My latest blog on The Stimulist today, calling for a National Day of Mourning, so we can at last codify, or at least make socially acceptable, the act of mourning.

It was kind of an emotional thing to write, found myself crying remembering when my mother died (pictured right at 21-years-old). It's something I try not to remember most of the time. And certainly the crazy process of going back to Stanford a couple days after we buried her, and spending the rest of senior year hanging on by a thread, eating meals mostly alone in my dorm room, taking tests alone after my concentration got so shot I needed time and a half on exams, pretending I was okay.

Or rather, accommodating how ill-equipped most other people are with death, how they mostly never mentioned my loss, averted their eyes if I mentioned it, and usually went on (and on and on) about their trivial problems. Studying for a final exam. Getting over a breakup. Finding an outfit for senior formal. To all of these trivial trials I listened politely, nodding and frowning in the right places, saying how much it really sucked and how I was sure things would turn out okay. And all the while, this ever widening distance grew between me and most of the people in my life who I felt worried about the stupidest things, fixated on the most inane minutiae.

Life and death, I realized, is life and death.

Having a boy you like not care that you're alive is not life and death, it's a distraction. Fixating on that boy, obsessing over him, slitting your wrists with shards of broken glass (true story, one of my friends from high school) just isn't worth it.

At the time, and even now somewhat still, death put life into perspective for me. My relationships, my goals, my dreams for myself. I realized that most of my relationships weren't that deep, didn't have the legs to support a significant trial like loss; that I really really really DID hate biology, and was never in a million years going to med school; that I felt pretty bad about my life and could certainly benefit from therapy; and that I really hated feeling like I had to look like I was doing okay for other people. In reality, I wasn't. I was far from okay. The okay that I am now has been hard won, and I had to give up a lot of my childhood dreams about what I thought my life would be like in order to live it. That phrase is so deep, really -- "...She is survived by her daughters Eno, Ime, Anniedi, and Iquo..." -- because surviving isn't easy. Not helped by the fact that most other people could not help me cope. Most of my friends never even asked me how I was feeling.

If they had asked, I might have said I feel like shit. Or that my life was over. That I then, at 21, had to be my own mother. That my biggest and best cheerleader was gone forever and I would have to do the work of believing in myself for the rest of my life.

Many of those early feelings still haven't been processed, and seven years is still not that long. It amazes me how difficult it is, emotionally, to comprehend a loss. Even seven years later, one memory can make it seem like just a minute ago, and I'm sitting there in the hospital room again, wishing she would sit up and start talking, or laugh that great big belly chuckle she had.

Wow. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was arrested last Thursday. In Cambridge. For disorderly conduct. Grey-haired and bespectacled, the fifty-eight-year-old Gates, who now walks with a cane, flew into a "tumultuous" tirade at police responding to a neighbor's tip about a possible break-in (he had gotten locked outside of his home on Harvard campus).

His lawyer is Charles Ogletree. The pair play the race card for a living. This couldn't be a more perfect example of our life and times. Lately I've been thinking we still have no common understanding or language for discussing race, racism, blackness, whiteness, minority-ness, dominance and submission, signifier and signified.

You've gotta read the arrest report. I think I would fly into a "tumultuous" tirade too, although I highly doubt he did. There's no way a black man, and an educated one at that, would go off on a white cop with a pistol. Really don't understand how some folks think that's even in the realm of the possible. Goes to show how privilege breeds ignorance.

Could not get my shit together from the Bronx yesterday and got to the African Fest at Prospect Park near the tail end of King Sunny Ade's performance. Trains were crazy, making the BX-Bklyn commute almost two hours(!). But I'm a trooper. Missed Freshly Ground, though from what I heard of them a couple years ago in Jo'burg, I didn't miss too much. Sorry I missed Cheikh Mbaye and Sing Sing Rhythms, the amazing sabar drummers/dancers that teach my dance classes.

Earlier this week my dad saw King Sunny perform in Albany, and sent along this pic:



Bassey meets King Sunny at the Music Heaven, Central Park, Schenectady, NY (7/12/09). Enjoy the photo of two old men from Lagos: Sunny Ade of Palace Landing Hotel and BEPCO (both of Herbert Macaulay Street, Yaba, Lagos—going back to 1969). God bless the King of Nigeria’s Juju music. It is a small world. Just make it better!!

