We Want the Airwaves - Ajuan Mance

Nia King: So I recently participated in an event that you organized.

Ajuan Mance: Ah, yes.

Nia: I thought that you were the sole organizer, but were there-

Ajuan: No.

Nia: OK. (laughs)

Ajuan: I'm the sole organizer for the Mills event.

Nia: OK.

Ajuan: But not for the net- Well, it's a regional organization called Art of Living Black. It is African-American, or actually it's not just African-American, it's artists of African descent, self-identified, from the Bay-Area, mostly East Bay, and between January andusually everything's done by the end of March, we have a series of shows. There's a big show at the Richmond Art Center with a very big opening, it's really a great event. Depending on the year it's anywhere from about 50 to about 90 artists, and then there are a bunch of satellite shows. Sometimes CBS actually has satellite shows, several galleries in the area, um

Nia: CBS like the television station?

Ajuan: Yeah. The Commonwealth Club has had satellite shows, and then there's an open-

Nia: That's in San Francisco?

Ajuan: That's right, and so both sides of the Bay do satellite shows, and then we have an open studios weekend, and so there's a map I guess that's the biggest part of the event, is that we print out, the organizers print out a map, and then Mills is one of the open studios locations. We like to have as many places where people can go and see several artists at one place so that they can at least hit a whole bunch of artists and not have to drive that far. We have some people who just open up their homes.

The organization was founded by these two African-American women artists, Lorraine Hart-Schuyers and, uh, why am I forgetting Rae's name- Rae Hayward. Rae Louise Hayward. She's the person I knew. By the time I joined the organization the other woman had already died, and we have an award in her name every year for three artists who will then be the featured artists next year. Featured artists get a whole section of a wall and they get to do several pieces.

Nia: And that's at the Richmond art gallery?

Ajuan: And that's at the Richmond Art Center who have been really support over the years and let us have our show in the space from usually late December all the way through early March. And then Rae Louise Hayward is the person who invited me into the organization to participate. And it's not juried, so anyone who identifies as Black and identifies as artist can participate. Sadly enough, it was really tragic, Rae died several years ago, both women of cancer. Women's Cancer Resource Center has also been very supportive of our organization, they have satellite shows as well. But the one thing I can always say about Rae was that she made all of us feel like we were real artists. If the newspapers wanted to feature some work she really distributed it amongst the different artists, had us interviewed, she made sure there were artist talks, and she really made this event happen every year, calling people up saying you know, the deadline was yesterday.

Nia: (laughs)

Ajuan: I need you to bring your art (laughs)

Nia: I feel like that's so much of what a curator does. (laughs)

Ajuan: I tell ya. In the interim her family has taken over over the years. There's been a lot of losses, which have been really tragic. Some of the people who have then stepped in to her place afterwards, Melba Lazenby, who's her sister-in-law. She then took over and did a wonderful job doing the same thing. Melba died last December and Melba's husband has now stepped in, Henry, and you know he's been doing a great job making this happen. And so, it's a close knit group and it's kind of like going to a college reunion when we see each other up in December when we're dropping off our art, lots of hugs and over 10, 15 years we've all gotten to really know each other. It's a great group.

Nia: That's awesome. I think it's so cool that the big show is in Richmond because I feel like generally everything art-related in the Bay tends to be concentrated in San Francisco and then less so the East Bay but then less-less so in Richmond, even though I haven't been to the Richmond Art Center, is that's what it's called?

Ajuan: Right, right.

Nia: But it seems like a great space.

Ajuan: It's amazing. It's large, it's oddly enough attached to the police station. (both laugh)

Nia: Interesting.

Ajuan: It is. It's kind of an odd one. When I first got up there I was like Ahhh, I gotta get used to this. But the main gallery is beautiful and they maintain it very well, big white walls, high ceilings, and there are two other gallery spaces, so they do a range of shows. I mean they bring in some remarkable artists. A lot of Bay-Area connected people who've done political art for a while, they had some folks who were doing political posters back in the 60's and 70's. It's one of the most memorable shows I've seen. But just really wonderful artists, and a real emphasis of artists of color. And then also things like they have some amazing shows of local youth artists, of artists with intellectual disabilities. They have had some amazing shows, and then photography projects that high schools have done. And then of course the main gallery every year really lights up for me when we have our Art of Living Black show. People show up from all over, and you know I hadn't thought about this until you mentioned it because my introduction to Richmond was Art of Living Black, so for me it's always felt like an arts place. But yeah, every year when we have our opening people come from all over the Bay Area including San Francisco to this place, and I think it's a great way for Richmond to feature what it does, and it remains affordable for artists. Some of our artists live in Richmond. Some of them moved to Richmond so that they could buy homes and still live as an artist.

