Friday, January 19, 2018

Blaxit to Africa--Aljazeera.com interviews Muhammida El Muhajir

Why some African Americans are moving to Africa

Muhammida El Muhajir with parents Nisa Ra and Marvin X

www.aljazeera.com

Why some African Americans

are moving to Africa

by Azad Essa

18 Jan 2018

SOURCE: AL JAZEERAAccra, Ghana - They have come from the big cities of

San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. Thousands of them. And many

refuse to return.

A new wave of African Americans is escaping the incessant racism and

prejudice in the United States. From Senegal and Ghana to The Gambia,

communities are emerging in defiance of conventional wisdom that Africa

is a continent everyone is trying to leave.

It is estimated that between 3,000 and 5,000 African Americans live in

Accra, the Ghanaian capital. They are teachers in small towns in the west

or entrepreneurs in the capital and say they that even though living in

Ghana is not always easy, they feel free and safe.

Take Muhammida el-Muhajir, a digital marketer from New York City, who

left her job to move to Accra.

She says she moved, because despite her education and experience,

she was always made to feel like a second-class citizen. Moving was an

opportunity to fulfil her potential and avoid being targeted by racial violence.

She told Al Jazeera her story:

On life as a second-class citizen in the US...

"I grew up in Philadelphia and then New York. I went to Howard, which

is a historically black university. I tell people that Ghana is like Howard

in real life. It felt like a microcosm of the world. At university, they tell

us the world isn't black, but there are places where this is the real world.

Howard prepares you for a world where black people are in charge, which

is a completely different experience compared to people who have gone

to predominantly white universities."

I can't say what's happening in America today is

any worse than what's been happening at

any other time.

--MUHAMMIDA EL-MUHAJIR

On her first trip to Africa...

"The first country I went to was Kenya. I was 15 and travelled with a group

of kids. I was one of two black kids. I saw early that I could fit in and wasn't

an outsider. Suddenly it switched, I came from America where I was an

outsider, but in Africa, I no longer felt like that. I did graduate school in

Ghana in 2003 and went back to New York and then moved to Ghana in

2014.

"I have no connection to Ghana. Some people in my family did tests, and

we found ties to Senegal and The Gambia, but I don't think you can ever

figure it out. No matter where you were sold or left the port, Senegal or

Ghana, no one can be certain where you came from."

No matter where you were sold or left the port,

Senegal or Ghana, no one can be certain where

you came from.

MUHAMMIDA EL-MUHAJIR

Market in Agbogbloshie, a district in Accra, Ghana's capital [Thomas Imo/Photothek via Getty

Images]

On leaving New York for Accra...

"Even when you live in a place like New York as a black person, you're

always an outsider.

"You hear stories about the richest black people, like Oprah Winfrey,

getting shut out of a store or Jay-Z not being allowed to buy [an

apartment]. Those things happen. It doesn't matter if you're a celebrity,

you're a second-class citizen. This was the biggest issue for me.

"In America, you're always trying to prove yourself; I don't need to prove

myself to anyone else's standards here. I'm a champion, I ran track and

went to university, and I like to win, so I refuse to be in a situation where

I will never win."

You might not have electricity,

but you won't get killed by the

police either.

MUHAMMIDA EL-MUHAJIR

On moving to Ghana...

"There are amenities that I am used to at home in New York - like parties,

open bars and fashion, so when I realised I could do the same things in

Africa as I could back in the US, I was sold. There is also a big street art festival

here, and that was the difference from when I came [as a student]. I saw the

things that I love at home here, so I decided that now is the time."

On Ghanaian reactions...

"When Ghanaians find out that I live here, they're usually confused

about why I chose to live here as an American. There is definitely certain

access and privilege being American here, but it's great to finally cash

in on that because it doesn't mean anything in America.

"There are also plenty of privileged Ghanaians; if you take away race

there's a class system."

Modern architecture in Ghana's capital [Thomas Imo/Photothek via Getty Images]

On the 'Blaxit' documentary...

"In my documentary, I chose five people that I've met since I've been

here and every one of them went to a black college in the US. It's

something that prepares you mentally to realise you aren't a second-class

citizen. Something like that can help you make a transition to live in Africa.

"I made Blaxit because of this wave of African-Americans moving to Africa.

This trend started to happen around independence of African countries,

but the new wave [comprises] people who come to places like this.

This new group has certain access in America and comes here to have
that lifestyle in Africa.

"Unknown to us, we're living out the vision that [Ghanaian politician and

revolutionary] Kwame Nkrumah set out for us, of this country being the

gateway to Africa for the black diaspora.

"I don't want people to think that Africa is this magic utopia where all

your issues will go away. It's just that some of the things you might face

in America as a black person - you won't have to suffer with those things

here.

"You might not have electricity, but you won't get killed by the police either.

"I want people to understand that they have options and alternatives. Most

black people in America don't know that these options exist; they think they

have to suffer because there's nowhere else to go. But no, there are other

places."

On the prospect of more African-Americans

moving...

