I heard this song on the night the Dankpuna group post was made public and I only started to think about it after my initial anger had dissipated into a sinking depression. Even then, Aretha’s song seemed too upbeat. I was annoyed- I wish she had been more angry. more demanding. more sad. Maybe she should have sang Respect the way Nina Simone had sung Mississippi River. Maybe that would have done justice. Maybe that would have communicated the loss I felt when I read “It ain’t gonna suck itself”

After the song became a radical feminist anthem in the 60’s Aretha said in an interview:

“I don’t think it’s bold at all. I think it’s quite natural that we all want respect — and should get it”

Respect. It was all about respect. And I think we all found ourselves having to prove we were worth  respecting. The last week was a fight, for some of us it felt like nothing short of a battle. Here was a crisis that demanded we prove to an institution that we were worth respect. Respect: Of friends who were nothing short of family. Of Teaching Assistants that were supposed to be teaching us-and teaching us only. Of Professors we respected, and loved. Of partners we loved and more than anything, trusted. Of an Institution that lied about being a family.

Listening to Respect in this environment got me thinking, what was Aretha so happy about? Why did she choose to sing her song like this? Up beat- complete with back up singers. And it was only at my fourth or fifth time listening to the song that I realised there was value to singing it the way she had. Aretha’s song is not apologetic. Her song communicates to the fullest- that she is worth that respect. And that she believes she is. There is no shrinking away from it and I think in a lot of ways I needed to hear that too.

Franklin’s song is a rendition of an earlier version sung by Otis Reddington.  Reddington’s version was released in 1965 and is a song about a man demanding more respect when he comes home at the end of the day. He sings:

Hey, little girl, you’re so sweeter than honey

And I’m about to give you all my money

But all I’m askin’, hey

Is a little respect when I get home

Hey hey hey, yeah now

Respect is what I want from you

Respect is what I need

Respect is what I want

Respect is what I need

Got to, got to have it

Got to, got to have it

Got to, got to have it

Got to, got to have it

Talkin’

Give us, give us, give us, give us

Give us, give us, give us, give us

Give us, give us some baby, everything I need

It is supposed to be a humble appeal by a hard working man returning home to his family. I read it as entitled- “Got to, got to have it” sounded a lot like the men in my family. I thought of a man coming home from work and demanding that he be treated like an honorary guest. Cue Hum TV scenes of women serving chai to irritated men. Franklin’s version spins the song on its head and genders it. Her song affirms that she does not need Otis’ money “Baby, I got it/What you need/Do you know I got it?”

Franklin’s response becomes important in the context of the civil rights movement of the 50s and the wave of black feminism that followed it. The decade is characterized by women like Audre Lorde, June Jordan (See one of my favourite poems by her: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48762/poem-about-my-rights), Alice Walker and others that write of being displaced by two conflicting political movements. hooks writes of this as the “double bind”. Where black women faced racism in a movement dominated by white women and sexism in the civil rights movement. Inevitably, disowned by both. Black women found themselves up against black leaders that demanded women conform to more subservient roles. The independence that black women were forced into as a consequence of racism needed to be reversed so that the black man could have the white dream-complete with the suburban home and the beautiful docile housewife. Further, racism was believed to be a greater evil and women were demanded to be silent about their needs so that the black man could “restore his manhood”.

Franklin’s song thus pushes against this image of the black woman as supportive or docile, which happens to be the kind of woman that Otis is writing about. By using her upbeat tempo and back up singers Franklin communicates that black women did not need black man for anything other than their respect. She tells them that she has everything she already needs and if they don’t give her respect she can just as well leave. And the ong communicates that- I hear the song and I hear a woman who believes she is worth respect and will not stop short of anything else. Franklin chooses to do her song with her sisters. I think decision communicates the sisterhood and the unity that most black feminists were trying to create.  

On a completely different note (I apologise if this seems like hawaye fire) I also thought of Ismat Chugtai and her exchange with her husband in The Lihaaf trial  (Available here: http://www.urdustudies.com/pdf/15/28naqviExerpt.pdf) when I heard Respect. I think this more in line with political movements and not being supported by men on your side, a crisis the left is all too familiar with. Chugtai writes: “The Progressives neither berated nor commended me, and I found that reassuring” But she was berated. The friend she stays with in Lahore, Shahid Sahab, demonishis her for her vulgar writing style.  When she says:

“And what about the filthy sentences you have written in Gunah ki Raten (nights of sin), actually giving explicit details of the sex act, just for titillation?”

