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All you must hold onto

by Keller 0 Comments

The “Black Sexism Debate” issue of The Black Scholar, Vol. 10, No. 8/9, May/June 1979, reminded me of Nikki Giovanni’s remarkable 1971 dialogue with James Baldwin on Soul!, a TV program that has been called the U.S.’s “first Black Tonight Show.”

While host Ellis Haizlip introduces James Baldwin as “Mr. Baldwin,” he introduces Giovanni as “Nikki.” The dynamic between Baldwin and Giovanni is compelling. At times, when Baldwin calls Giovanni “baby, baby, baby,” and “my dear,” it comes across as approachable; at other times, it comes across as rather patronizing. (Affectionately, and perhaps wryly, she responds by calling him “Jimmy.”) He routinely interrupts and corrects her, blurring the line between his status as an elder and his status as a man.

At one point (51:00), while Giovanni struggles to get a word in about Black women and children’s experiences with domestic violence and lack of support from Black men, Baldwin puts his hand over hers, stopping her hand gestures, and says, “But wait, wait, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, hold the phone, baby.” He gives her hand a squeeze before gesturing towards himself. “Look,” he transitions, “I’ve had to learn in my own life…” Divested by racism of the social economic ability to provide for his family, Baldwin suggests, “I’m no longer in my own eyes – it doesn’t make any difference what you may think of me – in my own eyes I’m not a man.” Giovanni does not budge, responding at once, “It does indeed make a difference what I think about it.”

Earlier, Giovanni has explained her position (48:11):

Let’s say a guy’s going with a girl. You’re going with Maybelle and Maybelle gets preg­nant, and all of a sudden you can’t speak to Maybelle because you don’t have the money for a crib, right? Maybelle doesn’t need a crib. […] What Maybelle needs at that moment is a man. […] A man […] is not necessarily a provider of all that stuff. […] You don’t have a job. […] Maybelle understands there is no job. But what she needs is a man to come by and say, ‘Hey baby, you look good.’ And Black men re­fuse to function like that because they say, ‘I want to bring the crib when I come.’ You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself. […] I’m a poor woman. […] I’m already deprived of almost everything that we find in the world. Must I also be de­prived of you?

Baldwin responds with a memorable quote (50:16): “You can blame him [the man] on a human level if you like, but I think it’s more interesting to try to – you have to understand it, the bag the cat is in.” His riff on the saying is powerful, but where do Black women fit in? Are Black women responsible for understanding both the social reality men have been stuffed into, and their own? Are men and women’s “bags” separate at all? And if there are two cats in one bag, can they not use their combined strength to discover the shape of their social reality together, to break out together? Why is it an inevitability for the bag to be external to the man, to overdetermine the man’s behavior, and yet an expectation for the woman to understand the bag and accommodate its harmful effects on people trapped inside? Why are women expected to perform unique epistemological labor to understand social realities affecting multiple genders?

The question of how Black men can better understand and support Black women’s struggle against oppression never comes up in Giovanni and Baldwin’s dialogue. I was reminded of Erykah Badu’s “Bag Lady”:

Bag lady you gone hurt your back
Dragging all them bags like that
I guess nobody ever told you
All you must hold onto, is you, is you, is you

This resonates with Giovanni’s insistence: “You’re never going to get the crib. Bring yourself.” Whereas Baldwin emphasizes a man’s dependence on the bag in which he has been trapped, and thus “the Black man’s” need to be seen as a man by white society’s standards, Giovanni focuses on “Maybelle’s” radical antimaterialist love for her man. He is already seen as a man by the woman right in front of him; if only he would value her perspective just as much as his own, she wouldn’t pay the price of his needing affirmation elsewhere. As Toni Morrison critiqued Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man – “Invisible to whom?”

There is no unmediated relationship, Giovanni and Morrison suggest, between “the Black man” and a larger, uniformly white “society.” Relationships between Black people and their world are also shaped by families, communities, and workplaces in which Black women and Black men can and must support each other, across difference. A Black woman’s perspective is essential to establish this radical commons. Otherwise, Black women become, as Donna Kate Rushin has written so eloquently in Bridge Poem (1981), the bridge between Black men and white society. Who will build Black women’s healing connections to each other, and to themselves? As Audre Lorde challenges, “If society ascribes roles to black men which they are not allowed to fulfill, is it black women who must bend and alter our lives to compensate, or is it society that needs changing?” (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 17).

Like Giovanni’s Maybelle, June Jordan uses the Scholar‘s conversation around sexism to advance an anticapitalist argument. “The point is not whether he earns a couple dollars more or less than she; the point is that, as a people, our ability to provide for ourselves is under […] white institutional attack,” Jordan stresses (The Black Scholar, “The Black Sexism Debate,” 40). Aspiring to gendered white economic ideals and competing for scraps will not fix this crisis; rather, solidarity and Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” are in order. The ideal man for Giovanni’s Maybelle refuses to buy into the demands of racist capitalist materialism, for he does not measure his worth in dollars or property accumulation. He brings value to Maybelle’s life in himself, by offering to share emotional support and child care responsibilities, and by treating her with respect. He carries his own weight, and they are both freer for it.

 

 

[1] Quentin Lucas has written an excellent analysis of their conversation, with excerpts transcribed, for Medium.

