Given where she’s been lately, it should come as no surprise that Megan Thee Stallion has chosen to dispense with pleasantries on her new album. The ferocity of Traumazine begins with its cover, which shows her visage in an emotive triplicate reminiscent of Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound of Greek mythology. In Dante’s Inferno, Cerberus resides in the Third Circle of Hell with the gluttons, where he “rends the spirits, flays, and quarters them.” As an executioner, Megan is more precise. On the Rico Nasty collaboration “Scary,” she renders both her lyrical and physical form as a foreboding omen for her detractors: “Say my name like Candyman, and bitch, you know I’m there / These hoes wish they saw me when they lookin’ in the mirror.”
Megan is also used to being the life of every party. Her bawdy, unabashed 5’10” presence quickly won her devoted followers, and as her star rose she engaged in rowdy revelry with these loyal supporters at famed roving spaces called “Hottie Parties.” She was so eager to please that base — the fans who helped elevate the carnal slow-burn “Big Ole Freak,” from her 2018 EP Tina Snow, into her first bona fide hit — that she continued to perform as the good-time gal they had come to love even as she entered what would be the most traumatizing years of her life. Where her debut studio album, 2020’s Good News, clanged against the public awareness of that turmoil, Traumazine leans into it: making space for ruminations and grief, managing the swirling emotions produced by years of acrimony and cathartically letting them rise to the surface. In reaching for a more confessional mode, she reaffirms her commitment to talking her talk.
Ever since Syd arrived on the Southern California scene with the avant-garde “Flashlight” at just 16 years old, it’s been clear that the multi-hyphenate artist has a unique capability to sink her teeth into the tender flesh of intimacy and capture lightning-in-a-bottle moments through her music. Her lyricism is both erotic and emotional, a sublime counterpunch to the understated, sapphic sensuality of her production — the combination has shaped a contemporary remix of the Quiet Storm era of R&B. With the 29-year-old artist’s latest album, however, she planned to introduce the world to something new, something deeper: a journey of her love in song.
It’s impossible to discuss the last 25 years of Black popular music criticism without invoking the name Danyel Smith—the first woman to serve as Vibe magazine’s editor in chief. Between her career as a writer, helping capture and document the musical soundscapes that reflect different facets of Black life, to her personal journey, anchored by the ebbs and flows of Black popular culture—Smith’s frame of reference is deeply informed by an innate understanding of the transformative power of music history and its integral role in the definition of cultural identity and belonging. Now, with Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop, Smith expertly places herself in the canon of Black writers and de facto archivists such as Greg Tate, Cheryl Wall, and Saidiya Hartman. It’s part history, part memoir, and along the way, it also reclaims Black women’s rightful place in pop music.
Shamira Ibrahim: One thing I’ve always liked about your writing is the way you make these intricate connections. You start with connecting “Queen of Disco” Donna Summer to the 18th-century poet Phyllis Wheatley. How have you honed the ability to draw these connections for people who may not immediately see the through-lines that go from antebellum slavery through generations of pop music?
DANYEL SMITH (PHOTO BY DREW ALLYN)
Danyel Smith: I appreciate the close attention to the text—that always matters to me very much. At this point in my career, it’s just the way I think, and frankly, I decided to stop fighting it. I have training as a journalist – years of on-the-job training, some training from school, some me training myself, and a lot of that has to do with getting things right. Getting the dates right, getting the moments right, getting the details right. For me, a big part of my work is resisting summary; I feel like so often, Black women’s lives are written about in summary. It is a privilege to have the time, honestly, to just actually think.
I really do adore and admire and often engage with Phyllis Wheatley and her work; the same for Donna Summer. I don’t know that I thought about them both being Boston girls until I was getting close to maybe the midpoint of this book. You’re just writing Boston a million times, and you’re checking your spelling of Massachusetts a million times, and something shakes out; you hear the Boston inflection again in Donna Summers’ voice. It came to me because I had time to think and then had the confidence to stop fighting that negative voice in my head that says, “does that really matter?”
This originally published on July 6th 2020 as part of my Newsletter series on Substack here.
Today (July 6th) marks 45 years of Comorian independence from French rule – when three of the four islands of Grand Comore (Ngazidja), Moheli (Mwali), Anjouan (Nzwani) and Mayotte (Mahore) successfully parted ways with the notoriously domineering regime of French colonialism.
