I’m working on African American folklore. Originally oral traditions that range from animal stories – probably familiar in the form of Enid Blyton’s ‘Brer Rabbit’ tales – to stories of conjure people who could put ‘goophers’ on people, classic creation myths to ‘freedom tales’.

What becomes obvious is that these tales are essentially formed through slavery. The recurring hero-type is the trickster who goes up against the powerful figures of the Big Bad Animal, The Master, The Devil and even God with only his wit and will and tricks his way to success – or freedom. Magic provides one form of an equalizing force – you can lay powerful curses on all and sundry. It provides a certain vocabulary of hope – escaped slaves might have disappeared into thin air – been turned into birds, or grown wings and ‘flown’ away. Tragedy and powerlessness are tempered with hope, with a rationalization of life, a thread of possible vengeance – and these stories emerge from the fertility of these emotions, in a place where only the imagination might be free to fly.

The folktales provided a way of subverting the authority of the slave-owner, of envisioning a way out through individual cleverness, or a way to avenge themselves. The world in its creation was populated by tricksters as well – tricksters responsible in their tricks for the sun, the moon and the stars. In some sense, the folktales provided a way for the slaves and former slaves to situate themselves in a new world, spinning the unfamiliar around them with the familiar, and seeking ways to establish a little control in their lives.

They weren’t considered history per se – they were an art. A way of looking at the world as it was, and from that grounding, what it had been and could be. This is why they struck me as important – tales of slaves running away, jumping together into a waterfall rather than be sold apart – but their bodies are never found and two birds fly above the water. Stories of the clever slave tricking the Master into giving him his freedom. And conversely, not so bitterly-triumphant, of the slave who turned into a tree to find some – any – roots – and was cut down to make his master a kitchen.

There’s nothing clear about these stories – they’re often written with humor but shadowed with deep, abiding injustice. A straight-forward ‘white’ morality is nowhere to be found. There’s death, and it is freedom – and a house is built on the body of a slave. The most innocuous of the tales – tales of animals, no less, told in something of the humor of Aesops Fables, have everything to do with the powerlessness of the slaves, and are an injunction to cleverness, to taking every ounce of advantage you could squeeze from those who would control you.

The tales provide an odd insight into humanity, perhaps – or if that’s too large a claim, a very specific humanity, under very specific historical conditions. There’s a deep tragedy, a deep resentment and an equally deep hope engaged in their conception. That makes them worth examining, empathizing with, achieving an understanding for.

I intend to write a paper examining this tradition, its subversiveness and its fluidity of use. To specify the whole – tradition, I suppose – enough to write a paper seems a shame, to pin down something that seems to glory in its elusiveness and its ability to serve many causes seems counter intuitive. But there’s plenty to write about.

Music speaks to us all, in one way or the other. You might even consider it as something ‘universal’. In the latter half of the 19^th century during the ‘rock n’ roll’ revolution numerous artists were brought to the forefront of the world stage who now have been immortalized in our memory for eons. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Unholy Trinity of Britain (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath), Pink Floyd etc.

A superficial glance into the past will reveal these well-known names (not to take the spotlight away from these legendary groups) but not their forerunners, their inspiration. The jazz and blues artists of the former half of the 19^th century. Robert Johnson of the crossroads who influenced Zeppelin to no end, Elmore James whose style with his slide guitar was something carried onwards by men like Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King who was approached by Eric Clapton to produce Riding with the King (an album whose name alone stands as testimony to the magnanimity of these people who performed in racially segregated joints in southern United States throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s). These people brought joy to not only their people, but their beautiful sounds were heard all over the world.

I am toying with the idea of making a short documentary because to understand the aesthetics related to music, it must be heard first. The reason for delving into this particular topic is not just because it is prudent to the prompt of the final project but also because these artists have helped me through particularly difficult times. The latter has helped me better understand the context of their work back then and to better grasp the essence of the influence they have had on future artists. When I think about the ‘aesthetics of decolonization’, my mind jumps, instinctively, to a mental image of Robert Johnson sitting on a stool with his guitar in a juke joint in Mississippi. My project will also be a sifting of the range of emotions the music brings about in me and uncovering the links to the context of the course. At the end of it all however, the project would aim for and ultimately find the true beauty of their music and where it comes from. Sources will range from studio albums and lyrics of songs to old interviews of particular artists, covers by future bands, their interviews and references in their music to these earlier artists.

I will be attempting to write myself into this project, seeing it more as a form of self reflection and exploration with regards to the theme of home and belonging. Being both from here and not, my relationship with the idea of ‘home’ has always been fragmented, feeling that I do not have the complete right to call either place my own. This is a question that has recently become more recurring to myself, and since I have never fully allowed myself to explore its depths, I feel this is an appropriate point to begin from.

Most of the kinds of writing that I have been inspired by are non-fiction, autobiographical pieces, especially Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother and this is deliberate. I find this form/method to be the base of the stories itself. They allow the author to directly speak to the reader, so there is in a sense, a greater moral obligation to appreciate these experiences. I see the difficulty in articulating, let alone narrating one’s life and would like to explore this as a means through which I can find redemption in our past, through the banal instances of the everyday.

I am unsure to call it a privilege or a burden, but I have had the experience of living in another country and therefore imagining a life in another country from a very young age. It has been built into me, this double sight of the world, always relating one to the other and finding myself in between. And so it is exactly this ‘in-between’ that I want to divulge as a decolonial aesthetic, finding a way to reconcile my experience as the ‘other’, in both my ‘home'(s).

