While researching on Intersectionality, I came across a quote from Audre Lorde’s address “Learning from the 60s” where she vehemently suggested that “there is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” This quote, I believe, is the living representation of what Kimberlé Crenshaw tries to highlight in light of the inconsistency of feminism to represent the hegemonized black woman. In retrospect, if there is one structural error that can be defined as the epitome of inconsistency in liberation movements such as feminism, it is the mere fact that they attain a rather polarized or blind-sided view of discrimination – disregarding the interconnectedness of all its various forms.

The forms of discrimination that have existed thus far have stemmed from an apparent dominant power structure: the ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.’ (Hooks) Hence, it is important to understand that the existing dynamics of structural power cannot be rectified by treating each form of discrimination rather independently. In other words, selectivism or treating one form of oppression as bigger than the other only suffices the misfortunes of some and exponentiates the ignorance of others – those who fall under multiple marginalized categories.

Intersectionality penetrates the layers of discrimination that combine to form a ‘matrix of domination’ by the privileged identities. This can be best explained under the ambit of intersectional feminist theory as explained by Hooks. She reiterates on the fact that sharing a single umbrella identity of being a ‘woman’ is a rather broad form of generalization. Hence, it isn’t sufficient enough to explain the multitudes of realities a woman has to experience – which is determined by the co-existing identities she attains as the multiple ‘layers’ that will continue to define the form of discrimination she will face as a part of her existence.

In other words, the living example of a sector intersectional politics provides representation to is ‘the black womanhood’. It highlights the bitter fact that social inequality and the redistribution of structural power exists even within the liberation movements – where there are a dominant few and the subjugated others. It attempts to rectify the error that tends to propagate the rejection of a binary presence of a woman: that an individual can be a woman and a person of colour. That the ultimate form of liberation should not be a utopian idea but a foreseeable reality for the black woman where she liberates herself from the chains of both her sex and her colour. Intersectionality highlights her misery in the sense that, if otherwise, she remains uncategorised – the worst form of identification that comes about as a result of the combination of subjugation towards her multiple existing identities.

Hence, intersectional politics, in all means, is productive. It is productive because it creates the basic understanding of how dominant categorizations such as class or race, independently or in combination, interact with gender to promote a strain of marginalization that, at the very least, requires recognition and subsequent rectification.

Based on Abel Meeropol’s poem, “Strange Fruit” is a song about the lynching and killing of black people. Billie Holiday’s rendition of the song was the first one and thus has a significant place in the history of redemption songs. The song is raw and yet subtle. It addresses the violence caused by racism but also creates a pastoral backdrop. This contrast emphasizes on the point being made. The song does not call out white people directly. It also does not openly ask for black people to rise to action. Instead, it creates a quieter and more internal response. This song can be seen as an embodiment of Toni Morrison and Aime Cesaire’s notions of using language and poetry and tool for liberation, and Martin Luther King’s idea of nonviolence.

The first argument presented here is simple; poetry and music are tools of liberation. Morrison recognizes the absence of black representation in literature. She illustrates how language is political and aids the agendas of those who possess it. “Strange Fruit,” written in the English language, not only represents but empowers the black person. The oppressor’s language is molded to aid the oppressed and that too in a moment when even black people were trying to produce content for the consumption of white people. Holiday’s version of the song came out in 1935 and it was the first song of its kind among the uncle-Toms of the black music industry. It presented a history and an account of the present. Without overtly calling for a revolution, it does the required job of informing the people and stirring emotion. In accord with like Cesaire’s ideas about poetry being weaponized, Holiday’s song on Meeropol’s poem aims to bring the very real problems of a people into an arena which was considered entertainment only. Such kind of inclusivity reflected on support, shared fear, and the need to break the silence. In a way, this song acts as one of the first steps to the civil rights movement.

This song also embodies the nonviolence Martin Luther King talks about. An analysis of the lyrics shows that. The song opens with a pastoral image of “trees” but sets a dark tone from the beginning as these trees are stated to “bear strange fruit.” The purpose of the pastoral image seems to be to highlight the unnatural acts taking place in a natural setting. There is “blood” everywhere as “black bodies” swing and the “smell of burning flesh” is carried through the “southern breeze.” The juxtaposition of images of trees and wind with blood and death creates an uneasy feeling which continues to exist as the song goes back and forth between a tranquil scene and bloodshed. It calls to the sense of smell and sight as the “scent of magnolias” is interrupted by the “smell of burning flesh.” The song ends with references to fruit, rain, and sun, creating an image of ripeness and fullness. Yet, the crop is “bitter.” This could be seen as the white man’s apparent progression in contrast with his ugly racism.