Nia: Yeah, no, I think that's kind of sort of what I was getting at. I keep thinking of the National Queer Arts Festival and how it tends to be very heavily centered, I think you can't get funding to do a showI think that's changing this yearunless it's in San Francisco, and so that way a lot of arts money and like, queer arts money gets spent in San Francisco. But it's like, people of color and a lot of queer people can't afford to live in San Francisco. (laughs)

Ajuan: That's right.

Nia: And especially Black people. Like the outmigration of Black folks from San Francisco has been making headlines for years now, because their I think their Black population is down from 5% to like 3% over the last like... (laughs)

Ajuan: Wow. (laughs)

Nia: But that should be fact-checked, I'm not 100 percent positive on that. But it's super small, and I feel like yeah, Richmond doesn't get a lot of love but it's still a place where Black people and artists and Black artists can afford to live, in an increasingly unaffordable Bay Area.

Ajuan: Right. Art is sustainable there.

Nia: How long have you been involved with the Art of Living Black?

Ajuan: Probably sinceI came to the Bay Area in 99maybe 2001? I think 2001 might have been the first year.

Nia: How long have you been doing visual art?

Ajuan: Well, I always say there have been two things I have been my whole life, and one is Black and the other is an artist. (laughs) And the other is a nerd.

Nia: (laughs)

Ajuan: All three are very true. And so art has always been a part of my life, forever.It wasn't until, weirdly enough, it was after I was a professor for my first year. After grad school I got my first job. I taught at the University of Oregon, and at the end of that year, almost the moment I turned in my grades, I just had this overwhelming feeling that I need to do art, I need to take it seriously, and I need to develop an art practice that leads me down a path of some sort of creative inquiry. Somehow working 100 percent, putting all of my energy into the academy made it really clear to me that this thing that has always come fairly easily to me, I'm very passionate about but I've never taken it very seriously, needs to really become a central part of my life. That was in 1996. So that's when I got really serious and started buying art supplies and working on usingI wanted to develop a permanent medium, and I can't do oil, and so I started working in acrylics and I started teaching myself how to use acrylics, and so I guess now that's been almost 20 years.

Nia: So, I know you first as my former professor. (laughs)

Ajuan: Oh, right!

Nia: I took your 20st Century African-American Literature Class and so that's how I know you. I didn't find out you were a visual artist until later, I think

Ajuan: Ohhh!

Nia: --and then also I'd see you around at QPOC stuff.

Ajuan: Oh right, right. (laughs)

Nia: And then also your partner was in a class that I taught, a stand-up comedy class.

Ajuan: Which was so bizarre. You're one of the people who've I've actually had in a class who I see around more than anyone else, in very positive contexts (both laugh) which is also a plus.

Nia: Thats good. (laughs) That's cool because I know you first as an academic and an intellectual. It's cool to find out that you have this very long running art project. How long have you been doing 1001 Black Men?

Ajuan: I have been doing the project since June of 2010. One could say I have a lifetime of practice leading me toward that because I always have drawn more men than women.

Nia: That's one thing I wanted to ask you about, why men?

Ajuan: You know, that's an interesting question, and I'll just say as an aside that when I turned 40, I had an art show that was a retrospective from 4 to 40 (laughs) and just for that day I brought a bunch of art my mother sent me, drawings that I did when I was four or something.

Nia: Where was this?

Ajuan: I actually had it at Mills. We rented out the alumni house.

Nia: OK.

Ajuan: And I invited a bunch of people and had my art all over the place and I hadn't looked at the art in a long time, and especially the art from middle school. I realized that I have never kept a journal because I start to bore myself after awhile. Today I had breakfast. I just don't know what to say.

Nia: That's a funny thing to hear from a literature professor.