It came a full 15 years after the wave of what is known as the “Year of Africa” (1960); where 17 African nations declared independence from colonial rule – overwhelmingly from France – including the then-Republic of the Congo from Belgium (marked by Patrice Lumumba’s seminal speech), and punctuated by Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah’s address at the United Nations General Assembly:
For years, Africa has been the foot-stool of colonialism and imperialism, exploitation and degradation. From the north to the south, from the east to the west, her sons languished in the chains of slavery and humiliation, and Africa’s exploiters and self-appointed controllers of her destiny strode across our land with incredible inhumanity without mercy, without shame, and without honour.
This year was concluded by the ratification of the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples in the United Nations – which, it should be noted, was abstained by the colonial powers of Belgium France, Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, and the United States.
(We also got the Congolese Rhumba hit “Indépendance Cha Cha.”)
Of course, no fracture comes without its pound of flesh: many of the countries within the Francophonie in particular continued to orbit around the vestiges of the colonial empire. The CFA remained that kept many countries economically tied to France, with their reserves kept in French treasuries, simply rebranding from colonies francaise d’Afrique to communaute financiere africaine in West Africa and Cooperation financiere en Afrique centrale elsewhere. This is a financial bind that is still being unwound to this day – with a proposition pending for a new regional currency, that is still pegged to the Euro and backed by the French Treasury, running at odds with the ongoing ECOWAS efforts (led by Nigeria) to form the Eco currency.
In the case of the Comorian archipelago, after winning our vote for independence (with the key assistance of several under-acknowledged women in the organizing efforts leading up to independence) with 95% of the vote, France rejected the vote and demanded assessment island by island, in which Mayotte was accounted as voting to retain French ties, and used as a just cause for annexation – despite running afoul of the aforementioned UN policy on decolonization. Since then, twenty UN resolutions have condemned France’s annexation of Mayotte – including an attempted United Nations Security Council resolution in 1976 recognizing Comorian sovereignty over Mayotte, supported by 11 of the 15 members and vetoed by France, whose permanent seat on the Council is an outgrowth of their colonial reign. Below is a link to a summary video of the road to independence in French for those who can understand:
Since then, Mayotte has become part of the French outre-mer– yet another remnant of the formal colonial era – officially becoming an “overseas” department in 2011, joining the likes of Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, and Réunion. In the time since, a visa known as the visa Balladur was put in place in 1995 (named after Édouard Balladur, the prime minister of France at the time) requiring clearance for Comorian nationals to enter the 4th island. It has caused fractures and significant loss (emotional and physical) that remain to this day, particularly with generations of Mahorais that are raised with the knowledge of being “French” and consider Comorians outsiders, and the stratification of resources that exist between the two communities. For more insight (in English), please feel free to watch this Al Jazeera special below (although I caution that even this cannot fully capture all the nuances of such a complex matter).
I chose to do the second issue of this newsletter on Comorian Independence Day for a few reasons. The first is, of course, out of pride for my homeland; the second is to impart the key takeaway that historically-supported pathways to freedom are red-herrings that can still come with many caveats, whether it be the trappings of neo-colonialism or seizure of assets. Operating within these constructs is not a route to liberation so much as it is a route to incrementalism, with punitive tactics undertaken in tandem by former overseers (for the sake of brevity, look up Bob Denard).
I think about this a lot in this current moment, as our various communities and organizing groups start to think through what the future we envision for ourselves as Black peoples would start to look like. In Angela Davis’ “Lectures on Liberation” , she said, “one of the most acute paradoxes present in the history of Western society is that while on a philosophical plane freedom has been delineated in the most lofty and sublime fashion, concrete reality has always been permeated with the most brutal forms of unfreedom, of enslavement.”
This is what we are all trying to break free from and reimagine; all forms of enslavement, from neocolonialism to the modern prison industrial complex in the Americas and everything in between. As Angela Davis said during the Dream Defenders’ Sunday School session on June 14th, “Abolition allows us to get to the root of the problem. That is how it is the radical alternative.” K Agebebiyi added, “the prison system aims to redefine who can be human. We know that we are human. Abolition requires me to ask, ‘how can the human in me, see and honor the human in you?’” Derecka Purnell eloquently stated, “it’s an invitation to think about the politics and struggle through it together.”
