I’m so honored to be a regular contributor to The Spin, an all women’s media panel hosted by the brilliant Esther Armah on New York’s WBAI 99.5FM. This entry is your one-stop-shop for all of the programs that I have participated in thus far…

On December 20, 2011 I offered commentary along with Dr. Salamishah Tillet and April Silver of Akila Worksongs. We talked about Dr. Maya Angelou and Common’s collaboration that sparked a community conversation about the creation of controversial art and the use of the “N word.” We also weighed in on a new survey released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention about the horrific number of rapes and the culture of violence we find ourselves in. Missed it? Catch up now.

December 27, 2011: Doubling down! For our 2011 Year in review listeners were treated to an hour long special of The Spin. This one featured writer Joan Morgan, PR guru April Silver & me. More details about this piece may be found in my blog entry below.

On January 10, 2012 I was invited back to the The Spin along with writer and filmmaker dream hampton; Joan Morgan, author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost and professor Bhakti Shringarpure. As always, we got into a thoughtful and provocative discussion about the week’s headlines. To start, in the first change since 1927, the legal definition of rape has been expanded to include assaults on men. Next, a Georgia school’s faulty attempt at “cross curricular education” results in math questions like: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in 1 week?” Finally, with the birth of baby Blue Ivy Carter and the release of the new track Glory by her father Jay Z we got into a fascinating conversation about the perspectives emerging from the blogosphere… Is Beyonce the new face of feminism? Listen in by following this link.

During the January 24, 2012 edition of The Spin we discussed the move to eradicate slavery from the school books, courtesy of the Tennessee Tea Party. We also covered the 39th anniversary of Roe v Wade and the current state of reproductive rights. The convo concludes with a discussion of Black images in film. As host Esther Armah phrased it, “Red Tails, Pariah, Spike Lee, Sundance, the state of black film. When it comes to mainstream money & black folks on film: is George Lucas right about Red Tail’s failure equaling black films’ future at risk? Or are we accepting mediocrity & calling it revolutionary? & are we ignoring the revolution being cinematized via film-makers like Ava DuVernay & the work of ImageNation?” If you missed the show when it aired on New York’s WBAI 99.5FM with commentators Dream Hampton, Aletha Maybank & me clickety click right here to hear it all go down.

With the exception of the hour long special, each of the all women’s media panels begin about 25 minutes in! Enjoy…

Time to chunk a deuce to 2011! There is much to make note of as I survey the last couple months of the year, they have been full of media and art in the most beautiful of ways…

To begin, I’ve been a guest commentator on The Spin, an all women’s panel on WBAI 99.5FM’s Wake Up Call. In my most recent appearance I was invited to participate in an hour long special covering everything from a recently released study about our current incarceration rates to language and power in the global Black community. It was my privilege to join Esther Armah (program host and playwright), Joan Morgan (author of When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost) and April Silver (media maven and PR guru who runs Akila Worksongs) in a really fascinating discussion.

In addition to the above topics, we also talked about our picks for news highlights from the year. As Esther generously tweeted: “What’s your story of 2011? On this am’s All Women Media Panel, the brilliant Shani Jamila picked Time magazine’s ‘Protester as Person of the Year’ article which celebrated the global social protest movements from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Occupy Wall Street and the resurrection of people power with social media as a powerful tool to bring images & stories & to make citizen journalists into storytellers. What a year? Check out Shani’s choice on this am’s The Spin.”

If you have the chance to listen I think you’d enjoy. Here is the link (the panel begins after the headlines, approximately ten minutes in).

In other news, earlier this month I headed down to Miami to check out Art Basel– one of the most amazing gathering of art, artists, collectors and gallerists I have ever participated in. For several days large swaths of the city are inundated with visual and performative displays from some of the art world’s most talented. I’ve posted a few pics from our time down there below:

Miami Beach

Manolo Valdes

In front of Faith Ringgold's quilt

Kito Mbiango

Natalie Hopkinson, Adrian Loving, guest, Jamil Hamilton

Takashi Iwasaki

Max Weidemann

Jason Green, guest, Duhirwe Rushemeze, Brandon Coley Cox

Joyce J Scott

Renee Cox, Charlotte Mouquin + guests

Shani Jamila & Danny Simmons

For many years I danced and did performance art in Washington DC with a powerful group of sisters, in celebration of the lives and beauty of Fela Kuti’s wives… This was well before the Broadway play, which I loved. Artist Holly Bass and I revisited that aesthetic a bit during our time at Basel this year…

Shani Jamila + Holly Bass

Lastly, in November I was part of a group of quilters who displayed and discussed our work at the Dwyer Cultural Center in Harlem. We’d all had the good fortune to participate in a workshop series by master artist Dindga McCannon, a Harlem based fabric artist who is also an extremely generous and gifted teacher. A full house came out to view the work and listen to the stories that emerged from our time together. A picture of the group is below:

Display and Discussion at the Dwyer with Dindga

Alright lovelies, thank you for walking this road with me. I do wish you all the best for this upcoming year. Light!

