in everything I teach, hundreds of accolades and glowing reviews, and winning every campus grant I’ve applied for with the hopes of increasing my department’s visibility. But I digress. After I sent the scary email up the chain, I got notification of a Facebook login attempt. I was on the phone with my husband while this happened. The fear elicited nasty physical reactions. The dry heaving, chills, rumbling bowels, liquid excrement. My poor bidet got a lot of action that day.
My dear husband stayed on the phone with me while I screenshot the login attempt, locked down social media accounts, changed passwords, set up two-step authentications, sent another panicked message up the food chain. He stayed on the phone with me while I crawled into bed and shut down. He stayed on the phone while I dozed in and out of consciousness. He booked a ticket from Maryland to California, coming in the next day. He has always claimed to find my snoring to be soothing, as he reads snoring as a sign of deep and full sleep. The last time I was in shock with him was when I destroyed my ankle. This was long before we were engaged or married. He took care of me for three days. (Take note: marry the person who loves it when you snore, who tucks you in bed when you are in shock, who helps you bathe and dress when you can’t walk, who cleans up your vomit, who takes on care work without comment.)
Campus police and IT determined the email was “not a threat” and came from a Russian email server, similar to Google. They advised us to not reply. I thought, no shit. There would never be any reason for me to respond to any sort of email like that. My fears were disturbingly assuaged when I was told that a colleague received the very same email. I phoned her when I found out. It was comforting to know we were not alone, but we were still uneasy. When news of the email spread to others in our department, one person replied that they get goading, inflammatory messages like that all the time, inviting response. That person keeps them in a file.
I read their response to the incident as contemptuous. I don’t know if they were minimizing my fear. It doesn’t matter anyway. The net result has been shutting down for several days. It is now October 10. I have not slept well since the incidents. I don’t know how I managed to lecture on Monday morning; the topic was Elaine Brown’s leadership in the Black Panther Party and narratives on internalized misogyny and patriarchy within social justice spaces. We were connecting Brown’s depictions of violence to what transpired with Angela Davis and the prison industrial complex, the American Indian Movement and the words of Wilma Mankiller, the life and death of Annie Mae Acquash, and the work of Asian American students at UCLA.
Patriarchy is rooted in violence. Internalized misogyny within communities of color is the worst of all.
Patriarchy is rooted in violence. Internalized misogyny within communities of color is the worst of all. It is a death drive. I am well-aware of the times we live in. Since 9/11, those of us who live in the intersections of Islamophobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment, we have to walk every day under surveillance. We are policed in a myriad of ways. We have to be mindful of everything we say. We do not have the luxury of boredom, relaxation, or free self-expression. If you are a woman of color, the surveillance is amplified time and time again. If you are an academic, it is unbearable. The temptation of celebrity feminism, the thirst for public recognition as the means to success within a capitalist narrative, is destructive. I do not tweet publicly. My Twitter account has always been private. I use it to practice brevity.
I do not feel safe being a public figure. My Instagram is a curated archive of food photos, sunsets, cat and dog pictures, and celebrations of friends’ joy. Mine is remarkably devoid of selfies, because I fear being in front of cameras, even my own. Privately, I take selfies to remind myself that I am not a monster, even though white beauty standards would have me believe otherwise.
Me? Let me be. Let me write. Let me do my work. Let me teach my classes. Let me be with my family and friends.
It is the fear of the external gaze that I loathe most. Michel Foucault wrote of “le regard,” the penetrative lingering ocular moment of visuality, reserved for medical purposes and scientific, surveillance performed by guards and captains, nurses and jailers. bell hooks wrote of the “oppositional gaze” taken up by Black women spectators claiming their agency, those consumers of public and visual culture whose ancestors were denied the right to look back at their masters, in the context of the colonial slave plantation, of hegemonic whitewashed popular culture. Some get off on being watched, the narrative or fetish of voyeurism and exhibitionism that are so valued in what we deem as raunch culture.
Me? Let me be. Let me write. Let me do my work. Let me teach my classes. Let me be with my family and friends. Let me be free from unimportant and superficial interactions. Let me process my rage and pain and let me speak to it through the classroom. Let me survive in my cocoon of literacy and sleep and love.
Le Mepris (on contempt)
I find myself riddled with contempt.
I feel it seeping into my bones, soaking into all of my cells, and then leaking out into the world, through the snarky things I say or think or feel.