“To bring Rhodes’ statue down is far from erasing history, and nobody should be asking us to be eternally indebted to Rhodes for having “donated” his money and for having bequeathed “his” land to the University. If anything, we should be asking how did he acquire the land in the first instance…But bringing Rhodes’ statue down is one of the many legitimate ways in which we can, today in South Africa, demythologize that history and put it to rest – which is precisely the work memory properly understood is supposed to accomplish. For memory to fulfill this function long after the Truth and Reconciliation paradigm has run out of steam, the demythologizing of certain versions of history must go hand in hand with the demythologizing of whiteness. This is not because whiteness is the same as history. Human history, by definition, is history beyond whiteness. Human history is about the future. Whiteness is about entrapment.”
(It should be noted, of course, that the Rhodes Scholarship has still retained its name).
Of course, this pattern of coalescent discourse is a cyclical behavior that can be seen in all sorts of diasporic thought, whether it be socio-political or purely arts-related (in each instance, it is still creative in spirit). Take, for example, this conversation between Haitian poet Rene Depestre and Martinican writer and co-founder of the Negritude movement Aimé Cesaire during the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1967, transcribed in the seminal text “Discourse on Colonialism”:
A.C.: I remember very well that around that time we read the poems of Langston Hughes and Claude McKay. I knew very well who McKay was because in 1929 or 1930 an anthology of American Negro poetry appeared in Paris. And McKay’s novel, Banjo – describing the life of dock workers in Marseilles – was published in 1930. This was really one of the first works in which an author spoke of the Negro and gave him a certain literary dignity. I must say, therefore, that although I was not directly influenced by any American Negroes, at least I felt that the movement in the United States created an atmosphere that was indispensable for a very clear coming to consciousness. During the 1920’s and 1930’s I came under three main influences, roughly speaking. The first was the French literary influence, through the works of Mallarme, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Claudel. The second was Africa. I knew very little about Africa, but I deepened my knowledge through ethnographic studies… and as for the third influence, it was the Negro Renaissance Movement in the United States, which did not influence me directly but still created an atmosphere which allowed me to become conscious of the solidarity of the black world.
He later continues:
I have always recognized that what was happening to my brothers in Algeria and the United States had its repercussions in me. I understood that I could not be indifferent to what was happening in Haiti or Africa. Then, in a way, we slowly came to the idea of a sort of black civilization spread throughout the world. And I have come to the realization that there was a “Negro situation” that existed in different geographical areas, that Africa was also my country. There was the African continent, the Antilles, Haiti; there were Martinicans and Brazilian Negroes, etc. That’s what Negritude meant to me.
I can only hope that we recognize the power of this as we continue to conceptualize and dream of the world and spaces we deserve; and lean on each other as an oppressed peoples to help get there.
This month:
For those who are still out in the streets (while your algorithm may have you convinced otherwise, protests are still very much happening): check out resources such as Mask On Zone and resources from Decolonize this Place to continue to engage in organizing and disrupting efforts as safely as possible.
That’s the thing about posthumous albums — they’re forever framed by the circumstances under which they were released, forever tied to death. They become an exercise in myth-making as much as reminders of what has been lost. To listen to Shoot for the Stars is to wonder where Pop begins and ends, to search for him among his peers and imagine that their chart-topping and history-making ascents would’ve been his destiny as well. In his absence, we’re left only with snapshots of his potential, possibilities refracted through other people’s imaginations and suspended now within the span of the album. It could never be enough, but it’ll have to do.
If you aren’t already subscribed to Woy Magazine’s weekly newsletter – providing you with news and commentary on Haiti and the Diaspora – you should be. The latest issue covers important information around organizing efforts and protests that have been happening in Haiti that have been facing police violence tactics akin to that in the United States, as well as mass deportation updates.
Black women who were formerly employed at OkayAfrica and OkayPlayer (Antoinette, Oyinkan, Hanan, Ivie, Sinat, Winnie, Olabisi and others) have been making unprecedented waves in Black media for mistreatment at the hands of their CEO and publisher Abiola Oke (who has since relinquished his position), demanding his removal and other amends be implemented at the publication moving forward. Important note: they have not alleged personally to any sexual assault/harassment (while allegations have been revealed as a result of this ongoing story) or requested their jobs back. As someone who has worked with OkayAfrica for some time and was nominated for #Okay100Women this year, hearing the accounts of the mistreatment was unnerving; but I will always stand with, believe, and support trusted Black women voices in media, and hope to see more people do so. Click here to stay up to date with the latest developments and donate to their fund if you can. #itsneverokay
On American Independence Day, I had a conversation with Sophia Gurulé – a Xicana public defender who represents incarcerated immigrants facing deportation – on #FreeOusman, the concept of citizenship and sovereignty, harmful immigrant narratives, the prison-to-deportation pipeline and race and class implications, DACA, ICE, and anything else that came to mind around identity, borders, and the carceral state, and how this all fits with the Movement for Black Lives and in my reporting on police brutality for Black immigrants. Feel free to check that out below (as well as my purple hair).
