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The night Barack won, my mum called me from Jamaica. Like all around us, and around the world, we wept - and she said to me "You see Berette, do you see what he has done? Look at his supporters: an even mix of every type of person jumping together as one body. That is the world your father and I raised you to see, that is the world we wanted to you to live in." And I cried out, LOUDLY and almost violently because that night, I remembered the girl I was when I moved here and my heart opened for me to begin loving myself again.
Yes, it was truly an amazing time to be alive, to be a part of such joy, such openness, such incredulous euphoric oneness on that night, and I will forever cherish having been alive to witness and experience it. I was jumping till the wee hours in Times Square - too filled and too hungry to be filled more to go home. :) It was also the night I accepted America as my home.
I received a most moving email describing the new endeavors of my acting professor Godfrey Simmons Jr, inspired by Barack Obama's Historic victory. (See my Favourite Blog List or go directly to www.dispatchesfromamendedamerica.blogspot.com). I was immediately inspired by his appeal and responded to it with a most personal account of my journey as a black immigrant here in the United States. First a synopsis of his project - followed by my response:
In the month leading up to the Presidential Inauguration, I will be traveling throughout America with my friend and colleague Brandt Adams to interview Americans about this watershed event. The guiding questions will be: What does the election of America's first African American President mean to you? Has this changed your life and if so, how? Has this changed America? What do we do now? We feel we can best investigate these questions by soliciting real Americans' own stories of the 2008 presidential election through their eyes and in their own words. What are their hopes for the President elected on hope? What suggestions can they give to an Obama administration that would keep them engaged in the governance of our country?
The interviews, which will be digitally recorded either on audio or video, will form the basis of a documentary theatre piece called DISPATCHES FROM (A)MENDED AMERICA. Brandt and I, two displaced sons of the South, will begin traveling on December 28th along the same routes used by The Freedom Riders in 1960 and then make our way from Mississippi, North toward Chicago, retracing The Great Migration of African Americans from 1910-1940. Finally, we'll make our way eastward through Philadelphia, finally landing in Washington DC on January 19th in time for the Presidential Inaugural Ceremony. We plan to interview people in Farmville, Virginia, home to one of the school districts included in the original five cases comprising Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka; Greensboro, site of the first civil rights sit-in at Woolworth's; and Oxford, Mississippi, where James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962. The fact that Brandt is a 25-year-old white man born and raised in Virginia and I am a 42-year-old black man raised in Virginia only serves to amplify the resonance of this project to us both personally and politically.
My Response
I would like to share a couple of thoughts with you on this if you don't mind. I know I'm not an American, and so there's a particular meaning that this election has had for African Americans that I can't share in a historical or cultural context, but I can certainly share in an emotional one, as a black immigrant in this country. As you know, I am the daughter of two attorneys/human rights activists - of West African and German decent. I grew up as a foreigner in every country I've lived, in Jamaica, the UK, and now here, raised with ideals that espouse the same values as those lofty ones upon which this country was built...We The People... . I moved here with, as I was told, a blanket over my eyes. I therefore lived to, and relished in cracking the glass of stereotypes. I was lucky to make it to my mid-twenties with no idea, experience, or frankly belief in racism; with no tolerance for the so-called existence of it in my daily life; no real empathy for any one who cried from its contemporary lashes; and I certainly didn't identify with the living meaning of 'minority' - for you see, I had that middle class up-bringing in nations where either BLACK was the majority (and so therefore I've seen black leaders of nations), or in the UK where being 'an educated black' was lauded so much so that it was barely even noticed! A far cry from America where being black was a point to be noted no matter WHAT you do or where you are from! You're black first, and then the rest of your demographic or personal details can be organized into some pre-ordained section of the social quilt.
