It's not about trying to transcend my race.
race non-conforming, ball rolling, and tradition!
¿What you heard?
Sitting outside Saffron & Rose, a Black Bruin says something so glorious I pull out my phone to recite his words.
For anyone gender non-conforming, this is foundational, but for me, whose racial identity is more activated than my gender identity, it was revelatory.
Gender discourse seems to develop before race discourse.
Why can we be gender non-conforming but not race non-conforming?
Why can we be transgender but not transracial?
Why are we sensitive about correct pronouns and avoiding deadnames but accept the use of inaccurate, offensive, invisibilizing terms to describe neighborhoods of color?
I think it is, probably, because, for many white people, gender matters but race does not.
What you doin’?!
I have come up with a diagnosis for LA Commons, the cultural arts non-profit I’m collaborating with through my Artists At Work fellowship. They are chronically ill with a common creative malady called eyes bigger than stomach disease.
They say yes to so much more than they actually have staff to achieve, and this ends up with artists, like myself, stuck in a slog of delayed deadlines and unanswered emails.
Coping with their sickness for the past few months has affirmed two core beliefs…
Poor communication is a human’s natural state of being.
Regardless of what I achieve or who I collaborate with, I will, at all levels of my career, have to get the ball rolling (or bouncing!) myself.
What you seen??
THE NIGHT OF COUNTING THE YEARS (1969) is about the trap of…
^Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
And what to do when you learn that your culture’s…
Cause harm.
Wannis and his brother are horrified when their tribe’s secret…
Is revealed following their father’s death.
The stakes for Wannis and his brother though are much higher than for any of the characters in Fiddler on the Roof. Survival is on the line.
When Wannis’ brother condemns his society’s tomb-robbing ways…
They dead him, and unlike in Fiddler, not just in a metaphorical sense.
When Wannis eventually also stands against tradition, it’s a death sentence for his home.
While Wannis ultimately succeeds in bucking tradition, in Muna Moto (1975) when the protagonist Ngando learns that tradition disallows him from fathering his newborn child since he is too poor to pay the dowry for his baby mama, he tries to run away with his baby just as Wannis tries to run away with his tribe’s stolen artifacts…
But tradition ends up leaping out from the bushes and detaining him, leaving Ngando incarcerated by the chains of his culture.