(both laugh)

Ajuan: I tried so many times even in the last couple of years. I want to do a journal but I realized my art is so revealing, and when I started looking through it I realized, Oh my goodness, this is kind of telling my whole story. One of the things I realized, I was drawing a lot of men, particularly through high school and I really love particularly very a lot of classic clothing and especially men's clothing Brideshead Revisited and Chariots of Fire and all those great cricket sweaters and everything. I drew a lot of folks dressed in those clothes. Sometimes I just drew those clothes when I was in high school. I had great art training in my high school.

I was not really particularly interested in drawing femininity because I don't find it particularly compelling as a line of inquiry, and art is really a thing for me to explore and enjoy and kind of really get into every aspect, every dimension of stuff I'm really into. In research that's what I do. I'm very into African American history, so I love reading 19th century literature and doing research on it. I have questions about things about which I'm passionate, and I think I'm more passionate about maleness and masculinity and more interested in it because it's something I kind of, I find I more relatable. I feel like I kind of understand femininity because it was the thing that was kind of given to me and handed to me as the thing I probably want to try out and adopt and I chose otherwise, but I've always been much more interested in drawing masculinity for as long as I can remember.

Nia: That's a great transition into asking about your book Constructing Black Womanhood because you said you've always found masculinity more interesting, but then you wrote this book about Black women.

Ajuan: I did, I did.

Nia: (laughing) What does constructing Black womanhood mean?

Ajuan: You know I definitely identified as a woman but for me that's not really a gendered term, it's really about the body I inhabit. For myself, I'm really comfortable saying I'm a woman who is gender non-conforming and feels more connected to male clothing and stereotypically male stuff. Never really thought about it too much until I moved to the Bay Area. (laughs) It's just never been a difficult thing for me.

One of the things that I find really interesting as someone who identifies as a woman but is non-gender conforming is that when you walk in the world as a woman who is Black there's certain meanings that people associate with your body. I mean in some ways femininity is something that has never really been it's a hard-won identity for people who walk around in Black bodies. So I'm really interested in how women of African descent have negotiated that space, have negotiated the space of inhabiting themselves, understanding who they are, or who they want to be, but always walking in a world that even in Blackness doesn't really create a space for them to be those things.

Womanhood has always been gendered white in the U.S. and Blackness has always been gendered male, you know? Black people who are not women, who don't identify as women, and women who don't identify as Black have played a very strong role in enforcing that, and giving Black women basically no space in which to, you know, it's the classic intersectionality argument. And so whenever we talk about intersectionality a lot of times we're talking about the 20th century and we're talking about the notion of the women's movement that says that Black women have to participate as women, or the nationalist movement that say Black women have to participate as Black. But I was really interested in looking backwards and starting with where that idea became-what role does literature have in perpetuating this idea?

Nia: That Black women can never be woman enough or Black enough?

Ajuan: Right. And so you know it took me back to the mid-19th century when we see, I won't go into a lot of detail, but when labor moves from the home to a workplace away from the home, all kinds of things ensue, and thats really I think when we see codification of women as raced and classed identity.

Nia: Could you say a little more about that?

Ajuan: So the notion that certainly Black women have had an uphill battle. You know, anyone who identifies as woman and Black at the same time, being visible as such is a challenge. So Black women from the first time that Europeans encountered sub-Saharan Africans, for some reasons Europeans had trouble understanding that these are human beings, and that those human beings experience themselves as gendered. But certainly slavery in the United States does not make space for Black people to have gender or sex self-determination. They take meanings for those bodies and they project them, and they use those bodies, literally, in the ways they see fit. But in particular the notion that to be a woman you need to withdraw humbly into the home, and that your life is circumscribed that, that excludes almost all Black women at the time, certainly because of slavery. In 1850 89% of Black people were enslaved. We can certainly imagine that the overwhelming majority of that 11% free, those women had to work.

If you work outside the home, you're not a woman. So it also excludes a whole lot of immigrant women who are white. Immigrant women of all races, many of whom were poor, so the race and the class thing overlay in a way that never has served Black women. Womanhood is white, and womanhood is middle-class, at least. So given that, how have Black woman found a space to inhabit both of those identities, Blackness and womanhood? And so I spend some time in my book and the introduction looking at the poetry of the time by white women that in some ways develops a really elaborate set of symbols to reinforce the idea that womanhood is very specific things, that working-class women of all races and that women of African descent can't measure up to, so to speak. Not that one would really necessarily want to have this humble withdrawal, but if womanhood means these specific things, most women are not going to be able to fit into that identity.