Over the years, I have felt the blanket I came here with fall from my eyes. I can no longer argue, shut off, or close my eyes to the fact that I have been fighting a thing I never fought before. I have to fight to be me, to be 'Berette'. I know undeniably now how "the angry black woman" is formed. Not so much because of I've become one, but because of moments when I channeled the feeling of one because I felt denied the right to be the educated, beautiful, mild mannered, sexy, intelligent and sophisticated being that I actually am. Yes I said it! ha! When I open my mouth and this nondescript accent comes out, I am no longer blinded to the confusion it causes - I am now hurt by it. When I speak in well constructed sentences, and offer bridge-tales for a desperate connection - or as an explanation, I have felt saddened by the fascination and incredulousness in the eyes of some of my listeners or audience, and no longer enjoy the acceptance I gain, as it is often in the form of exotification if you will. If I don't dress in fashionable duds, I can't get a cab or service in a store. I can't deny that the woman I am, that many of my sisters are, is not seen in the media or represented in a way to reinforce the validation of my apparent freakish existence. I can't believe that I find myself now seeing, feeling, and experiencing things I never saw, felt, or heard in my childhood. As a woman, a black woman, I have come to experience and understand the burden of this ascribed status and its place at the bottom of the totem pole. I have come to understand as a quiet social rule that I am not a status prize on the arm of men, and most painfully therefore of black men who have further to climb. I have taken on damaging thoughts of myself. After over a decade, I have fallen from my parents' idealistic heights and now live as a 'minority'.
I was going through an emotional break - a sense of a loss of self, and I needed to get out, for in my subjective world, - I came to conclude that while living here, America was apparently teaching me to hate myself. Then Barack Obama came along, with that wife of his. :) Let me state that since March of this year, it was Michelle Obama who held my interest most. It was her, who gave him deep character in my eyes. It was her interviews and speeches I paid closest attention to - most of them featured on CSPAN. He was easy for me to accept - as we have seen this (type of) man represented in politics and media before - and frankly I grew up around men like that, his rhetoric, his sentiments, wishes, projections, dreams were refreshingly familiar to me. His style of debate woke up an unused part of my mind and heart and brought my father back to me. But his wife - she represents CHANGE, in a way that will I believe, quietly shift and alter far more in the current paradigm of the world than even his win. I grew up with women like this all around me too - my mother being one cut from the same cloth. But rarely have I seen these women commonly featured plainly in politics, high academia, or media, if at all, the lack of which contributed to my forgetfulness and diminutive perception of myself in America. Oh, to be so priviliged to be a little black girl in the world today to see her, a tall dark-skinned, broad-nosed, well spoken educated, black woman as the First Lady of a first world white majority nation! As she said, and I paraphrase 'to be a girl who will be a woman my age some day living in a world where she can take this for granted!' INDEED. What privilige to be black adult female to see that too. WE needed that. I NEEDED, I NEEDED to see THAT in my lifetime. How will this change how black women are seen? How will this lift some of the burden? How will this remove: the xenophobia, the concubine crown, the mammi cap, the animalistic vulgarness expected of us, the anger, the pain, bipolar post-traumatic stress and confusion, the lashes of thankless expectation of strength, the lack of positive reinforcement, the lack of permission to be weak or to be great? How will this remove the invisibility? Will this give black women the right to be unremarkably yet respectfully normal? Godfrey, this is what I wept for that night.
Strangely enough - I really didn't experience doubt about the trajectory of Barack's campaign. It seemed ordained and so I believed, but not with a blanket over my eyes, rather with a knowing and a worry frankly, of how he would be regarded by the end of 2009. For anyone who would have won, love and popularity would not be theirs' to hold by the holidays of next year, but I felt weary of the first black president having to endure the impatience from the public from what will be hardcore third world political choices imposed on us to fix the mess of that nitwit Bush. It will be interesting to see how long and how tightly we can hold on to the hopes we now project onto our Son of Hope. He will need our faith and our patience and our belief and our celebration more a year from now - it is key that we know this now - for the romance will end shortly.
My mum called me from Jamaica - and we wept - and she said - "You see Berette, you see what he what he has done? Look at his supporters: an even mix of every type person jumping together as one force - that is the world we raised you to see, that is the world we wanted to you to live in." And I cried out, LOUDLY and vigourously, because that night, I remembered the girl I was when I moved here and my heart opened to begin loving myself in the American context again.
I wish you every possible blessing on this journey. I wish for you to be filled and for you to find all you seek, I anxiously await the blog entries and the theatrical work that will be birthed from this effort.
Peace with much ease dear brother, teacher, and old friend,
Berette