Comorian-American (by way of France) rapper Napoleon Da Legend has a fantastic EP out, Charles de Gaulle, with tracks in both French and English. Give it a listen below:
Malcolm-Aimé Musoni launched the first installment of his Zine, Blacks Rule Vol 1, with the collaboration of a lot of Black creatives (myself included). I did want to explicitly pull out an excerpt of an essay from my friend Mack titled “Kill the Cop in Your Head,” because I think it’s especially potent and resonant for right now – but check the rest out for yourself.
I leave you with three final things: 1) the audio of Lumumba’s Independence Day speech, 2)one of my favorite montage videos of the Comorian National anthem (with French subtitles 3) a lovely playlist from the women at FourTwo Creative. Yes, you can let go and get free. ♥️
This originally published on June 1st 2020 as part of my Newsletter series on Substack here.
Welcome to Shamira Explains It All/Shamira Explique Tout, a culture newsletter discussing the origins and impact of Black production and exchange, identity, and intellectual property via our digital, social, and archival discussions – and whatever else may be timely and interesting. Part English, Part French (la moitié est écrite en français, ou plus, si le thème du mois le demande). Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at contact@shamirathefirst.com.
Sistas, how y’all feel? Brothas, y’all alright?
I originally wanted to launch this newsletter on my birthday – for a variety of reasons, that did not come to fruition. So I’m launching this on my mother’s birthday instead – a woman who as born in a country that had that to claw and fight for its independence from its oppressors, and continues to try to find its way. It grounds me in a sobering truth – eradicating the most visible oppressors is only the first step. But as Samuel Beckett wrote, “Ever Tried. Ever Failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Over the past few days, cities across the United States have been rife with clashes between organizers, protesters, and their respective law enforcement forces. Some people are confrontational and others are not; all methods of protest are legitimate (including this amazing form of surveillance disruption by K-pop stans). Ultimately, the concept of a “peaceful” protest is a farce; it presumes opposing forces that do not seek to engage the community as enemy combatants. Corporations and businesses are not people, despite the fact that the Supreme Court opted to give them protections that treated them as such; but when discussing looting, keep in mind that there is record unemployment in a public health crisis with little to no social safety network to keep people afloat. As people have pointed out recently, Martin Luther King, in his advocacy for nonviolence, still expressed that “a riot is the language of the unheard:”
I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.
With regards to how people discuss MLK and nonviolence in general, it is frequently misconstrued and decontextualized. I encourage people to listen to this clip from Bomani Jones’ ESPN Radio Show about the impetus behind MLK Day and the clarity of his actual message – that the greatest weapon he employed wasn’t pacifism, but shame.
In Brooklyn, near-unprecedented violence is ongoing in Fort Greene and Flatbush. It should not be lost on spectators that the nexus of brutality going on in Kings Country is happening around the Barclays Center – the source of its own violence on the Black community in Brooklyn. Gentrification and displacement go hand in hand with over policing and stop and frisk. I explored that in my piece for OkayPlayer
Lastly, I will just share my quick (and growing) thread on surveillance practices and ethics with journalism and organizing. It will be an ever expanding discussion as we continue to accept loss of privacy to the state and use of that data in a retaliatory manner, but one that we have to accept is a very present threat in the first place. This is an excerpt from an unpublished essay I wrote some time ago on surveillance and criminalization of Black communities:
Between the patterns of zeros and ones rests a minotaur for the digital age – amalgamating the sophistry of inherent Black criminality within a web of innovation that only serves as an anchor to longstanding pathologies. If we have any hope of a technological age that isn’t inextricably contracted to white supremacy, we would be well-suited to look at the threshold between mythology and history in order to reshape the way we think about applying harm reduction and racial equity. The surest way to get swallowed alive by a monster is to fail to realize that one is even there; and it is only by identifying that framework that we can begin to lay down the thread that will guide the perception of inherent Black criminality from the bowels of a modern digital labyrinth.