Dear family,

I’m so happy to be able to share some super exciting news… I have a piece of my art work included in an exhibit celebrating of one of our living legends, Faith Ringgold! Ms. Ringgold is an accomplished artist and author whose work has been displayed on six continents and whose 75+ awards include 22 honorary doctorates. You can see why she was recently selected as the inaugural recipient of the City College of New York’s Cultural Arts Award! Part of her tribute included a commemorative exhibit featuring some of the top quilting artists from around the country, curated by Dr. Myrah Brown Green.

My quilt is titled “Ring Shout.” It takes its name from the holy African American tradition of forming a circle of praise, a ritual our ancestors created that carries through to today. Also, as a child of the hip-hop generation, this quilt is my dedication, my “shout out” to Ms. Ringgold—an artist who has inspired me deeply.

It’s important to me to draw the connections from the past to the present in my work as a fabric artist, especially given the role quilting has played in the lives of African American women. My Grandma was a quilter. It is a special thing to be able to take scraps and cast offs and create a thing of beauty. It’s representative to me of what we as a people have always been able to do.

The vivid colors were chosen to reflect the abundance of life and spirit that has allowed our community to survive conditions we were never meant to come through. The appliqué is done entirely by hand. I stitched a raw edge finish in a ring of gold in homage to the incredible artist we are all honoring in this exhibit.

See below for pics from our opening reception in the Aaron Davis Hall gallery– the address is West 135th Street at Convent Avenue in Harlem. If you’d like to see the exhibit in person, it will stay open until December 1st. Also, I’ll have a second piece shown at the Dwyer Cultural Center during an evening reception at the end of the month.

It’s a new day! I’m so honored to be in the company of such amazing visual artists and I’m deeply thankful to have your support as I walk this path.

Opening Reception

Ring Shout

Ring Shout close up

The Exhibit

Faith Ringgold + Shani Jamila

Reflecting on the 6th anniversary of Katrina today, particularly in the wake of all the hurricane prep we went through this weekend. Sending light to all the survivors, lifting the memories of those who perished.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the murder of young Timothy Thomas at the hands of Cincinnati policeman Steven Roach. This killing (the fifteenth Black man to be shot by local police within a short time span) sparked the economic boycott of the city and a movement to reform police/community relations for the better. Today we remember him and all victims of police brutality. #anotherworldispossible

Hello lovelies,

I am honored to have been featured in the amazing Of Note magazine. “Of Note celebrates people of color in the arts. It is a space where art meets activism, empowerment, and social responsibility. The artists and artistic works featured by of note demonstrate a commitment to global citizenship and social change.”

This was a great opportunity to share about the work I did with Justice for DC Youth. Big shout out to the young people who are continuing to walk so strongly within our Prison to College Pipeline program and whose leadership humbles me.

Check it out!

Washington, D.C: Shani Jamila on Arts Activism

“Artists are the only people in a society who can tell that society the truth about itself.”
~ James Baldwin

By Shani Jamila

Our challenge as arts activism facilitators is to create moments wherein the community with whom we work feels compelled, inspired, or otherwise motivated to believe bigger than they see. This is the groundwork that must be laid in encouraging and empowering people to understand and explore their political imagination—a fundamentally undervalued part of creating social change.

My own life’s work has been dedicated to this end. As a recent example, I directed the Washington, D.C. based organization, Justice for DC Youth that worked to shift the city’s priorities from an over-reliance on incarceration to a focus on education. One of the major issues we confronted was how to subvert the school to prison pipeline.

Clearly, schools are centers for formal education…but they also serve as institutions where children are implicitly and explicitly taught their place in contemporary society. Whether it be via the exclusion of culturally relevant history in the curriculum, the decrepit state of the textbooks and school facilities, or metal detectors and guards policing the hallways, many schools in economically impoverished communities have the atmosphere of a prison. Conversely, economically privileged schools may have the overt look of a college campus. In either case, young people learn early what society expects of them.

These dynamics are further exacerbated by the fact that, given the inextricable ties between class and race in this country, the overwhelming majority of schools that funnel youth into prison rather than college are primarily serving populations of color. The crisis has reached epidemic proportions, yet because the brown and black faces that characterize it have been criminalized and shuttered behind jailhouse walls, it is largely overlooked or written off in the public eye.