His response is: “It’s different in my case, I’m a man.”

And again:

“You are an educated girl from a respectable Muslim family.”

We see men holding different standards or values to women fighting by their side.  Whether it was the black civil rights movement or Chugtai writing in the 1940’s or even ‘allies’ responding to memes, women find themselves fighting for a degree of respect from their male counterparts. In the civil war, black men actively demanded women to be more subservient. In Ismat Chugtai’s case, the reaction she got from people on her side was silence. It was a nothingness reaction. She never wrote the same again.

 

Aretha, we’re still waiting on that respect.  

 

For the purpose of my final paper, I want to look at the pedagogy outlined by the Brazilian educationist  Paulo Freire as decolonial aesthetics. What Freire set out to do in 1970 has long since become a blueprint for political activists, leftist intellectual, teachers, politicians, psychologists, radical theologians- the list is endless, who hope to bring about any semblance of change with the current structures. His work outlines the need to reconceptualize the paradigms of our education system in light of various structures of power and oppression by posing a critical, problem-posing pedagogy. For Freire, literacy or rather how literacy is imparted, had the power to create a free subject. Education was a project that was humanizing when it was critical, dialogical and praxical. It could not be apolitical, for it either created students that conformed to the present system or became ‘the practice of freedom.’ It is this concept- education/teaching as freedom that I  am interested in. While Freire never strictly limits the group he refers to as oppressed, he cites them as the poor in Brazil who are crushed under the rubric of both capitalism and dictatorship. Even so, his understanding of  a ‘death-affirming climate of oppression’ and the subject it produces allows fo the world to use Freire to understand the oppressed under multiple different power structures, including colonial government.  Freire speaks of the dehumanization that is intrinsic to power relations. For him humanization does not take place without dehumanization. His detailing of what this dehumanization looks like and the effect it has on the psyche of the oppressed is emblematic of what Fanon, Memmi and other postcolonial thinkers are writing about. “The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting him; between following prescription or having choices; between being spectators or actors…This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account”. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decolonial precisely in this act, it demands that the way the colonised are taught about their own community, about their own image, must be done by themselves. For no one understands them better than them: “a pedagogy which must be forged with not for the oppressed (be they individuals or whole people) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.”

What makes this an aesthetic to me, more than its applicability to the social, political and economic violence inflicted on the colonised countries, is the ethic of hope that this text is loyal to.  It is a labour of love, at the heart of which is Freire’s uncompromising belief that there is beauty left to redeem and and that the oppressed can make it material. Hope, follows all the texts he wrote in his lifetime and twenty years later he writes the Pedagogy of Hope. 

“From these pages I hope at least the following will endure: my trust in the people, and my faith in men and in the creation of a world in which it is easier to love.” 

This paper will be most probably take the form of a boring old paper (for now).

“If you get there before I do

Coming for to carry me home

Tell all my friends I’m coming too

Coming for to carry me home

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.“

 

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?

How does it feel to be a problem?

While I read the text, these two questions kept coming back to me. Throughout the chapters Of Our Spiritual Strivings, Of the Faith of the Fathers, Of the Passing of the First Born, Of Alexander Crummell and the Sorrow Songs, I saw DuBois attempt to chart out the depths of the Black soul. What was it? What plagues the Black soul? What makes the black soul indispensable to this nation that has declared it ‘half-man’? What is its beauty? Its suffering? And above all, its home?

That was it, it kept coming back to that question of home. Where was the black soul at home? And I think this was the most difficult part to read, that the problem of the twentieth century might have been the color line but what that meant was that the color line ensured that the black woman was never home. There is/was no place it could go where it was whole. For DuBois, home was allusive spiritually as much as it was physically.