Dilemmas of the Kitchen Table

by Keller 0 Comments

Readings

I was fascinated to learn that, after the racist white feminist press Persephone dropped This Bridge, women of color feminists including Barbara Smith and Audre Lorde worked together to found their own radical feminist press by and for women of color, Kitchen Table, in 1980, with which they kept This Bridge in circulation (Adair and Nakamura, 261). This immediately reminded me of Carrie Mae Weems’s historic exhibition, her Kitchen Table photo series, in 1990. Both the feminist press and Weems’s photo series chose to center the kitchen table in projects that defended women of color’s and queer women’s access to intimate justice.

Picture

Members of the Kitchen Table Press. Source: Kitchen Table Literary Arts. https://www.kitchen-table.org/

For the radical feminist press, the name Kitchen Table immediately announces the editors’ commitment to prioritizing praxis over theory. There are many crucial contrasts with the racist white feminist title “Persephone” – a reference to an ancient Greek goddess and princess who, in a thinly veiled fruit allegory, disobeys injunctions against sex before marriage. “Persephone” appeals to the racist european cult of claiming ancient Greek and Roman slaveholding and colonizing societies as whitewashed cultural forebears to europe and the united states. The white feminist invocation of “Persephone” defines freedom in a very limited and individualistic sense: a princess’s desire to choose heterosexual partners without consequences.

In contrast, Kitchen Table locates freedom in direct action more than theory or myth, in the lives of ordinary women rather than the elite. Persephone is a fictional character; the Kitchen Table is a very real place. Kitchen Table recalls a linkage of necessity and creativity in the full dimensions of Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” that rejects heteronormativity, superficial pornographic consumerism, and freedom without accountability. Rather than representing the name of an individual woman, Kitchen Table names a space that has functioned at once as a home and a workplace for working women throughout history, a space within which women are, through the press, finally invited to define and name themselves.

Similarly, in The Kitchen Table Series (1990), Carrie Mae Weems brilliantly subverts the anthropological gaze of the camera.[1] She acts as both object – that which is captured by the lens – and subject – the framer, editor, and namer of what can be seen. For Weems, the kitchen table does not symbolize political isolation; a lamp illuminates the kitchen table like a stage, or a factory floor. Largely a homosocial space shared by women, in which men feature only as visitors, never as fixtures, the kitchen table represents a political economic arena in its own right. Weems’s kitchen table is entangled with and helps shape the mainstream masculinist, white supremacist political landscape, rather than existing “outside” it.

The fact that the essential work Black women expend in kitchens is perennially unpaid and often required in addition to a full day’s work at a formal job risks refiguring racist and patriarchal exploitation. Weems’s Kitchen Table explores the contradictory potentialities of the kitchen: on the one hand, as a landmark of the ongoing, unredressed labor given by and seized from Black women; and on the other hand, as a radical commons out of which the liberatory possibilities of communities and the sustenance of generations can grow.

In Untitled (Eating lobster), a man at the head of the table hungrily sucks lobster, leaving shells behind. Weems’s food is untouched as she leans over to caress the man. Behind them, a bird sits in a looming cage. Maya Angelou wrote that the bird’s wings are clipped and her legs are tied. But Weems’s limbs are unchained and her kitchen has no bars. What bonds make her stay and pull her towards the man she feeds – force or love, pleasure or obligation, delight or debt? Can either/or questions help us understand her position?

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Eating lobster), 1990 © the artist and courtesy Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems, Untitled (Eating lobster), 1990 © the artist

The kitchen table as a social economic institution analyzed by Weems and Adair and Nakamura’s reflection on the Kitchen Table as a radical feminist press by and for women of color raise similar dilemmas. After recounting women’s struggles to gain access to books by women of color that were routinely abandoned out of print by racist mainstream publishers, Adair and Nakamura in “Digital Afterlives” give credit to online networks of radical free information sharing, while also pointing out troubling continuities with legal systems of exploitation. Spaces for “digital consciousness raising on Tumblr” serve as a

“feminist classroom[,] but one in which nobody – not the authors of This Bridge, not the unknown laborers who scanned and uploaded hundreds of pages, not the feminists of color writing and critiquing the work online – was compensated for providing [this] education. Nobody, that is, except the media corporation Yahoo, which owns and sells advertising space on Tumblr. […] [Thus,] both the legally distributed book and the pirated version online raise ethical concerns about the uneven distribution of work, ownership, and social power in pedagogical spaces” (Adair and Nakamura, 256).

For example, the Kitchen Table press survived in part by taking advantage of personal relationships with people – predominantly women of color – who were committed to the cause of circulating their radical message, which spared the press the cost of hiring paid staff to do the same work. Adair and Nakamura add hastily, “Of course, we do not equate these acts of solidarity with the exploits of racial capital” (262). Ultimately, however, “even ‘revolutionary’ pedagogical networks inevitably reproduce some racial and gendered dynamics of unremunerated work,” including work that is not counted or credited as work (263). Is the kitchen table a home or a workplace? A product of public labor or private love? An appliance serving at a woman’s convenience, or a domineering institution in whose framework her life plays out, like a cross-section of a dollhouse? If it is both, what does that tell us about freedom and the work of getting free?

 

1. My sources for analyzing Weems’s Kitchen Table are: (1) O’Grady, Megan, “How Carrie Mae Weems Rewrote the Rules of Image-Making,” The New York Times, 2018. (2) Kelsey, Hall, Tillet, Bey, and Blessing, “Around the Kitchen Table,” Aperture, No. 223, Vision & Justice (Summer 2016), 52-56.