Ezibota

Everything Changed When The Fire Nation Attacked | Kimani Okearah

Media is a language we’ve developed to communicate on a wide scale. From hieroglyphics to books to television to this sentence you’re reading right now, it’s all a process based on combining our linguistic resources -patterns of movement, symbols, and sounds- to connect to each other. Sometimes this communication is direct, like a live viewing or a VoIP (voice-over internet protocol - think Facetime) conversation. Sometimes it’s passive, like reading an ancient text, swimming in the knowledge of our ancestors. We’re going to use this understanding of media as a language to explore how its misuse can maintain ideological divisions. We’re gonna get down with messaging techniques using the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender. It gave me life. Maybe I can give it back.

Racism exists as an ideological system of power in Western society. We classify individuals and their communities based on impressions of a global minority - in our reality, it’s various groups of Europeans insisting on an imperial legacy based on their claim to the fabricated concept of “whiteness.” If this system is negative, then it must have a counter, a positive system in which these individuals are exempt from these racial classifications. Unfortunately, no such system exists. If you don’t fit the social perception ascribed to your visual appearance, you’re considered an anomaly. Many of us have lived this, and it doesn’t feel good. This ‘racism, or lack thereof’ approach that we in creative media embrace is a result of exceptionalism (also called Chauvinism for hilarious French reasons). Exceptionalism is the social agreement that the ideology of the dominant group is exceptional, and therefore anything that does not coincide with this ideology is an unwelcome departure.  The first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender uses exceptionalism in a reverse binary as a code to both enable and challenge the dominant social ideology. Flameo, hotman!

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Mwasi Collective: Afrofeminist Resistance in France | Clementine Burnley

The confident prints and colours at the Afropunk Festival this weekend in Paris lifted my heart. For my generation, to wear anything “African” was to risk being identified with Africa and treated accordingly. Many of us shied away from that experience. The young people at Afropunk seem different from their parents and grandparents. Their homes are in Africa as well as in Europe, North America, Australia.  Their concerns and understanding of their Blackness is probably different from mine. But we share a common experience of discrimination. There are people who assume that as time goes by and hipsters grow facial hair, discrimination fades away.  Instead, the attitudes of the past find new expression with each generation and so Black consciousness is remade in each new generation. I caught up with the Mwasi Collective, a black feminist organization active in France.

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The Dictionary of African Family | Clementine Burnley

May is IDAHOT* -  International Day Against Homo-, Trans*- und Biphobia. This year the organizers picked the lens of Family. That left me wondering, who’s looking out of the windows of this basic social unit. Mom, Dad and baby makes three or are there ladies* taking tea on the balcony? It’s common knowledge now: families of choice can be safer than many of the families we grow up in. But it didn’t always used to be that way.

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SLAD Liberia Art Collective: “A Dance Around War” | Freda Koomson

“Please tell my people I’m gone”. Those were Emmanuel Lavelah’s last words to someone he recalls meeting at the port before his departure from Liberia to Sierra Leone in 1990. Liberia’s president Samuel Doe had recently been captured and the threads of the country’s precariously woven fabric were beginning to unravel. War was on the horizon.  Emmanuel had made up his mind to not be left behind by his older brothers who had been planning to leave their mother in his care. At the mere age of 18, Emmanuel arrived in a new land alone.  “Sometimes when anything is part of you, and you reach to a new area, you want to remember where you come from”.

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Pepsi Meant It | Kimani Okearah

An advertisement for Pepsi (featuring the sub-Kardashian Kendall Jenner) recently got a lot of buzz and for all the wrong reasons. It’s message was simple - join the conversation. The methodology was... ignorant. That’s if we’re being merciful. Various corners of the internet sparked a flame at Pepsi’s appropriation of protest imagery to sell flavored high fructose corn syrup. Pepsi has since pulled the ad. “Pepsi was trying to project a global message of unity, peace and understanding. Clearly, we missed the mark and apologize,” Pepsi released in a statement. “We did not intend to make light of any serious issue.” Actually, Pepsi, your brand absolutely intended to make light of a serious issue. Let’s get dirty and apply ‘dramaturgy,’ or the theory and practice of dramatic composition, to this ad.