"I think more will come when they begin to see it as a viable alternative.

But it's not easy and it's not cheap. I can't say what's happening in America

today is any worse than what's been happening at any other time. I think

now is the time that people are starting to see they can live somewhere

else."

This interview was edited for clarity and length.

Follow Azad Essa on Twitter: @AzadEssa

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Azad Essa

Azad Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera, covering Sub-Saharan Africa.

Muhammida El Muhajir is Pan African Editor of The Movement Newspaper

Thursday, January 18, 2018

EDWIN HAWKINS SINGERS - OH HAPPY DAY

Oh Happy Day

Oh, Edwin
we rejoice your passage to the Upper Room
Oh, Happy Day
for all of us in the Bay, Oaktown
City of Resistance
Qur'an says After difficulty comes ease
Oh Happy Day
Sixteen Crucified Saviors walked
on water
peace be still
oh happy day
Jesus walked
Isa Ibn Mar'yam
Isa Ibn Yusef
Oh happy day
Frankie Beverly say
joy pain same
oh happy day
after difficulty comes ease
no cross no crown
sweat equity
Santa Rita jail
holding cell sleep head by toilet
strip butt naked time after time
hold nuts cough
top ramen money
no cigarettes
hungry hustle food day night
communal meal top ramen casserole doritoes bologna
everybody share
Oh happy day
down dungeon
If mind ain't in prison
you ain't in prison!
Oh happy day!
Some out here in the big yard in mental prison, lockdown. Wake up, stay woke!
Oh happy day!
Jesus walked
Oh happy day
washed my sins away
Isa Ibn Mar'yam
Isa Ibn Yusef.
--Marvin X
1/18/18

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

For Lorraine Hansberry, ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ Was Just the Start

Salamishah Tillet
January 12, 2018
New York Times

For Lorraine Hansberry, art was not simply an expression of her civil rights concerns but a space where she could wage racial and gender battles and find resolutions that were more liberating than the law.

David Attie, Lorraine Hansberry was the first African-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway, with “A Raisin in the Sun.”

