on I chose this song because it emits feelings of liberation and freedom. Lorde argues that the erotic, is basically our truths that we can feel deeply. This song brings me feelings of peace, emotion, love and flowing. “Im ready,” to allow myself to feel.
on The poem, “Alien Suite,” was fire. Like all good poetry, there were lines that resonated, that haunted, that chilled you like a sweat-cold bottle as its contents spilled into you. Safia Elhillo’s claim that “home is a place in time” did that. It stood me erect like the second syllable of my Chinese name: lì. But it gave me pause as well. Was my home really just a “a place in time,” or had home accompanied me into these moments? If home was 1989, then where am I today? Am I dispossessed, an orphan in an imaginary homeland?
I have been contending with Salman Rushdie’s collection of essays by the same name, Imaginary Homelands, for better than a year now, no closer to a resolution on that issue now than when I first picked the book up. Rushdie says that it is his “present that is foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in the mists of lost time.” But I struggle with this as both an unsatisfactory state of being—perpetually belonging to the past, unrooted in the present—a perpetual displacement, but also as a truncated understanding of time. We often treat time as a snapshot standing still on an ever-retreating timeline. A dot, a mark, a past tense. Theorists from Edward Said to Miranda Lambert have claimed this.
Said gave us that the Orient “was disappearing; in a sense it had happened, its time was over,” but then allows three-hundred and fifty-two pages of exposition on the durable knowledges that emerged from it, that persist from the Orient as both a place and an understanding. Even Miranda sung of knowing “you can’t go home again” even as she “had to come back one last time.” Is home, then, really just “a place in time”?
Home is more than Safia’s “place in time.” Home, and its attendant experiences, I suspect, are more like a ghost story. One of those Eastern ghost stories where the entity refuses to stay bound in time and locale—like The Ring or The Grudge. In those stories, the entity follows you; it is unmoored from its roots, crossing both space and time, irrupting past place and bringing with it the history—sometimes fraught and anguished, often beautiful and majestic—that informs the way it reaches for us today. Even today. Yesterday is place to draw strength from for today; any decent postcolonial theorist will tell you that. They will also tell you that history (time), echoes forward.
But if it is reaching, and we can draw strength from it, then it cannot be static. And maybe that is a new, or different understanding. Time is not a thing that happened but, instead, an informative agent; a guide both behind and ahead of us. It harries us, yes; but it also fosters. Rushdie, too, sensed his precarious relationship to time when, looking at a faded picture of the home he grew up in “felt as if [he] were being claimed, or informed that the facts of [that] faraway life were illusions, and that this continuity was the reality.” Rushdie is no more 1947 than I am 1989 or you are 1999 or 2001 or whatever signpost marks your beginning. Perhaps, then, home is less “a place in time” than it is a time in place.
Safia’s poem was still fire, though.
on Chuck D to W.E.B.: A Fist-raised Shout-out
It is telling that in the build-up to Public Enemy’s 1989 smash, “Fight the Power,” Chuck D. states that the “March in 1963 is a bit of nonsense, we ain’t rolling like that no more.” True to Public Enemy’s spirit and messaging, Chuck is signaling a more confrontational approach to gaining rights and equality. Telling is that before Chuck’s salvo, the video opens with scenes and a narration of marchers peacefully moving toward voting rights. It is a scene that W.E.B. Du Bois would have felt a surge of pride for.
Du Bois’s 1900 essay, “To the Nations of the World,” opens with a signaling of his own. In referring to “the metropolis of the modern world,” Du Bois is citing America’s global leadership position. From there, he moves to the assembling of a “congress of men and women of African blood” who are not only demanding to know how much longer will race be “the basis of denying…half of the world the right of sharing” in the ability to make the most of themselves, but also cites the world’s responsibility—their complicity in that denial—as well. Chuck, however, is less interested in the rest of the world’s responsibility, he is intent on confronting the specificity of America’s failure.
Chuck’s asserting that he’s “black and I’m proud, I’m ready and hyped, plus I’m amped/most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” is a declaration that the moment of arrival is at hand; the marching towards is over: he, and the black bodies demanding equality alongside him, are now present. His rail against America, while as clear as Du Bois’s, is more forceful and less conciliatory: “sample a look back, you look and find nothing but rednecks for four hundred years if you check.” It is four hundred years of denial and negation, oppression and withholding and, like Du Bois, Chuck wants change.
To ‘fight the power,’ is to challenge hierarchies of oppression and denial and their upholders. These titans don’t clash—they simply mark their challenges differently:
“As the rhythm’s designed to bounce/what counts is that the rhyme’s designed to fill your mind/Now that you’ve realize the pride’s arrived, we got to pump the stuff that makes us tough/From the start, it’s a work of art to revolutionize/make a change…”
Word.