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There is No One Way to Be | Benjamina Dadzie

We are made to feel as though we can be only one thing, that we can inhabit one space and find fulfillment through one dimension of ourself. Therefore, if you define yourself as feminist, you're often seen as someone who knows no intellectual fluidity beyond an elementary understanding of what being a feminist entails.

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AfroFutures - Art, and Staying Alive under Global Capitalism | Clementine Burnley

If we think of art as a game, maybe even “the beautiful game” then let’s take a look at who is  on the playing field?  These people range between independently wealthy and homeless.  People who  do not need to make a living at all or who cannot live without art.

How long  players are able to experiment, train, sharpen their vision, live long enough to mature, depends very much on the conditions of their existence.

What are the material conditions under which Afropeople make ART a fulltime or part-time thing they do?

There are also powerful inner voices that speak to afroartists at 3 am, insomniac and worried, of self-doubt and fear. Of criticism, failure, of being judged and found not to be sufficient.  Not inspired, trained enough, not being understood, being compared to a norm which isn’t calibrated by Africans.

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Art in Conversation | Benjamina Dadzie

Art is an essential part of life, whether we live it, consume it, or produce it. In the last decade or so, we have experienced the emergence of African and Afrodiasporic artists in different fields – music, visual arts, digital art, creative writing, performing arts, etc. And for most of us, the work of the artist is our gateway into their many different experiences, experiences we otherwise may have never been introduced to.

But what does it mean to be a creative or an artist?During the months of April, May, and June, we will explore what moves artists to create and express themselves in the ways that they do. We'll use these conversations as an opportunity to grasp the challenges and/or benefits of being a creative in an age of digital media, and money driven businesses.

All posts dedicated to this quarter’s theme will be tagged “Art in Conversation"

The Anointing | Freda Koomson

For a time during my adolescence, I considered conversion to Islam. The project of discovering myself almost mandated it.  When my first cousins arrived from war-torn Liberia in the Fall of 1997, I was starting a new school, in a new world and perhaps I was clinging desperately to some foundational aspects of my being and enthusiastically proclaimed to my cousin that I wanted to study the Koran like he had.  I recall peeling my eyes open sleepily at the crack of dawn, realizing my cousin had left the bottom bunk mattress we shared,  snoozing as I watched my eldest cousin bend in prostration, wipe her face with both palms and open and close  her hands repeatedly to the ceiling slowly catching the blessings showering her from above. Blessings that poured in through the dark morning air, penetrating our 20 floor housing building, and piercing the air molecules of our room.

My desire to convert to Islam was no doubt made more attractive by this intimate personal daily engagement I was privy to, which  beat the Christianity my stepfather had decided to force feed us every Sunday morning. “We’re going to Church!” he would exclaim and the dread crept up even faster if the car wasn’t working (it often wasn’t) and church meant a 20 minute bus ride to a 40 minute train ride. Church, at all costs.   In fact my mom’s excuses to not join us varied from wanting to have food ready for us when we returned from church (who could argue with that?), to declarations that she was “Muslim!” despite the folded up prayer mat that I had never seen her use.

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Religion or No Religion... That is the Question | Khaoula El Otmani

In all the many aspects of my life I noticed a deep difference between the values and culture I find at home and the ones I find in school or work.

I was raised in a religious environment and most people I’ve known during my childhood have the same ideas and beliefs as my parents’, give or take. As I grew up, though, I started to realize that religion wasn’t a priority for many people and that most of them confuse religion with culture and think that they’re interchangeable.

Nowadays, most people I know are not religious. But, I noticed that they still swear by the Islamic beliefs and feel that it is necessary to follow certain aspects of the religion. Except when it contradicts their lifestyle.

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