--Dr. Essien

Lmao! My dad had a photography company, BEPCO, back in those days. I think he even still has his old camera. :)

King Sunny's dancers were on point, a pair of middle-aged Naija sisters with curves (like real women) that could shake their booties in a million different ways. King Sunny might be an old man, but his hips still work too. LOL. Haven't seen that many gyrations on stage since...well, I guess Seun Kuti. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree either, cause I know King Sunny's son Kunle, who lives works and drums in Bklyn. We in the African arts community are always wondering when he will get his shit together, since he's obviously music royalty, though his dad is clearly wondering the same thing since he didn't ask Kunle to perform with him.

After the show, ran into some cats from The AFRican (how many years must pass in order to call it "defunct"?) and Nollywood NYC, the thirty-something-year-old-male-dominated bunch of Naija filmmakers who host screening events. In tow was this crazy dude with extremely chapped lips and a grizzled beard who kept talking about the "spiritual quagmire" he was in regarding other people standing in the way of his success (he was unemployed and living with his parents in Yonkers). Apparently he recently returned from a failed business venture in NG to find himself plagued by various "demonic forces" hampering his success.

I offered that it is often ourselves who stand in our own way, a force far more powerful than anything else. He refused to listen, touting the mysticism and magicalism of Nollywood movies as evidence of the reality of occult, demonic forces (I was lmaoing at this point, and it didn't help that the guy was literally crying...I think his tear ducts have some kind of problem).

You know, if you're broke and unemployed, as many people are right now, please don't expend energy questioning the demonic forces standing in the way of your success. If they truly exist (which is questionable), you're only giving them more energy by thinking about them. Conversely, please do not spend all day praying for deliverance. Instead, focus on what you can do differently if your life isn't working. As my mom always said, may her soul rest in peace, God helps those who help themselves. And I stand as a living testament.

I will pray for that brother. :)

I've been learning a lot about myself at work these days. There's the general stuff, like how much I hate emails and meetings and bosses (they can be so bossy sometimes), and then the major stuff, like how much I'm really not that in to politics.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to know what's going on in the world. I vote, read the paper, watch Macneil Lehrer and Charlie Rose, even write about politics from time to time. But I'm not necessarily "in" to politics. I've gone on marches, but I would never organize one; have never joined an explicitly political organization; and of course, famously, didn't call or canvas a single person to vote for Obama.

I did shoot a documentary of canvassers in downtown Brooklyn, though. And maybe that's just it: I enjoy politics as an observer, unwilling to get mired in the endless (and quite silly, I might add) left-right debate, progressives and conservatives like two kids on the playground arguing about whose mom is better. The answer is neither because there is no objective way to measure them, the two moms -- or ideologies -- are equally distinct beings governed by different systems of thought.

That kind of simple partisanship, though, is certainly at the heart of American politics, and makes for really bad government. Policies are molded more by fear and rhetoric than concern for the commonweal.

Most people are too small-minded to govern. I could toss out the names of two dozen pundits who think it's all either red or blue, and thank God they're not in any public office. Reality, unfortunately, is more like a shade of purple.

Rather than get caught up in the fray, I prefer to stay far enough back to see the reds and blues blend together. I wish more people approached government with that kind of pragmatism, call it wisdom. Without it, as it stands now, politics is the ultimate exercise in futility.

I always had a sneaking suspicion I was more of an abstainer than anything else, but it took a political job -- or rather, a job at a political documentary film company -- to realize that I don't really care that much. My compulsion is more to understand people, society, and the nature of social change than the political game. Why I likely was more fascinated by the phenomenon of a Barack Obama, than by the man himself or his politics (even less so now!).

That being said, I'm not so naive as to think the personal is not political. That my being black, African, American, female, and educated means nothing. Take one look at this circus of a confirmation hearing, and you can plainly see how simply being ethnic -- for lack of a pithier, less vulgar term -- is taken as a political statement, in contrast to neutral, objective, impartial whiteness.

Food for thought.

Last night Imagenation premiered “The Jackson 5 in Africa,” directed by the late Mamadou Johnny Sekka, a never-before-seen documentary chronicling the J-5’s concert tour to Senegal in 1974. It was the single most fascinating thing I’ve seen in the last ten years -- equal parts propaganda film, time capsule, and jam session – featuring the entire Jackson clan and the “spiritual…spirited…and rhythmic” people of Senegal. If you didn't see it, the film's West Coast premiere is at the Los Angeles Downtown Film Festival in August.

Imagenation Founder Moikgantsi Kgama got her hands on the film from an African-American investor who, in the 1980s, acquired a 16mm print of the original in exchange for a rough cut diamond. The film was funded by a group of African investors looking to bridge the gap between Africans and African-Americans, using the J-5 as the catalyst. They eventually ran out of funds and never finished the movie; the picture and, occasionally, sound fall out at points and the whole thing ends abruptly at 50 minutes.