I am deeply contemptuous of things I deem inferior, or not worthy of my time. I am deeply contemptuous of white people who do not understand colonization.
I wonder, how could they, meaning the eurotrash mayonnaise populace of the globe, deem me and my ilk, as less than, simply because of our gorgeous black and brown skin?
I have contempt for the snaggletoothed fools who benefit from those legacies. I look at their pasty, dough-colored bloated bags of skin and bones and think, their mouths look like 17th century graveyards.
I feel contempt for X, a city rife with murder and violence, 3000 miles away from our beautiful Los Angeles, that has taken my beloved husband away from our bed and home and cats for 24 months.
I feel my lips curled in sneers around my own teeth, perfected after years of Amreeky orthodontia, and my body is flooded with heat and blood and rage.
Feeling contempt rush in is not always bad.
The worst is coming across people who attempt to tap into empathy, who want so desperately to help, who perform friendship or advocacy or allyship, but then who actually feel nothing, and then who feel guilt.
Your guilt is not my problem.
I am contemptuous of hyper-religious zealots, so encapsulated by their own myopia that they choose not to acknowledge the sheer, utter disbelief on my face when they tell me of their volontourism, of their journeys to the global South, to “sivilize” the “savages.”
I am contemptuous of entitled dude bro nontraditional undergrads who equate chattel slavery with indentured servitude. Not. The. Same. Thing. Bro.
Your history is taught as a requirement. Mine is taught as an elective. That is the height of hegemonic privilege.
Contempt is heady and addictive.
It is expressed asymmetrically, through the lifting of an eyebrow or the curl of a lip into a sneer. It makes my hands sweaty and my heart beat fast.
I have to reserve the full expression of my contempt for only one person, my best friend, who understands and does not judge, or if she does she doesn’t express it.
I cannot fully express my contempt to my husband, for he will be upset.
He, who is sweet and calm and so kind and loving, does not find value in expressing contempt.
But he is the beneficiary of white male science professor privilege.
He can be contemptuous and be rewarded.
I have to ask, why are we taught to disregard contempt? Why is the expression of it only reserved for those who hold hegemonic power?
In a capitalist system, the distribution of wealth is not equitable.
The owners of means of production are not given fair shares. The profits are always maximized.
I have earned the right to be contemptuous.
I have earned the right to bristle at injustice.
Generations of epigenetic trauma remain encoded inside me.
The expression of contempt must be cautious.
It must be kept under wraps, away from the prying eyes of panopticon guards.
Bentham and Foucault’s predictive models extend into the world of social media.
I fear the wrath and consequences of fully expressed contempt.
I fear the internalization of it, as it affects my health and well-being.
I am contemptuous of those who do not or cannot feel.
We are encouraged to not pay attention to our bodies, to heartbeats or sweat beads, or tears.
ANGER showcases essays and poetry featuring well-aimed anger from femme writers, writers of color, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers.
“We are constantly being told not to be angry. As a black woman especially, I hear it from all corners. To be angry is to give in to stereotypes of the shrill feminist, the mad black woman. To be angry is to trade intellect for emotion. To be angry is to be irrational and violent. To be angry is to be like them. To be angry is to lose. But none of that is true. I am angry because I love. I am angry because what I love is being harmed. I know why my people matter, why the environment matters, why human rights matter, why justice matters. And I know that this all deserves love. I know that it deserves protection. And I know who is fighting to deny it what it deserves. I know that when that which we love is being harmed — to not be angry would be unconscionable. […]
What if we took that anger beyond the internet? What if we took it into the streets more than once every two years? Into our boycotts? Into our strikes? Into the voting booth? What if we took that anger to our city council meetings? What if we took it to their campaign events and press conferences? What if we took it to our school boards and our workplaces? What if we took all this anger born of righteous love and aimed it?”
Essay pitches will be reviewed and responded to within 24 hours by Brain Mill Press staff.
This call is for femme writers, writers of color, LGBTQIA+ writers, First Nations writers, and disabled writers.
If your pitch is selected, you will be given a mutually-agreed period of time to write your essay. You will receive editorial feedback on your submitted piece, a negotiable contract granting Brain Mill Press the limited right to reproduce your piece on Voices, and payment at industry-standard rates upon publication. You will retain all other rights to your work.
Contact Brain Mill Press at inquiries@brainmillpress.com with questions.