The song on its own is not making a direct claim. It’s descriptive but it does not define the oppressor, only the oppressed. It simply reports on the events taking place and suggests that they are unnatural. The tone is not accusatory. In fact, the pastoral imagery and Holiday’s calm voice contrast with the violence. It also does not seem to be asking to cause a revolution based on violence like the one Malcolm X or Fanon seems to advocate for. The song merely causes contemplation. It yearns for peace. It is a cry for help, and a plea to put an end to all violence. In this way, it reminds one of MLK’s faith in nonviolence. The objective is to redeem what is lost and what is left behind. Thus, violence in retaliation does not the serve the purpose.

Holiday’s song reflects on the power of language and the need for representation. It also shows how a silent and nonthreatening plea can also help bring one closer to liberation. The personal kind of response that this song creates embodies nonviolence and creates new possibilities. If blood is not shed, and if the white men sow seeds of equality and coexistence, a new fruit will be born. It is the possibility of a sweeter fruit that Holiday is showing and that MLK, too, was chasing.

“The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer. To respect the law, in the context in which the American Negro finds himself, is simply to surrender his self-respect.” – James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s article “A Report from Occupied Territory” and Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly are separated by 49 years, yet their messages have evidently disconcerting similarities concerning racial inequality and institutional discrimination experienced by African Americans. In his song Alright, Kendrick is able to align a very personal journey with the broader struggles of the Black experience.

According to Baldwin, the police is designed to “keep the Negro is his place” as exemplified by the case of The Harlem Six. Institutionalized racism continues to severely impact the lives of African Americans. In Baldwin’s time of writing, it reflected the fears and anxieties of white Americans surrounding the African American existence. Due to stereotyping, the Black identity has been made synonymous with crime and violence. This unjust interpretation has pervaded institutions through discourse, the effects of which remain prevalent. Both Baldwin and Kendrick try to reveal the nature of the atrocities committed against their community by virtue of the color of their skin. Despite the passage of time, police brutality and wrongful incarceration remain highly pertinent issues which oppress the Black community.

Wouldn’t you know

We been hurt, been down before

Nigga, when our pride was low

Lookin’ at the world like, “Where do we go?”

Nigga, and we hate po-po

Wanna kill us dead in the street fo sho’

Nigga, I’m at the preacher’s door

My knees gettin’ weak, and my gun might blow

But we gon’ be alright

In the pre-hook of his song Alright, Kendrick achieves universality in his message by choosing to keep the source of the “hurt” ambiguous. These words are sentiments, applicable to any hardship faced by African Americans throughout history and also in the contemporary era. Like Baldwin, he then proceeds to vocalize his frustration with the justice system that disproportionately targets African Americans. When referencing the “preacher’s door,” Kendrick implies that he seeks to counsel of God to set him on the right path in midst of the hardships he faces.

Alright can be interpreted as an extension of Baldwin’s words, as Kendrick himself preaches a message of strength and endurance against racism that is deeply entrenched in American society. Through the pre-hook and chorus, he finds strength and shows solidarity with the Black community, realizing that his personal struggles are not unlike the history of African Americans. Kendrick has remembered that fight is inherent in the Black experience, that progress has and will continue to be made due to the fortitude, strength, and perseverance of his people.

Through God, Kendrick believes there is no adversity too difficult to navigate. He recognizes that the problems faced by him and his community are a shared struggle. He goes on to preach a message of union and displays faith in God’s plan. Like any great anthem, Alright’s chorus is brief, catchy, and extremely versatile. The inflection with which it is performed is infectious—it can be repeated infinitely without tiring. In fact, its message only gets stronger the more it is heard.

Outside the album’s narrative, Alright has been adopted as the unofficial anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement. Beginning in 2012 when an unarmed Black teen Trayvon Martin was killed, the hashtag Black Lives Matter emerged on social media outlets. It became a digital platform where dialogue, frustration, and debate could be expressed around issues of racial profiling and racial inequality in the United States. The phrase would come to represent a national movement whose pursuit was and continues to be racial justice and social awareness. The movement intensified as more and more unarmed Black men and women continued to lose their lives at the hands of the police.