“It was young people—collegiate volunteers who joined with their incarcerated peers—who were the lifeblood of this political education and arts activism project.”

Our program was designed to work with the young people others had thrown away. We did this via an initiative we called “The Prison to College Pipeline”— a culturally grounded tutoring and mentorship program that utilized the arts to reach and teach incarcerated teens.

We used a wide variety of artistic approaches within our work. To introduce ourselves, we would collectively create collages that depicted what was important to us. Important figures in Black and Latino history were introduced via photography and Jeopardy games. The teens were tasked with performing skits that allowed them to act out different scenarios young people face, and explain why they chose to make the decisions they did. We wrote and shared poetry that discussed what it means to be free.

Through this work, I was reminded how cultural expression allows for a safe space to challenge our assumptions and imagine things that may seem otherwise inconceivable or irrational. In addition, art helps level the power dynamics that are present in the privileges that age, education, or other social markers may confer. It also opens a window into the trust that is the core of any successful mentor-mentee relationship. If both parties can allow themselves vulnerability, or if one can model it for the other, that’s where it starts.

Each one of us is in possession of a political imagination that should order our steps as assuredly as moss on the north side of the trees signaled the way forward for our ancestors. It should dictate our movements in the same fashion that a strong beat demands rhythm from our hips.

Once it is sparked, we become unstoppable. This program was for me a case study in how that works. It is important to note that it was young people—collegiate volunteers who joined with their incarcerated peers—who were the lifeblood of this political education and arts activism project. I’m so proud that we reached hundreds of youth during my tenure. However, I consider one of the project’s greatest successes to be that it continues now as an exclusively youth-led initiative.

The gritty grassroots work we do in opposition to the prison industrial complex, in support of a feminist lens, in affirmation of human rights… all of it is rooted in an ethic of transformation. If we can harness the power of inspired creativity, in the immortal words of Sam Cooke, “a change is gonna come.”

For more information on Justice for DC Youth visit www.jdcy.org.

Shani Jamila [www.shanijamila.com] is committed to using the power of arts activism to create global social change. Her work has taken her to more than thirty countries over five continents, a journey she chronicles in her journalism, cultural work and writings on race, gender, justice and diaspora.

This blog should begin with an admission: Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls is sacred
text to me. I know passages from it by heart. I’ve been known to recite excerpts from
it to myself when dealing with situations where her words were balm.

To say I had trepidation about experiencing it in the hands of Tyler Perry would be the
grossest of understatements. But I walked up to theater on the day that it opened,
reminding myself that what I was going to see was not For Colored Girls Who Have
Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Was Enuf… I was going to see a motion picture
that was inspired by it. A movie whose very artistically done promotional materials
highlighted an array of additional characters not included in the original script.  I
expected that a new narrative would be imposed, and that the set would be revised
to make it conducive to a film format. This was a new something, not to be received
or processed as one might with a production of the play.

I came away from it feeling conflicted. Here’s what I liked: I was glad to
see such able actors have the opportunity to work with Ntozake’s words in a high
profile capacity. I’m excited about the idea that a new audience will be introduced to
her work and may be inspired to seek out the original text along with her other
books. I like that this movie is a history maker in terms of having a cohort of black
women headliners.

However, the movie felt… heavy to me. Core poems were truncated and I was uncomfortable with the addition of back story lines that showcased overwhelmingly negative depictions of Black men. I am cautious about writing that because I know that so many feminist books and films have been assailed for that reason, often wrongly. But, this was something new. And the portrayals of men that were added to Perry’s adaptation of Shange’s seminal work lacked resonance. I also didn’t like what that redirected focus on Black male pathology did to the stories of the women. A direct consequence of vilifying the brothers is that the sisters were stained with the taint of victimhood. Which is not how the play ever read or presented to me. In fact, I would argue that is the polar opposite of the play’s intent.

For Colored Girls is a classic that endured through the decades because Shange, as a master of her craft, managed to thread light through words that described some of the deepest horrors that afflict us. Traumatic stories of rape, infidelity, abortion, and domestic violence that morphs into murder were told through a lens that emphasized our humanity, our endurance, our survival and triumph.  The focus was on Black women’s ability to retain our joy, find God in ourselves and love her. Fiercely.

In the closing montage that depicts the eight women leaning on each other, I wanted to feel the transcendent feeling I got from watching this extraordinary performance of Four Women:

Instead I was going down the line thinking “damn, this one got cheated on, those two both got STDs, that one’s man was wilding, she was sexually assaulted, etc, etc.” The feeling of celebration and victory, that’s the magic that was missing from this movie.