What ensured this incompleteness was the Veil, a condition that DuBois believed struck every black citizen of America. “A world which yields him no true self consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.” The Veil split the black american ino two: it robbed the black soul the power of its own representation. For even in her head she mediated her own image by the ideas of the white man, white civilization. This contradiction permeated all institutions of black cultural life and Dubois explains this as the “wrenching of the soul.”. Where the black educator, priest, artist was struck with ‘double aims’. She knew that the values of her civilization that the White man needed were mockery to the modern world and that the values her race needed were incomprehensible to them for their incompatibility with their culture and reality. Church life, family life, art and even the body was thought of in terms of these contradictions. For Dubois this was perhaps the worst consequence of the Veil, for it meant that nothing was realised to its full potential or even wholly owned by black people.

“The history of the American Negro is the history of strife.” This question of struggle, begged the question: What would a journey to freedom look like? A life outside strife? Here, I could not help but think of Fanon. For Fanon, the creation of a new self, a free individual is of paramount importance and one that could only be found through struggle . DuBois does not go into detail on what the struggle needs to look like on a mass political scale, however I think the chapter on Alexander Crummell is insightful. Here, DuBois, charts what the struggle towards attaining that internal self looks like: a fight against hatred, doubt and despair while at the same time navigating the Valley of Humiliation and Valley of the Shadow of Death.

“Culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors.”

Cabral writes of National liberation and culture as intertwined concepts inseparable from one another. For Cabral, the importance of culture to national liberation movements is rooted in its importance to domination. His text is thus an exercise in showing the interrelationality of modes of production, history and culture. In all, of Africa’s image of itself. Here I will read the text closely in an attempt to show the relationship of the modes of production/class struggle to culture and how Cabral sees this understanding as instrumental for the making of national liberation movements.

Cabral outlines the relationship of cultural domination and material extraction from the start of the text. He describes this as inherent to the Imperialistic project,  stating that the material ambitions of Empire could only be actualised “by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned.” Here, it is important to ask what the material allows for the cultural and vice versa? Cabral identifies the modes of production as the method through which a nation knows its material relationships. “of relationships between man and his environment, among men or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies”. By controlling the modes of production, which Cabral outlines as “the true and permanent driving power of history”, Imperialism demarcates the material relationships that (wo)men can have and can not have within their own country. How (wo)men are allowed to interact with certain segments of society is prescriptive to how its history and culture will develop. While Cabral states that history allows for us to know the nature and extent of the disparity and conflict caused by Imperialism it is in “culture there lies the capacity (or the responsibility) for forming and fertilizing the seedling which will assure the continuity of history, at the same time assuring the prospects for evolution and progress of the society in question.” He further states “it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of opposition, which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement”. By limiting the material relationships of these countries, Imperialists effectively stunted the development of both histories and cultures. This proved instrumental in how native populations processed and reacted to foreign domination. The control of culture meant that native populations were subjugated into material domination. Thus, for Cabral the “seed of opposition” needed for national liberation movements could only be reversed by the effects of culture.

“Thus, it may be seen that if imperialist domination has the vital need to practice cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.”

The commitment and attitude towards a national liberation movement was also determined by the varying levels of culture present within society. The fact that material conditions underlied the formation of these varying levels is a comment on culture and how intrinsically tied it remained to imperial forms of domination. The “horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture” and the bolstered local elite was the product of Imperialism. For material  domination to be successful, Imperialists recognised the need to develop a system of ‘cultural alienation’ that removed the local elite from the concerns of the masses. As a result of the social distance created, the local elite continued to reproduce this system of inequality long after the colonists had left. Cabral points to the danger of assimilating these men into National Liberation movements precisely for this reason and states the process of Re-Africanization as the only remedy. This serves as an example to the kinds of culture that need to be at the centre of the movement: “the liberation movement must, on the cultural level just as on the political level, base its action in popular culture, whatever may be the diversity of levels of cultures in the country. The cultural combat against colonial domination–the first phase of the liberation movement–can be planned efficiently only on the basis of the culture of the rural and urban working masses, including the nationalist (revolutionary) “petite bourgeoisie” who have been re-Africanized  or who are ready for cultural reconversion.” Cabral qualifies what culture is dangerous and what isn’t for the liberation movement.

For Cabral, culture was rooted in the material which could not be separated by the implications of Imperialism. How he situated culture at the centre of national liberation movements was tied directly to how he viewed them as invariably manipulated by imperial domination.