"Piecing Me Together" Is a Gorgeous Collage of Self-Discovery
As a Black non-binary queer person, my life and my identity are made up of a variety of experiences and influences.
While I’m more aware of who I am now, there was a time when I just wasn’t sure about it. In Renée Watson’s beautifully written book Piecing Me Together, the main character Jade creates a collage out of her experiences to figure out who she wants to be.
The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable.
Out of all the ideals of respectability and success, the idea that a Black person needs to escape their “bad” living areas in order to be successful is one of the most pervasive. It is this idea that Jade combats in the book, even as she yearns to travel the world and speak Spanish. Since Jade sees the beauty in her friends, family, and her neighborhood of North Portland, she uses those influences to define herself in a positive way and make her collage art.
Not only does Jade undergo self-discovery with her present day life, but she also uses historical influences from the past. One day, she learns about York, a Black slave who went on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She is drawn to his story because he was having his identity and personal story defined for him. Jade also learns about Black collagists like Romare Bearden and Mickalene Thomas later in the book. Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Through lived experience, art, and learned history, Jade literally puts together the pieces of who she feels she wants to be. As an artist, daughter, student, and more, Jade refuses to let others define who she is as a Black girl. Jade is a collage worth seeing in all its pieces and glory, and that makes her story powerful.
The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.
Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.
Listening to these mentors, I feel like I can prove the negative stereotypes about girls like me wrong. But when I leave? It happens again. The shattering. And this makes me wonder if a Black girl’s life is being stitched together & coming undone.
These lines made me really connect to Jade as a character because of similar feelings I had as a teenager. Like Jade, I felt like my identity was constantly under attack by expectations and preconceived notions of what a Black person is like. The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable so I learned to hate myself. Unlike Jade, I didn’t have the self-worth and knowledge to define myself on my own terms until my twenties.
Another thought about Jade defining herself on her own terms is expressed when she says,
Sometimes I just want to be comfortable in this skin, this body. Want to cock my head back and laugh loud and free, all my teeth showing, and not be told I’m too rowdy, too ghetto…. Sometimes I just want to let my tongue speak the way it pleases, let it be untamed and not bound by rules.
While I have never been called too rowdy or ghetto by others, these lines made me think of the ideals of respectability that I unconsciously learned from various media and my own parents. I was expected to go to college, get the right degree, and not be too influenced by “bad” Black kids who got pregnant in high school or dropped out. At one point, I was also told not to watch too much BET and not speak too much slang when I wasn’t around my peers.
The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable.
Out of all the ideals of respectability and success, the idea that a Black person needs to escape their “bad” living areas in order to be successful is one of the most pervasive. It is this idea that Jade combats in the book, even as she yearns to travel the world and speak Spanish. Since Jade sees the beauty in her friends, family, and her neighborhood of North Portland, she uses those influences to define herself in a positive way and make her collage art.
Not only does Jade undergo self-discovery with her present day life, but she also uses historical influences from the past. One day, she learns about York, a Black slave who went on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She is drawn to his story because he was having his identity and personal story defined for him. Jade also learns about Black collagists like Romare Bearden and Mickalene Thomas later in the book. Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Through lived experience, art, and learned history, Jade literally puts together the pieces of who she feels she wants to be. As an artist, daughter, student, and more, Jade refuses to let others define who she is as a Black girl. Jade is a collage worth seeing in all its pieces and glory, and that makes her story powerful.
The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.
Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.
Listening to these mentors, I feel like I can prove the negative stereotypes about girls like me wrong. But when I leave? It happens again. The shattering. And this makes me wonder if a Black girl’s life is being stitched together & coming undone.
These lines made me really connect to Jade as a character because of similar feelings I had as a teenager. Like Jade, I felt like my identity was constantly under attack by expectations and preconceived notions of what a Black person is like. The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable so I learned to hate myself. Unlike Jade, I didn’t have the self-worth and knowledge to define myself on my own terms until my twenties.
Another thought about Jade defining herself on her own terms is expressed when she says,
Sometimes I just want to be comfortable in this skin, this body. Want to cock my head back and laugh loud and free, all my teeth showing, and not be told I’m too rowdy, too ghetto…. Sometimes I just want to let my tongue speak the way it pleases, let it be untamed and not bound by rules.
While I have never been called too rowdy or ghetto by others, these lines made me think of the ideals of respectability that I unconsciously learned from various media and my own parents. I was expected to go to college, get the right degree, and not be too influenced by “bad” Black kids who got pregnant in high school or dropped out. At one point, I was also told not to watch too much BET and not speak too much slang when I wasn’t around my peers.