My project will most likely culminate into a paper; providing vignettes of my own life upon which I will draw an analysis. I will also be employing poetry and music into my work, since I feel these are two outlets that beautifully capture the rawness of emotion, and can also be accessed in different ways, attaching our own interpretations to them and finding a way to voice our own pains.

My grandfather married my grandmother in England. Both were far away from their homes and families. Their wedding was a small affair— my grandmother’s sister was the only representative from both their families combined. They were both warned about the folly of marrying a person who was ultimately the other. But for the most part they proved their naysayers wrong. My final project is about all the times they couldn’t.

Interracial love is born from a contradiction. Both possible and impossible, it exists as an antithesis to itself. And what better way is there to address contradiction than through fiction? My project will take the form of a short story through which I will aim to address the interplay between history and the individual.

The story will attempt to construct a decolonial aesthetic through the lens of a marriage between two people of different races. Fiction gives me the space to not only tell the story of my own history but to take liberties with it that I wouldn’t be able to do in a non-fictional piece. I am greatly inspired by James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk while working on this project. In particular, it is this sentence upon which the crux of my story rests: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass”. My grandparents spent much of their life together doing just this. If nothing else, my project is an attempt to pay homage to their struggle.

When I first read the excerpt from Bina Das’ memoirs I was struck by the longing in her voice as she neared the end of her memoir. She writes: “I find a sense of incompleteness in my words. I have failed to give expression to my innermost pain and unfulfilled dreams and hopes.” This inability to articulate her feelings, put them into neat descriptions with a beginning, middle and an end is prevalent throughout her written narrative. The inner turmoil and struggle seems to be sidelined when it comes in the way of a “greater” cause. And they never truly show in the memoirs or accounts penned down later on by these women who gave up so much for the social causes they were affiliated with.

That is where I believe slam poetry might be able to fill these gaps. It is an art form that is quite inclusive, fluid and has existed under different names ever since man discovered the healing powers the spoken word contains. On numerous occasions when I felt I couldn’t fully express myself through the written word or when I felt trapped in my own consciousness, slam poetry has served as a wonderful outlet that can echo the frustration, pent up aggression, silence that is simmering inside of me. Instead of being a structured form of poetry with a set meter or rhyme scheme it is liberating with its absence of any rules.

The longing, the passion and the anger tied up with the rhythm, the musicality and the poetic dexterity in the writings of these female activists and freedom fighters that are slowly being erased from history do have the potential to be translated through the slam poetry medium.

Therefore, through my final project I aim to map the stories of Bina Das, Vimla Dang and Kalpana Datt on a different terrain. A terrain that allows their stories to be less constrained and diluted and unidirectional. I hope to do justice to their stories and to this art form.  

I am trying to understand the musical, lyrical, and contextual texture of hip hop music by using Kendrick’s work, and his album To Pimp a Butterfly in particular, as a case study. As of now I am trying to collect writings from the Black Diaspora that speak to his music and in doing so I will attempt to trace the influence, impact and necessity of his work. A particular attention to lyrical analysis will be paid that is underpinned and informed by other works, both fiction and non-fiction, which articulate the black experience. 

This project is important because i) it is an attempt to give us a glimmer into the pain, anguish, hate and despair that makes such art possible. ii) it will allow us to understand that art making of this kind is an affirmation of oneself and will, hopefully, allow us to uncover the mechanisms in place that make such an affirmation possible. iii) it will allow us to map what we have learnt in class to the work of a contemporary artist and finally iv) it will help us develop a more nuanced understanding of an art form that has a terrible image problem.

This project can only really be presented in two forms. Either a video essay or a podcast. As of now I think the former is definitely a superior way to go because it lends itself to the usage of imagery (album art, music videos, interview excerpts), something which is central to the work being discussed. However, such a form requires much more work, and more importantly, much more time. What is more likely, though, is that a podcast will be recorded wherein different recordings from interviews, fiction, commentaries and music will be knitted together, and overlaid by my own analysis in the form of a voice over. 

I am trying to understand de-colonial aesthetics through black feminism. My project; in the form of an essay; will focus on four female feminists: Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, and bell hooks. De-colonial aesthetics will be defined as ‘a new way of being’, or in the words of bell hooks, ‘from margin to center’.  Then, the aesthetic will be seen in Truth’s speech called ‘Ain’t I a Woman?’, Wells’ anti-lynching crusade, Parks’ refusal to give up her bus seat for white passengers, and Hooks’ authorship. An attempt will also be made to critically analyze how these histories are written to fit under categories of resistance; for example; based on their degree of spontaneity. In culmination, two final questions will be answered. First, what is resistance? Second, what does it mean to be free?

My project is important because it is about black women, intersectionality, and black feminism. It will find de-colonial aesthetics in acts of those that have been at the heart of the negation caused by colonialism- the black women. Oppression as well as resistance to it, is best understood from the vantage point of the most oppressed, which in this case are Truth, Wells, Parks, hooks, and black women. Doubly marginalized on the basis of race and sex, black women’s histories are of absence. But feminists such as the aforementioned turn this silencing upside down when they refuse to give up a seat or demand an answer to the question of ‘Ain’t I a Woman’. Their body becomes an archive, and they act in correspondence to the way their body has been treated- misrepresented and abused.

Black feminism fought to redeem whatever beauty was left in the world; true sisterhood, honest journalism, unsegregated buses, and institutional equality. It healed the scars caused by racism and sexism, and affirmed life by fighting back when a black life was taken by a white life.

“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.