A few months before her death from pancreatic cancer in early 1965, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry spoke about a letter to the editor that she sent to, but that was ultimately rejected by, The New York Times. Standing before a racially integrated Town Hall audience in New York, Ms. Hansberry, then 34, sought to counter the growing white liberal criticism of the racial militancy expressed by a younger generation of African-Americans.
“And I wrote to The Times and said, you know, ‘Can’t you understand that this is the perspective from which we are now speaking?’” Hansberry said. “It isn’t as if we got up today and said, you know, ‘what can we do to irritate America?’ you know. It’s because that since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation from petition to the vote, everything. We’ve tried it all. There isn’t anything that hasn’t been exhausted.”
This image of Hansberry — exasperated, fatigued and sympathetic to the nationalist ideologies that would later blossom in the Black Power movement — might surprise those who know her only through the success of “A Raisin in the Sun.” With that much-lauded play, about a working-class African-American family on the verge of racially desegregating a Chicago suburb, Hansberry became the first African-American woman to have a show produced on Broadway, in 1959.
But for Tracy Heather Strain, showing there was much more to Hansberry than “A Raisin in the Sun” was the imperative driving the making of “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” which debuts Jan. 19 on “American Masters” on PBS. This includes her radical leftist politics as well as her struggle to identify publicly as a black lesbian in the 1950s and 1960s. “I started with the notion that people did not know who Lorraine Hansberry was,” Ms. Strain said. “I didn’t either, really. You see these pictures, she’s wearing the pearls, her hair’s all done. She’s an icon, the picture of success during the civil rights movement.”
Ms. Strain, 57, was 17 when she discovered Hansberry. But it was not through “A Raisin in the Sun,” which has had critically acclaimed revivals on Broadway (in 2004 and 2014) and has inspired other work like Bruce Norris’s “Clybourne Park” and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s“Beneatha’s Place.” Her introduction came in 1978 in her hometown, Harrisburg, Pa., during a performance of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” a play that Hansberry’s ex-husband and literary executor, Robert Nemiroff, adapted posthumously from her unpublished letters and diary entries.
“I’d never encountered a young black woman sharing her inner thoughts before, and those thoughts and observations were remarkably similar to the ones that I had about things like race, gender and class,” Ms. Strain said. “It stayed in the back of my mind for a long time.”
As she pursued a career in documentaries, producing and directing documentaries like “Unnatural Causes” (2008) and “I’ll Make Me a World: A Century of African-American Arts” (1999), Ms. Strain found herself drawn to her subject. She produced and directed a short TV segment on “A Raisin in the Sun” in 1999. Five years later, she met with Chiz Schultz, a film producer who not only had exclusive access to Hansberry’s materials, but was also in search of a director for his Hansberry documentary. (Mr. Schultz is an executive producer on the film, which was budgeted at $1.5 million.)
Through interviews with the original cast of the stage and film versions of “A Raisin in the Sun,” including Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee and Louis Gossett Jr., as well as her fellow artist-activist, Harry Belafonte, Ms. Strain tries to capture the revolutionary nature of Hansberry’s play. “It was like Lorraine opened a new chapter in theater,” Ms. Dee recalls in the film, describing the standing ovation and riveting response on opening night. “That included black people.”
LaTanya Richardson Jackson, the narrator of “Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart,” whose performance as Lena Younger in the 2014 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” received a Tony Award nomination, sees the character of Beneatha, Lena’s adult daughter, as ahead of her time. Not only does she turn down the advances, and in one case a marriage proposal, from her two male suitors, but she also plans to be a doctor and proclaims to be atheist in a staunchly Christian household.
“She had a very feminist, ‘why not me’ point of view, whereas her mother just assumed the status quo of ‘your brother should lead the family,’” Ms. Jackson said. “She respected that, but she also challenged that his notion of living was any better than hers.”
Like Beneatha, Hansberry was an intellectual in an era when women and African-Americans were denied full admission into that rarefied category. “The stereotype of African-Americans in this country was that we weren’t thinkers, but Hansberry was thinking, batting around ideas, putting forth ‘what ifs’ and challenging suppositions that everyone else took for granted,” Ms. Jackson said.
The film emphasizes that despite the success of “A Raisin in the Sun,” Hansberry was frustrated with the common interpretation of it as a play of optimism or integration. Her family history helped shape her beliefs about the limits of turning to the courts for racial justice. Her parents’ legal challenge of Chicago’s restrictive racial housing covenants, in a case that went to the Supreme Court in 1940, was successful, but black and white people remained segregated and mob violence often greeted the African-American families that moved in, such as hers. And “my father died a disillusioned exile in another country,” Hansberry lamented at that Town Hall meeting.
Hansberry responded to her father’s fate by moving beyond theater to pursue her larger goal of social change. Seeking to underscore the racial particularities of her play, for example, she tried again with a film version of “A Raisin in the Sun.” The studio rejected her first two screenplay drafts and finally accepted the third one; ultimately, the film was not as successful as the play.
“Hansberry experimented with a variety of forms, which includes the essay, long-form fiction, short stories as well being a visual artist and a painter,” said Imani Perry, author of the forthcoming “Looking for Lorraine: A Life of Lorraine Hansberry” and a professor of African-American studies at Princeton. “And she was also was fairly ecumenical in terms of her political activism.” Hansberry was concerned with racial justice, colonialism and feminism; she joined the Communist Party and led the Young Progressives group at the University of Wisconsin in 1948.
For Hansberry, however, art was not simply an expression of her civil rights concerns but a space where she could wage racial and gender battles and find resolutions that were more liberating than the law.
The documentary also wrestles directly with her sexuality, rather than avoid or allude to Hansberry’s same-sex relationships (the way some recent documentaries on James Baldwin and Nina Simonehave). Her lesbianism was a source of conflict and comfort and helped shape her feminist politics. The film also recognizes that even though Hansberry never denied her attraction to women, she did not actively publicize it.
Instead, as she was working on the play that canonized her place in the civil rights movement, she was also writing, under the initials L.H.N. or L.N., letters to “The Ladder,” the first subscription-based lesbian publication in the United States. Hansberry’s preoccupation with women’s financial and sexual independence was not limited to these semi-anonymous letters, but a theme that she infused throughout her work, even “A Raisin in the Sun.”
Though she may have written in an era that precedes “what we think of mainstream feminist movement,” Ms. Perry said, “Hansberry stands out today because she was thinking about what a feminist future looks like.”

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

Marvin X new poem, 2018: Divine Discontent

What make god and goddess happy?
Original man/woman
Aboriginal
everywhere find us traces
bones in sand
primitive art Picasso copy
copy cats plagiarists
original man
mad in babylon
generational
no post traumatic slave syndrome
traumatic in the now
slave now
tech brain only
no original mind
cell phone mind
where you at where you at
Google nigga
white woman tell you where she at
where you at is the question
where you at
2018 in the rain
scared of Trump
Rocket Man #1
you scared of little Kim Rocket Man #2
Who got most rockets
who's finger button always works
Rocket Man #1
Shithole man #1
Last hurrah
savage no civility
discipline Sun Ra said
Space is the Place
party ova here
emergency situation
run faya life
grab children, husband wife
If you resist he will flee from you
You flee in name of Allah
"You shall find many places of escape
abundant resources." Al Qur'an

Tribe of Shabazz Greater Taker
Allahu Akhbar
no more blues man woman
Allahu Akhbar
Flee to Upper Room
escape dungeon mind
be other side of time
infinity
everybody star
shine star
little light shine
Mutabaruka say
don't stay white man land too long
African, Kemet, Aboriginal, Crime in street
negro problem no, negro solution
no white man solution Chinese Arab Latin
don't let devil catch ya naked
riddin' dirty
travel light
hide from fools
As-salaam Alaikum fool
Allahu Akhbar fool
Al hamdulilah fool
Aoutho bilahi mina s shaitani r rajim fool.

--Marvin X
1/17/18

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