We have a long way to go to understand just how much data we have forfeited to third parties and actors that profit from participation in the prison industrial complex. A calculation can never supersede the inherent biases that it is introduced to and the fact remains that the carceral state was designed out of a pathology to funnel brown bodies into boxes. As Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, “whiteness mitigates crime, whereas blackness defines the criminal.” The superimposition of automation belies this truth, but as Saidiya Hartman spoke to “a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago”, so has the digital model continued to reinforce the punitive history behind bars: it is all it knows, and therefore all it can be.
Playlist for the Month:
This month:
If you are uploading pictures of protestors or people organizing – use this tool to scrub metadata and blur peoples faces and other identifying features.
Try to contribute to vetted bail funds if you can. Here is a Twitter Thread with links to bail funds throughout the nation. (Important Note: The NYC Chapter has said they are overwhelmed by funds, so you may want to divert funds to local organizations in need of resources instead – like Equality for Flatbush’s mutual aid fund, so that they can continue investing in their police abolition organizing as well as community support)
For those who want to get involved but can’t take to the streets for various reasons (like myself, because of my immigration status) , here is a link to various to be in the struggle.
If you are interested in additional anti-carceral reading during this quarantine, for those of you who are just starting out – I encourage you to check out Angela Davis’ “Are Prisons Obsolete?”
This is a great 5-minute appearance from Cornel West on CNN worth checking out (where he references the Samuel Beckett quote above). Key takeaway: “It looks as if the system cannot reform itself. We’ve tried Black faces in high places – too often our Black politicians, professional class, middle class, become too accommodated to the the capitalist economy…”
Here is some legal guidance for those who are arrested in New York City.
Francophone Corner:
Découvrez le lancement de SUNU : Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics, une création de la brillante Amy Sall. SUNU Journal cherche à interroger, critiquer et célébrer le passé et le présent, tout en contribuant à une riche lignée de production intellectuelle, culturelle artistique africaine et afro-diasporique.
Check out the launch of SUNU: Journal of African Affairs, Critical Thought + Aesthetics the brainchild of the brilliant Amy Sall. SUNU Journal seeks to interrogate, critique and celebrate the past and the present, whilst contributing to a rich lineage of African and Afro-diasporic intellectual, cultural + artistic production.
Soutenons les médias indépendants ! Avec ce concept de « blingzine » bilingue (français/anglais), 33 Carats propose 106 pages de découvertes hip hop, lifestyle et mode par une équipe de passionnées. C’est le thème de la Déconnexion qui est exploré pour ce numéro avec des interviews d’experts sur les stratégies marketing des rappeurs français, une visite de Négus l’exposition/album de Yassin Bey par la journaliste américaine Ebony Janice. Mais le récit collaboratif fait de bling et de hip hop « Birkins and Drake » dont Life is Good le premier épisode est écrit par moi 🙂 En bonus ; une interview exclusive d’Erykah Badu : pas mal pour un média indépendant !Erykah Badu lance son site Badu World Market, Elle y propose des collections limitées hoodies et tee-shirts oversize en collaboration avec l’artiste canadienne Jackie Musial. A l’occasion du lancement de ce nouveau projet de la chanteuse, une interview exclusive par Sanaa Carats, fondatrice et rédactrice en chef du média, est disponible dans le numéro 3. Le rappeur français Cleim Haring en couverture.En attendant la version papier, En vente sur Issuu :
Support independent media! With this bilingual (French/English) “blingzine” concept, 33 Carats offers 106 pages of hip hop, lifestyle and fashion discoveries by a team of passionate people. Interviews with experts on the marketing strategies of French rappers, a visit to Négus exhibition/album by Yassin Bey by the American journalist Ebony Janice. But the collaborative fictional series of bling and hip hop “Birkins and Drake” of which Life is Good is the first episode is written by me 🙂 As a bonus; an exclusive interview with Erykah Badu!Erykah Badu launches her website Badu World Market, where she offers limited collections of hoodies and oversize tee-shirts in collaboration with Canadian artist Jackie Musial. On the occasion of the launch of this new project of the singer, an exclusive interview by Sanaa Carats, founder and editor-in-chief of the media, is available in this third issue. Buy it here.https://www.33carats.com/Suivre sur Instagram: 33caratswebzineTwitter: https://twitter.com/33caratswebzineFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/33carats/
Alors, c’est tout. Sign up now so you don’t miss the next issue.