And then I started to look at women in the late 19th century, when Black women start writing poetry that really pushes back against all of these ideas showing that's women's labor in the home is actually work. So those women who have humbly withdrawn into they home, they're working too. They really start to critique by making Black women visible in specific ways. Of course this is poetry that hardly anybody is reading, outside the Black readership. But still it's important and it's really amazing when you compare it to poetry in the Harlem Renaissance, which, really in that poetry a lot of Black women seem to retreat back into these very stereotyped, very limiting notions of womanhood as domesticity-based. It's really bizarre.

Nia: Do you think that that has to do with achieving economic means that would enable that?

Ajuan: Certainly the women poets of the Harlem Renaissance are overwhelmingly elite. The poets of the Harlem Renaissance are. But I make an argument that it about with its also visibility. Those Black women poets of the 19th century, I always say they kind of wrote for a parlor audience of people, often people who knew them. They certainly appeared in a lot of the African-American publications, but they didn't have as much power in literature, some did, but when we're talking specifically about the poets, when we get to the Harlem Renaissance there are women like Jessie Fauset who in some ways ran the literary section of the most important magazine of Black people of that time, The Crisis. So Black women in some ways trade this enhanced visibility for signing on to the notion of Blackness as male. So if you're going to talk about race and you're going talk about raced experiences those are going to be the experiences of men. You can talk about womanhood, and what people might stereotypically call women's stuff, but those need to be deracinated figures, and they need to be very, very stereotypically feminized.

When in grad school I started to read Black women's poetry of the Harlem Renaissance I'm like there's so much of this, why is it never taught? I think it's never taught because it's not what people were expecting. I think it's hard for 21st century readers to find it usable, and to find access. Some of those women are very talented, and powerful writers but there is a degree of which when they talk about racism they somehow have to articulate it through the lens of maleness and masculinity, so they write to demand a better world for their sons. They write to encourage their sons to grow up and fight. You don't see a lot of Black women speaking subjects who are addressing specifically their experiences of racism as Black people who are women.

Nia: Wow, that's super interesting. So you feel like the reason, when you say their poetry isn't usable you mean because it contradicts what we want to think about women of color in that time in that era?

Ajuan: You know, there's this scholar Nellie McKay, the late Nellie McKay who's an amazing African-American woman scholar, and she and Henry Louis Gates were the people who created the first Norton Anthology of African-American literature back in '97, and one of the things she said when they were interviewed about this on, I think it was CNN or PBS, but in the interview she said when we look back to early writers we look back for the roots of what we have of today. Where do we first start to see that? And Black women's writing from the 1970s on was known for outspoken representations and unflinching representations of Black women's lives. The struggles the celebrations, but being very Black women-centered, that's why it became so popular across races, particularly races of women, because it was one of those literatures, one of those few literatures that's about the experiences of people who identify as women and privileging those perspectives regardless of what other people thought of about it. And of course you know about the controversy of Ntozake's For Colored Girls and Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Gloria Naylor, you know they're saying bad things about Black men. They were privileging what they felt like they as Black women needed to say and what they wanted other Black women hear.

Nia: And that was blasphemy?

Ajuan: Well it was very controver- I tell you, there were some serious battles. Every time I looked at PBS for awhile Barbara Smith was debating one or another African-American male writer about how are Black women representing Black men, but that has become our expectation. And when we're looking at-

Nia: To uplift Black men?

Ajuan: Um, well, no, in terms of why were don't read the Harlem Renaissance. Our expectation is that Black women's literature is going to be about Black women's emancipation, freedom, and candor, about the reality of our experience, our celebrations and our hurts.

Nia: So if it's not then it's not usable?

Ajuan: Right, well it doesn't do- In some ways I would say that some of that literature from the 20s doesn't do what we as readers today we would want that literature to do for us because in some ways it seems to be defaulting to something against which we've been writing now for the last 40, 50 yearsthe de-centering of Black women's experience in Black women's own works. So in some ways, you know, a lot of our pursuit of history is not simply because we want to know what happened in the past. It's self serving.