The song’s message of hope through resilience struck a chord with the supporters of the movement, and the chorus has been heard chanted at protests and rallies across the United States. Institutionalized racism continues to be a problem which marginalizes African Americans. The struggle to redefine the African American identity is still ongoing. In a way, Kendrick echoes the words of Baldwin through his poetic expression which has become a chant of hope, solidarity, and defiance. Alright radiates an optimism that showcases the resilience of the Black spirit against racism.

“We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp”— Toni Morrison

The debate on violence and non-violence is essentially a question on what it means to live an ethical life. To Martin Luther King, non-violence is a philosophy of being. It calls for faith in the “amazing potentialities for goodness” in all humans, where the means must justify the ends— indeed, they are the ends. In his speech on “Unfulfilled Dreams”, King preaches a philosophy whereby action and doing can exist merely within the realm of the internal self. If the act of fixing your heart is all you can find it in you to do, it’s enough. Non-violence is a “technique of action” involving intention.

But can the “boat of faith” get you through the storm on its own? After all, what does it really mean to do the right thing in the face of great wrong? First, we need to identify the wrong. For Malcolm X, the African-American problem, or as he would call it the “Negro problem”, is about a continuous investment that has been poured into the American landscape. It is an investment of blood. And if we are to take King’s conception of the means justifying the ends, then it is clear that this investment can only be made good in one way. Earlier in this course we talked about how if decolonization is a story of triumph, it is also a story of cracked skulls, broken bones and disappearances. Malcolm and King are both telling true stories— different, but true.

The stories of violence and non-violence do not need to exist in a binary; Malcolm X does not advocate needless violence in his speech, nor does King proposition passivity. But we must question what violence really is. If it is the intention to do harm, what happens when the underlying intention of a violent act is to reclaim what has been stolen from you? As Malcolm says, “how can you thank a man for giving you back what’s already yours?” An investment of blood has to be repaid in the same. And a belief in the “amazing potentialites of goodness” necessitates a recognition of the potentialities of evil. To me, the difference between non-violence and violence is not in the means through which the end is achieved, but in the site of action.

For Malcolm, there are physical, and therefore external, threats that must be recognized. It is a question of the ballot or the bullet, and this physical response of hitting back is an affirmation of his humanness, an inalienable quality. The struggle between good and evil is happening in front of his very eyes and he cannot turn the other cheek. To King, non-violence is a way of being. It transcends the colour line and manifests itself in the “story of life”. It’s a struggle, but one that happens within the self. He is not advocating a philosophy of turning the other cheek. Evil is real, but its also closer to home than you might think.

In Toni Morrison’s story of the blind woman, the children ask a very relevant question— “Is there no context for our lives?” Both Malcolm and King gave their lives to the struggle to build this context. And while Malcolm’s fiery speeches and luminescent persona reek of courage, there’s a lot to be said for the person, who, standing in the wake of unspeakable wrongs remains steadfast in one simple belief— the belief that, at the end of the day, goodness, and only goodness, will prevail. The philosophies of violence and non-violence discussed above do not exist in a parallel state to each other. They stretch through the constraints of the temporal into a time when Malcolm and King can turn to each other and say:

“Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done – together.”

Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” is a memorably dramatic one. It is a rendition where strong and tactile poetry meets a raw, sharp and an almost unforgiving or callous voice. A voice determined to drive home the image of a tortured, dead black body, blood and the serene and beautiful landscape behind it. Simone called the song “ugly” and it is- in the pain that it makes a listener relive and in the beauty of its ability to become immortal, to latch itself onto the world. Abel Meeropol’s poetry becomes language that is truly alive, that leaves no room for lies, that which shows all reality- whether real or imagined. As Toni Morrison showed us, this poetic language becomes “the measure of our lives”, that which really and truly is.

Here one can see language as not just a “system” or a source of “agency” but as a living, breathing phenomenon as Morrison describes. It has a heart, an inside that protects human potential, the place where the meaning of humanity lives. And thus, like all other living things, language too can die. Language too can be tortured, mistreated, ignored, mutilated, caged, killed, protected, loved or made to live on. Language gives humans the “access” to what is left of “human instincts”, and because it has a heart that houses that instinct, language itself is a human instinct. Language itself is the beating or dead heart, the inside. That is why oppressive language “is oppressive”. This is a place where words cease to be a reflection of human thoughts and feelings but become them, with the living, throbbing capacity to create and destroy, to live and die. With a life of its own, language, in all capacities, does not only create its own path but is one. It does not only create a human but becomes one. A Narrative, therefore, creates us the “moment it is being created”.