But there was such a strong vibe in the audience last night—you might call it love—that I’m certain we would’ve continued staring at that white screen and singing along to J-5 jams as long as the soundtrack kept running.

Just seconds off the plane, the Jacksons are surrounded by sabar dancers in regal attire, Randy joining in as the narrator cites his ability to pick up the rhythm as “something basic” in the African personality. It continues on in that peculiar mysticism as the family tours the National Palace, a primary school, and the Medina, where candle lights in tin-roofed huts are likened to "twinkling stars" in the night sky.

The boys were captured at a rare point in their lives—not yet jaded by fame, still young enough to be awestruck by skyscrapers in the capital and slave dungeons on Gorée Island. Decked in royal beads, they move with a grace and carriage typically reserved for older men. Michael, barely taller than the podium, honoring President Leopold Senghor with their latest gold record. Joe Jackson receives the Medal of the Lion for his contributions to culture, only the second African-American after Duke Ellington to receive the honor.

What was evident from their first sold out performance at Demba Diop stadium, was not only how wide the J-5's international appeal was, but also how plugged in to contemporary African-American culture the 1970's Senegalese—and indeed all Africans—were. From their clothes to their style, hair, and swagger, the Africans could have been jamming in a stadium in Detroit.

For all the love in the room last night, the message was clear: Africa is in need of her displaced persons if she is to regain her status in the world.

Wow. Busy weekend. We threw a surprise baby shower for my sis who is expecting her second baby boy in September. Now that we're all grown up, I quite enjoy being able to gist and laugh and be crazy with my family. After the shower was over, we chilled watching (still nonstop) MJ coverage on CNN.


CNN anchor Don Lemon (pictured above) was discussing the wall-to-wall coverage of MJ's untimely death, suggesting it may have helped raise the black consciousness of the American public. The interview was inset by images of the funeral and, scrolling at the bottom of the screen, a ticker tape announcing Soledad O'Brien's Black in America 2. Shortly before the end of the segment, Lemon plugged Anderson Cooper, who would be covering Obama's trip to Ghana, segueing to an African-American filmmaker who documented his ten days in Africa, dropping some "expert" knowledge about pilgrimages to the Motherland.

I am more than speechless at this shift in the media's consciousness. I think we need to ask ourselves: Is it a good thing? I suppose it's a better alternative than no or a few token blacks in the media. But I must admit that I was quite comfortable flying below the radar screen. Now every half wit, pseudo black intellectual is spouting off half-baked theories on class, race, and society, taking cues from the black powers that be.

I think we need to retire some of these pundits (Al Sharpton, for one) and raise a new crop with some real shit to say. This. is. getting. ridiculous.

asa > asa

Asa opened for Les Nubians and Oumou Sangare at Central Park Summerstage yesterday. I've been digging her for a few months after sampling her debut album on a friend's iPod, though I never copped it. A pint-sized little thing, her voice and presence are larger than life. What I can only call a cross between Lucky Dube, Fela, Wunmi, and Tracy Chapman -- whatever that means. Something old and something new in her style. She'll be playing @ Le Poisson Rouge tonight, you should check her out.

the thing around your neck > chimamanda ngozi adichie
I caught a book reading by Chimamanda @ 192 Books in Chelsea a few weeks ago. When I say caught, I mean ran frantically from work and stood in the back of the room catching my breath as her words dripped like honey into my ears. It seems unfair that someone can be so young, so beautiful, so talented, and so warm -- speaking with me later on, as she signed my book, about our mutual friend (author Marie-Elena John Smith) who co-taught her writers' workshop in Lagos.

Her latest is a collection of short stories that contemplate what it means to be an African in America, set in -- amongst other places -- New York City. So wonderful how the familiar can become foreign just by seeing through someone else's eyes. Definitely worth a read, though I almost choked up a lung paying $27 (!) for the hardcover.

the jackson 5 in africa > imagenation
Next week I will be checking out The Jackson 5 in Africa, a rare, never-before-seen documentary brought to New York City by ImageNation. It seems that the collection of African investors who funded the film ran out of money before they could finish it (it clocks in at 50 minutes). They never had a strong impetus to show it until now, given the recent death of Michael Jackson that prompted ImageNation to request a special public screening. I can't wait to see mikey jackson get down to some djembes. My homie Funmi will be on the 1's and 2's spinning some MJ classics after the show. Check out a film clip on YouTube.