The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable.
Out of all the ideals of respectability and success, the idea that a Black person needs to escape their “bad” living areas in order to be successful is one of the most pervasive. It is this idea that Jade combats in the book, even as she yearns to travel the world and speak Spanish. Since Jade sees the beauty in her friends, family, and her neighborhood of North Portland, she uses those influences to define herself in a positive way and make her collage art.
Not only does Jade undergo self-discovery with her present day life, but she also uses historical influences from the past. One day, she learns about York, a Black slave who went on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She is drawn to his story because he was having his identity and personal story defined for him. Jade also learns about Black collagists like Romare Bearden and Mickalene Thomas later in the book. Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Through lived experience, art, and learned history, Jade literally puts together the pieces of who she feels she wants to be. As an artist, daughter, student, and more, Jade refuses to let others define who she is as a Black girl. Jade is a collage worth seeing in all its pieces and glory, and that makes her story powerful.
The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.
Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.
In order for Jade to figure out who she is, she has to wade through experiences and perceptions that allow others to define her.
In order for Jade to figure out who she is, she has to wade through experiences and perceptions that allow others to define her. The main focus of the book is Jade’s experiences with the mentor program Woman to Woman and her Black upper-class mentor Maxine. Jade feels that Maxine is treating her like someone who needs to be fixed. Since Jade is a thick-bodied, dark-skinned, Black girl from a working-class family, she is considered to be an “at-risk” teen in danger of becoming a statistic.
While Jade spends time with Maxine and Woman to Woman, she also encounters other significant experiences in her personal and student life. At her elite high school St. Francis, she befriends a white female student named Sam and learns how their racial backgrounds cause them to be seen differently. Walking alone on the street, men harass her because of her body and their sense of entitlement. When an incident of police brutality occurs in a nearby neighborhood, Jade feels compelled to take action even though she feels helpless.
These experiences make Jade feel that she is constantly coming apart because of how other people see her. She sums it up best with the following lines:
Listening to these mentors, I feel like I can prove the negative stereotypes about girls like me wrong. But when I leave? It happens again. The shattering. And this makes me wonder if a Black girl’s life is being stitched together & coming undone.
These lines made me really connect to Jade as a character because of similar feelings I had as a teenager. Like Jade, I felt like my identity was constantly under attack by expectations and preconceived notions of what a Black person is like. The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable so I learned to hate myself. Unlike Jade, I didn’t have the self-worth and knowledge to define myself on my own terms until my twenties.
Another thought about Jade defining herself on her own terms is expressed when she says,
Sometimes I just want to be comfortable in this skin, this body. Want to cock my head back and laugh loud and free, all my teeth showing, and not be told I’m too rowdy, too ghetto…. Sometimes I just want to let my tongue speak the way it pleases, let it be untamed and not bound by rules.
While I have never been called too rowdy or ghetto by others, these lines made me think of the ideals of respectability that I unconsciously learned from various media and my own parents. I was expected to go to college, get the right degree, and not be too influenced by “bad” Black kids who got pregnant in high school or dropped out. At one point, I was also told not to watch too much BET and not speak too much slang when I wasn’t around my peers.
The world told me that Black people couldn’t be geeky, sensitive, and emotionally vulnerable.
Out of all the ideals of respectability and success, the idea that a Black person needs to escape their “bad” living areas in order to be successful is one of the most pervasive. It is this idea that Jade combats in the book, even as she yearns to travel the world and speak Spanish. Since Jade sees the beauty in her friends, family, and her neighborhood of North Portland, she uses those influences to define herself in a positive way and make her collage art.
Not only does Jade undergo self-discovery with her present day life, but she also uses historical influences from the past. One day, she learns about York, a Black slave who went on the Lewis and Clark expedition. She is drawn to his story because he was having his identity and personal story defined for him. Jade also learns about Black collagists like Romare Bearden and Mickalene Thomas later in the book. Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Once Jade finally starts speaking up with her actual voice and honing her artistic voice, she combines the past and present for her art and for herself.
Through lived experience, art, and learned history, Jade literally puts together the pieces of who she feels she wants to be. As an artist, daughter, student, and more, Jade refuses to let others define who she is as a Black girl. Jade is a collage worth seeing in all its pieces and glory, and that makes her story powerful.
The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.
Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.
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