Originally published for VerySmartBrothas ‘ America In Black Series.
I often jokingly tell people that I grew up in a household made up of three (occasionally four, depending on what station in life my father was in at the time) distinct American dreams—one for each flag or passport represented: Comoros, Canada and the United States. My mother, my brother and I are a trinity of the resulting products of varying circumstances that led to us calling America home. Continue reading →
For 12 years of my life, I awoke to the same routine. A gentle knock on my door, followed by a more urgent one, quickly followed by the hinges creaking open and my mother exclaiming in harried frustration, “Bo Shami! Reveille-toi!”
When I was a child, my mom would tell me stories about Ramadan in our homeland of Comoros. Some parts weren’t the most idyllic—the idea of fasting under mosquito nets without air conditioning that close to the equator is not my concept of pleasant by any stretch of the imagination.
The one part that I always envied, however, was the sense of community enshrouded in each story. The collective participation in the holy month made the air crackle just a little differently, and you could feel the nuance in every vignette. Continue reading →
A few months ago, I reconnected with a dear friend whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time. We met up for brunch, laughed about prior fights, squashed beefs and updated each other on our personal lives in between bites of truffle fries. In between convos about the escapades that happened during our distance, I mentioned that I was trying to lose 15 pounds to get my body back right. Unexpectedly, she told me, “Shamira, the entire time I’ve known you, you’ve been trying to shed 10 to 15 pounds. At every size.”
Seasons later, that line still sticks with me. Not only because she was right—she absolutely was (and is)—but because I know that I say 15 pounds when I often mean 20 or 25 or 30, depending on the day, level of stress in my life and mirror I passed. My volatile relationship with my body has existed since I was at least 9 years old; it’s become so ingrained into my daily psyche that I don’t know myself without it and don’t understand a world in which I’m not over-scrutinizing every dip and crevice to the point of distraction.
I’m not so deluded as to think I’m actually obese; in my moments of rational thought, I grasp that I’m in a healthy range for the average woman in America, and as someone who has danced and played sports my whole life and currently has a regular gym routine to boot, I’m likely fitter than the average American, thigh meats notwithstanding. And there are certainly days when I pass myself in the mirror, tell myself, “Damn, who let that bad bitch in the building?”and flood my various social media networks with a stream of selfies and Snapchat filters.
Nevertheless, in every new relationship, the pattern is the same: I make an offhand reference to my (perceived) growing frame, my partner tells me they love my thick body, and I end up in a seemingly never-ending tailspin of disgust, despair and denial until I somehow make it out of the other end.
Before I make it out, however, I’m weighing myself six times a day—after every bowel movement and every piss. I’m dodging mirrors because I can’t stand to see myself naked. I’m declining invites to go out because despite rational thought, my brain still can’t stand the thought of my fat self being exposed in photos to unflinchingly look at, whether all 5 feet 10 inches of me weigh 135 pounds or 175 pounds.
When I’m terrified to weigh myself because I don’t want my day ruined, I’m knocking on my clavicles for reassurance that they’re still visible and wrapping my left thumb and index finger around my right wrist to check that it’s still small. I’m examining how my rings fit to check for bloating. And the darkest part of me, despite how unhealthy I was and how I was starving myself to maintain during a rigorous dancing circuit, misses me at that “curvy” 135—to the point that I cried to my boyfriend on my birthday after sitting next to a model who was thinner than I could ever be in this universe or the next, ashamed that my most immediate visceral reaction to seeing her frame was envy.
Ibrahim’s “curvy dancer” phase at 138 pounds
Body dysmorphia has an uncanny ability to warp your mind in a way that seeps into your brain like a vice and grasps on without a care, imprinting any bad perception into your head to agonize ad nauseam, regardless of positive reinforcement from your friends and family. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve just nodded and said thank you because I was out of ways to explain to a romantic partner or friend that I just couldn’t see what they did, or that something as small as lovingly grabbing my food baby can make me cry myself to sleep depending on the day.
I wish so bad that I could look through the same mirrors my loved ones saw; I wish that I could stop lying every time I drop 20 pounds out of nowhere that I was training for a half-marathon instead of working out for three hours a day and intentionally eating under 1,000 calories for a month; I even wish that my perceptions of my body were tied to male acceptance of my figure—but men have sexualized me from when I was an 8-year-old with baby fat to when I was an undergrad student so depressed that I was running 11 miles a day and not showering, so I’m a few decades too late for that pivot.