Even with my own research when I realized there was Black literary community in the 1820s it became very self-serving. It made me feel different as a scholar. To know that I was not I'm certainly not a pioneer, I'm not the first Black professor or anything, but the idea that there were Black folks who cared about the stuff I cared about, in the city outside of which I grew up, made me feel a sense of belonging as a person of letters that I didn't even know I hadnt felt. And this was my experience as a tenured professor. I realized there was a sense of belonging I hadn't felt until I discovered that there were people with my interest and my priorities, Black nerds who liked to read and write a lot, in a critical mass, in the city I that love, in the 1820s. It changed my relationship to the academy, and outside of academia, to my relationship as a reader and a writer and a lover of the written word.

And so, our pursuit of history is very self-serving. In many cases it's where the passion comes from. It doesn't mean that's bad history or bad research, the best research, because we want to uncover these stories that are transformative. But we also want bring voice to these people who If we don't know these things exist these folks are voiceless in the 20th century. So by saying it's self-serving I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing, but I am saying that especially as marginalized folks, I would say this about queer and trans folks too, we're looking back to try to find things that in some way give us something give us some shoulders on which to climb, that give us that gives us a foundation on which to rest and from which to build. The idea of inventing everything is very daunting, and that's why it's so important for LGBTQs, people of color, folks who inhabit both identities, to know our history and pursue that, but when history's not usable for us, when it tells us some stories that are kind of wonky.

Nia: That we don't want to hear?

Ajuan: We don't, we really don't. I've been reading some 19th century African work that's complicated like that, and I look back on it and I wonder what people are going to think when they read some of this stuff.

Nia: Are you talking about for your new book?

Ajuan: Right, right. I've been rereading all the works that are in the new book over the last several days and revisiting some of the work. Some of what I find so exciting when I read this work is that Black perspectives and experiences are so much more diverse than history has allowed us to experience and understand. And if that's diverse, if those perspectives are diverse, what it means is that some people are saying things that will make us very uncomfortable and I kind of am into that. I really like when people refuse what to be what we want them to be. In some ways when we go back and uncover writings that haven't been looked at, that no one has paid attention to, one of the things that is so important is that they just kind of challenge us to re-imagine ourselves when we realize how much more possibility there was in the past. And so I'm kind of into that.

Nia: Could you give an example of a work that you've been working with where you're like I don't know how people will feel about this?

Ajuan: Well, The easy one to say is this guy William Hannibal Thomas who really was kind of, he was I won't say he was a nightmare, I'll say he was a difficult man.

Nia: (laughs)

Ajuan: He was a man of African decent. To make a long story short, he wrote a bunch of essays and letters and did a whole lot of different jobs through his life, and then in 1901 or 1902 he published this book called The American Negro. In effect what he said was everything you thought about Black people, they are those things. They are lazy, they are hyper-sexual, they steal. It's confounding to 21st century readers. Its so confounding that a recent historian went back and did this exhaustive study of this man's life trying in effect

Nia: To figure out what went wrong? (laughs)

Ajuan: To figure out what's up with this guy, that he's going to write a book that says that everything white racists and slavery apologists say about Black people is true? Why would a person of African descent write this? Of course it was picked up by white racists partisans including Thomas Dickson who wrote the book that went on to become the film Birth of a Nation. The book is called Black Judas, by the way, the history book in which the historian goes back and tries to figure out what's up with this guy's life. Where did this turn happen? It was an award-winning book, it was exhaustively researched.

Nia: Did they come up with a root for his self-hatred?

Ajuan: Um you know, really it's about the notion of ambivalence about his relationship to Blackness, having experienced some a lot of racism. But in some ways having at certain times of life had forms of privilege also.

Nia: So they chalked it up to him being privileged?

Ajuan: Well, they chalked it up to him reacting badly to, in some ways scapegoating, in some ways being angry at Blackness for the ways in which it didn't deliver him into the life in which he had hoped. He ended up being a person who had a lot of struggles, some which he caused himself.

Nia: (laughs) How so?

Ajuan: At various point there are places where he lied about certain credentials, and he did some kind of irresponsible things in his jobs. I guess maybe the best way to say this is he was an angry man with a complex relationship to his identity, and it became anger at Blackness. It's probably his most successful piece of writing, this book.