This is why it is naturally inclined to let its words move towards the place in the human heart to which they really are meant to go to. It “arcs towards the place where meaning may lie.” Somewhere along that movement, that journey is often intercepted- language is made incapable of completing that journey. But Morrison shows us that this does not change the reality of language’s endeavor- to “surge towards knowledge, not destruction.” One may understand poetic language to make the same endeavors, to live in the hope and struggle to say what has to be said in just the way it has to be said. The essence of its life lies in its attempt to “limn the actual, imagined and possible”- all as equally real and meaningful narratives.

The lyrics of “Strange Fruit” encapsulate this reality of the real, the imagined and the possible. It begins by playing with “strange fruit” and “black body”, jolting one into experiencing how language can interweave reality and imagination, emphasizing the sheer truth of both. The imagery is vivid and meant to disturb- meant to make one hear the resonating silence of a breezy afternoon, the blood, and the breeze.  It is meant to make one experience both- the calmness, the silent pastoral landscape, the rhythmic swinging and breeze and the central presence of death, injustice, torture and pain. The sense of tranquility and the notion of human undoing rest within each other. The magnolia is only sensed if one senses the “burning flesh”. The black, hanging bodies, or the “crop”, create the rhythmic swinging. The breeze delivers the smell of blood smeared on the leaves and the roots of trees. The tranquility and the brokenness are inseparable. It is here that language fuses the real and the imagined together. We, inhumane humans, who enjoy the breeze and the blood together. It is all real.

A photograph of the lynching of two African-American men inspired these words. Yet the poetry recreates not just the painfully normalized phenomenon of lynching, but also the heart of that pain. It no longer matters whether a photograph or a real sight inspires it, or whether bodies or fruits hung from the southern trees. What matters is the inescapable, the piercingly real reality of the pain and the peace. In essence, if language dies, if its heart dies, so do we humans because we will no longer say or mean the things we are supposed to say, the things that have a meaning and emanate life. Whether what hung from the trees were just crops or bodies, the poetic language said what it needed to say. It showed its heart, the peace and the pain, the inside- here, the desensitivity. Thus, with a true understanding of the heart comes the power to choose to heal. In essence, Morrison shows the true heart of language and humanity- the power and beauty of being what you may be and still healing. As Morrison’s old, blind woman would have meant- to kill the bird or to let it fly.

Listening to all the songs in the playlist, immediately took me back to the speech ‘Unfulfilled Dreams’ by MLK. Every song talks of a struggle, whether it names it or not. The emotions that the songs evoke immediately make one think of the change that they strive towards. From the oldest songs such as ‘Strange Fruit ’and ‘Old man River’ to the point of ‘This is America’ and ‘We are here’ one sees the lasting struggle. Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change is Gonna Come’ walks you through the labour of this struggle. Even towards the end of the songs, even after questioning himself, he talks about how he will still carry on because the change is gonna come. This reminds one of MLK when he says that even throughout the reality that the dream might be left unfulfilled you go on. On the other hand the song ‘Old Man River’ talks about a person’s weariness in this long striving which compares it to the Mississippi river that it seems to continue. It continues till the present.

This is true as the struggle is still relevant, the content of the struggle might change but it is still there as shown by the songs of ‘This is America’ which focuses on gun violence and the reality of being black in the United States. Numerous other songs refer to racial profiling and one can understand the historical importance of black representation in the movies like ‘Black Panther’

This struggle has grown beyond that of the civil rights movement or for what MLK or Malcolm X stood for, this struggle is the one of freedom and peace that is defined by Ella baker in her speech. Ella baker explains how peace is not the absence of struggle but the presence of justice and a struggle for freedom that encompasses the whole mankind and so gives her reason as to why those were not the last stages of the struggle. In ‘We Are Here’ Alicia keys mentions Baghdad and Gaza as well, which shows that this effort for rights is not limited on terms of race or colour or nationality. It’s a horizontal solidarity which exists in Ella Baker’s definition of Freedom.

Hence, each of the songs and the artists take the unfulfilled dreams of the previous generation, build up on it and move forward in creating the ‘temple’ that Martin Luther King Jr. talks about, so that one day the change will come.