Instead I semiannually try to work it out through recommitting myself to therapy and self-care, working toward a level of honesty that I’m not always ready to even admit to myself, much less others. I talk about not realizing how bad I looked until my mom came to visit me for the first time in Washington, D.C., and cried because my clothes were hanging off of me, and sent care packages in hopes that I would eat. I talk about refusing to watch myself on video because I’m terrified to see how I look on camera and turn into an inconsolable wreck before an event. I talk about refusing to admit to myself until 2017 that I struggled with body dysmorphia, because how can you regularly view yourself as an anthropomorphized beached whale if most of your dresses are still a size 8?
I don’t talk about this with everyone, but I do with at least one person (and now the rest of you), because for a month’s worth of weekends, I went through a cycle of eating everything humanly possible on Saturday and then denying myself any nutrition on Sunday in shame—and something’s gotta give, especially my Seamless bill.
Ideally I could tidy this up in a neat little bow and point to the light in the horizon, but the reality is that these are demons I’m still fighting; what I can say, however, is that I now know more than I did yesterday. I know that increased anxiety and stressors trigger my dysmorphia because it’s something I feel like I can control amid seeming chaos. And I know that I can talk more openly about this without feeling like I’m talking over my plus-size sisters who have their own social burdens to bear.
Most importantly, I know not to keep beating up on myself when, despite my best efforts, the demon rears its ugly head telling me I’ll never be skinny enough, and that it’s OK to laugh at the absurdity of the circumstances sometimes! Laughter may not always be the best way to handle trauma, but it’s definitely an accessible one, and honestly, if I were a contributing writer for one of Tyler Perry’s future stage plays, I would gleefully write in a scene of a light-skint woman crying into some chicken wings in abject despair.
Until Mr. Perry realizes my big screen talent, however, I’m sharing this with you all—and I hope that, applicable or not, you come to some sort of advanced understanding of how truly toxic some of our relationships with our bodies can be.
When I was in the fifth grade, my mother, infant brother, and I settled in the Colonial Houses Projects in Harlem (now named the Ralph Rangel Houses).
The first year was rough. After a year-and-a-half of transition — two weeks in a homeless shelter in the South Bronx, followed by a few months in a temporary living motel and a transitional housing facility — we had returned to Harlem with not much more than the clothes on our backs. I slept on an air mattress next to my infant brother for six weeks until we could scrounge enough money for a bed on layaway. The elevators and staircases consistently smelled like urine. The facilities were poorly maintained — poor trash pickup in front of the building contributed to rodents of all kinds, no matter how diligent my mother was about keeping our space tidy. The violence, while intermittent, was enough to have my mom worried about me coming home off the train after dark.
Despite all that, we had a home, and that meant the world to us. I got to invite friends over without having their parents sign them in with government ID. My mother had a full kitchen to cook in. I taught my little brother how to play basketball in Rucker Park just down the road, and I no longer had to wake up before the sun rose for a 90-minute commute to school.
Now, almost two decades after we originally moved in, much has changed about Harlem, but the frailties of public housing, run by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), are still plagued by many of the same problems. These buildings remain overbooked and underfunded, with a waiting list in the thousands. Many buildings are still not properly up to code, with serious health and safety hazards — consistent heat and hot water issues, unsafe elevators, and lead paint just scratch the surface of infrastructure problems that predate my family’s arrival and continue to persist. And while I may no longer reside there, my mother still calls the beleaguered public housing system home, along with approximately 400,000 other New York City residents, of whom 90% are black and Hispanic.
If Dr. Ben Carson is confirmed by the Republican Senate majority as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), he will be responsible for coordinating and streamlining strategic efforts for affordable housing and community renewal nationwide, a domain which NYCHA falls directly under (as of 2016, it was estimated that around 85% of NYCHA’s Housing Preservation and Development budget fell under federal assistance from HUD). As a result, Carson and his team will be accountable for maintaining and rejuvenating a rapidly deteriorating ecosystem of half-century-old buildings that serve as a lynchpin for a significant number of New Yorkers of color, my mother included.