But, since it did gross over $20 million in its opening weekend, my hope is that this film’s economic success will serve as a gateway for sister filmmakers like Julie Dash, Kasi Lemmons or Nzingha Stewart (who originally optioned FCG and received executive producer credit for this) to seize the stage and take their turn at telling our stories with the financial backing and expanded audience that they deserve. I also hope that this will mark a turning point in Perry’s oeuvre, perhaps we’ll see more projects from him that work to show a more complex and nuanced portrayal of our communities. And it would be wonderful if more authors of Shange’s caliber and more actors like the amazing cast that was assembled for FCG get the increased opportunities they so richly merit.

On Friday night we had a full house come out and support Haki Madhubuti’s Third World Press during a fundraiser we held at the 14th & V Busboys & Poets. I had a great time moderating a convo between professors and political analysts Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and Dr. Marc Lamont Hill.  Plus there were readings and reflections from Haki’s daughter Mariama Richards as well as  TWP authors Brian Gilmore and Tony Medina.

This was an important one. We need to be there for the individuals and institutions who’ve been there for us. And TWP has definitely been there.

As their site notes, “Third World Press has been dedicated to publishing culturally progressive and politically insightful works of fiction and non-fiction since 1967. Over its four-decade history, Third World Press has published the works of poet and publisher Dudley Randall, poets Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Mari Evans and Margaret Walker; editor Hoyt W. Fuller; historians, John Henrik Clarke and Chancellor Williams; Chicago writers, Sterling Plumpp, Useni Eugene Perkins and Jacob Carruthers; playwright and producer Woody King Jr.; writers, Kalamu ya Salaam, Pearl Cleage, Ruby Dee, Ruth Garnett, Keorapetse Kgositsile, Derrick Bell, Gloria Naylor and Lorene Cary; artist Murry DePillars; and continues to publish much of the work by the unforgettable Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks.”

Brian Gilmore

Tony Medina

Shani Jamila

Mariama Richards

Michael Eric Dyson & Marc Lamont Hill

Mariama Richards, Shani Jamila, Brian Gilmore, Michael Eric Dyson, Tony Medina, Marc Lamont Hill

*All photographs were taken by the inimitable Jati Lindsay.

Additional thanks are due to Susan L. Taylor for issuing the call; to Marc for both having the vision for the event & his partnership in making it happen; to Busboys and Poets for their generosity; and to Baba Haki and the TWP family for the inspiration and legacy that have been such an integral part of our community for 40+ years.

If you were unable to join us, but would still like to support this amazing institution, please send your donation (suggested $20 or more) to the following address:

Third World Press

P.O. Box 19730

7822 South Dobson Avenue

Chicago, IL 60619.

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is the skeletal architecture of our lives.”
–Audre Lorde

Just over a week ago I walked into the Harlem Stage to check out Blood Dazzler, a play based on a series of poems written about Katrina by one of my favorite poets, Patricia Smith. Smith collaborated with director and choreographer sisters Patricia and Paloma Macgregor to bring these pieces to life via a fusion of dance and oratory. There was also a post show panel of artists and activists who gathered to discuss the impact that this disaster had on the Gulf community and the world at large. I was especially proud to check out two members of the New Orleanian branch of my family as they participated in that discussion, John and Wendi O’Neal.

When I first heard about this NYC based production, I knew I would be making the trip. I am so glad I did. The performance was extraordinary, it moved me in the way that only the best art does. I literally sat down in that theater one woman and stood up transformed.

Then this past weekend was the first national launch of Alice Walker’s latest book of poetry, Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, at Busboys and Poets in DC. Hundreds of people came out to share in this celebration, the restaurant was exclusively dedicated to this event. We had a DJ rocking Fela and Nina Simone, Carolyn Malachi and her band performed, NAACP President Ben Jealous came to speak to us hot on the heels of the One Nation Working Together march and Holly Bass rocked a poetic introduction in concert with a tap dancer. Alice was signing books and dancing with the crowd, her partner Kaleo entertained us all on the trumpet. And together we all danced furiously.

(Pics from the latter event are in their own entry down below.)

Both of these evenings have me thinking deeply  about what I’ve come to identify as my own life path, this fusion of art and activism.  I am a cultural worker because the gritty grassroots work we do in opposition to the prison industrial complex, in support of a feminist lens, in affirmation of human rights… all of it is rooted in an ethic of transformation. We have to be able to believe in a world we haven’t lived in yet. We have to be able to conceive of human interaction uncompromised by racism, sexism, classism and other forms of inequity.

Art helps ground us in that vision. And on the occasions when I get to see it done with the level of mastery that I have in the work of these women, it really reminds me of its power. This is the groundwork that must be laid in encouraging and empowering people to understand and explore their political imagination—a fundamentally undervalued part of creating social change.