Not only are the buildings deteriorating and increasingly unsafe, but the funding is rapidly depleting. NYCHA is facing debt in the tens of millions, with federal funding for housing having been slashed by $24 billion nationwide in 2013 by Congress. Efforts by New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio to increase development of affordable housing and tackle the hundreds of thousands of applicants on the waiting list has come at a cost; initiatives to acquire capital have included controversially selling off NYCHA-owned property to the highest bidder in an attempt to level off the rapidly increasing price points of New York’s neighborhoods with the largest populations of lower-income blacks and Hispanics. The erosion of this network would mean the displacement of entire communities, with nowhere to go and no places to afford in a city where the median rent is approximately $3,000 a month. The state of affordable low-income housing in New York is in disrepair and accelerating decline, and Ben Carson — a man with no city planning, urban development, or fiscal policy experience — will, if confirmed, be the one to lead us through it all.
It goes without saying that Carson faces an uphill climb; his seemingly severe lack of qualifications notwithstanding, any person slated to inherit the role would be faced with the quandary of managing a cash-strapped bureaucracy that directly affects millions of lives nationwide. In the face of our ever-present reality, the concern I have for my family and for thousands of others in the city I call home has increased; how can we make sure that a man whose only association to public housing to date has been his team inaccurately claiming that he grew up in a public facility sufficiently understand and address the needs of hundreds of thousands of lives of low-income people of color?
Carson has been noted as saying that “it is not the government’s job” to take care of our neediest populations — a jarring statement coming from someone poised to run a $47 billion agency dedicated to Fair Housing. Instead he has identified the solution to systemic poverty to be rooted in organic community initiatives instead of relying on government assistance, stating that “we the people have the responsibility to take care of the indigent in our society…the government started getting involved in everything…how did that work out? You know, $19 trillion later, 10 times more people on food stamps, more poverty, more welfare, broken homes, out-of-wedlock births, crime, incarceration. Everything is not only worse, it’s much worse,” according to CNN. He further contextualized his ideology with an anecdote: “In the old days of America when communities were separated by hundreds of miles, why were they able to thrive? Because if it was harvest time and the farmer was up in the tree picking apples and fell down and broke his leg, everybody pitched in and harvested his crops for him. If somebody got killed by a bear, everybody took care of their family.” This is all anchored by Carson’s belief that HUD and the federal government has “gone from providing housing to providing warehousing for an unacceptable number of people” and his dismissal of HUD initiatives as “social engineering.”
What seems to escape him, however, is that community building has never ceased. My mom couldn’t afford to give me an allowance, but my next door neighbor would let me tutor her son for some spending money. The family across the hall would let my brother stay there when my mom was working late cleaning houses. When I was in high school and coming home late from extracurriculars or hanging out with friends, it was the local elders who looked out for me and made sure I stayed out of trouble. There are daycares, senior centers, family days — all folding into the idea of communal support in the face of inauspicious conditions.
My family, as well as many others, had built a network of support within our housing complexes — but none of that can outweigh decay and mismanagement. A neighbor can help coordinate childcare, but how do you extend that helping hand to waiting weeks for repairs on a leaking ceiling? Placing the weight on the local residents to maintain their livelihoods and improve their quality of living not only diminishes the work that many of them have already done to create spaces for themselves, but falsely assumes that residents haven’t worked hard enough to combat the encroaching snare of capitalism and affordability in major cities. Simply put, Carson is stepping into the office with a bootstrap approach to affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods; it is this perspective that has me fearful for this gamble of a nomination.
In order for the NYCHA to serve and protect the lower income communities of New York City, significant investments need to be made in public housing’s infrastructure and development — facets that have long failed to be in line with Republican policy, and seemingly aren’t reflected in Carson’s, who has consistently expressed his distaste for government investment in public welfare and housing. This perspective is likely to come at a cost to the millions of beneficiaries of HUD aid across the nation, including the hundreds of thousands of black and Hispanic NYCHA residents across the five boroughs.
As we continue to discuss how “Black Lives Matter,” it is prudent to remember that this phrase does not merely apply in our unwarranted deaths. Conscious and active effort needs to be made to ensure the maintenance and enhancement of the communities that we call home, despite the behemoth of capitalism that threatens to eviscerate low-income communities. Within New York City, many of these lives are consistently striving for a better quality of life within the NYCHA system, including my mom. It is paramount that these livelihoods are defended and that we task Carson with holding true to the objectives of HUD. I, for one, plan to continue to hold accountable the man with my mother’s fate in his hands.