But people who didn't hate Black people also A guy who is really famous and an amazing Black pioneer who wrote the novel Clotel which was the paradigmatic so-called tragic mulatto novel of the antebellum period, and wrote the first Black history book, he wrote the first Black travelogue, he wrote a three volume history of Black people, the first Black travel book, he had a lot of firsts, the first Black history first Black professionally-published novel. And then later in life he wrote a book called My Southern Home. And in that bookand slavery has long been over by this timein he is weirdly nostalgic for the plantation from which he escaped, the plantation where he was born and raised. Actually I think he escaped from other people than this, who took him on vacation in Ohio, which is kind of weird idea to do with an enslaved person who can read and write. Nia: (laughs)

Ajuan: I'm glad his owners weren't terribly bright but that was a ridiculous idea. But then he writes about Black people he writes about them with this bizarre this distance from them.

Nia: Double-consciousness?

Ajuan: Yeah, and he's a person at this time and one of the things I think is shocking is how people understand relationships between race, multiracial/multi-ethnic identity, and things like propriety, chastity, intelligence, and just being a good person. (laughs) I think people would be uncomfortable with the degree to which people associated lightness and mixed race identity with being smarter, being prettier, being more moral. I think overall that's one of the most surprising things about the literature, in term of things that would be shocking and uncomfortable to people.

Nia: I think it strikes me as not shocking because we still hear that today. (laughs) I guess going back in history I would expect people to be, I would expect to find more colorism rather than less, does that make sense?

Ajuan: Yeah, yeah it does. And in fact there is much more colorism. I will say maybe it's my own sheltered environment, but (laughs) I have been stunned by the amount of colorism and just the openness about it, the values associated with certain ways of looking. But then you have people like this guy Alexander Crummell who's very, very proud to be what he would describe as pure African and you have these key moments in literature when people, some of the same people who you might think, hmm, they way they're talking about color feels a little weird, but at the same time they'll greatly praise someone's beauty who is, they will say pure African or very dark.

In some ways people are all over the place and that is what is so exciting for me Blackness is so many different things and the politics of it and the culture of it is so broad and there's so many different ways of being Black even though we're only hearing form a very small percentage of people, but those people represent such a diversity of ideas, and I think it's a lesson for today. There was a lot of debate and a lot of discussion and people were not afraid to go out on a limb and say a completely outrageous things.

It made for a richness of conversation around race because one of the things we did see was, you know certainly some people were ostracized for their ideas, but I'm just impressed by the degree of debate around various meanings and ideas of this time. I feel like it's liberating for contemporary Black people to know that there was debate and there were many different ideas and possibilities at that time when people had so much less possibility. So certainly today when were should embrace a lot of ways of should be a lot of different ways of thinking and talking about race.

Nia: The sense I'm getting from you is that there was this diversity of thought within the Black community that we have somehow, that at some point in history was lost or constrained? Ajuan: I would say this, and it's funny because I've been thinking a lot about art and I've been reading a lot of these texts but I haven't been thinking about the big idea, but I would say this, because I'm a 19th century specialist I'm not sure I know, I haven't read enough about the breadth of ways that people think about race in the 21th century to say there was more diversity of thought at that time than now.

Nia: I guess I'm going back to this idea of history of that we can use, and the idea of history that we can't use getting lost or intentionally erased, and so I think what I'm really thinking about is how Black nationalism constricted what was an appropriate way to be Black or what was appropriate to say as a Black person, and I also wonder if you to some extent blame hip-hop? (laughs)

Ajuan: (laughs) I was just thinking about this just about a year ago, about the relationship between hip hop and Black nationalism. The politics, the aesthetics, the language of hip hop draws so heavily on the language of Black nationalism. There's a wonderful scholar who used to be my colleague at the University of Oregon named Karen Ford, and she wrote a bookcalled, I think it's Moments of Brocade and it's about excess, the uses of excess, and in the language of certain poets. One of the poets she talks about is Amiri Baraka and the language of excess. His language of excess, it's kind of like racial signifying. How outrageous can you be to show your wit, but also to get people's attention?

Hip hop definitely jumps right in and draws on that, and people have made this directs connection from hip-hop to early traditions like pimp narratives, and toasting traditions, and folk tales but I also think hip-hop draws directly on the signifying tradition thats filtered through nationalism. You know, excess as a statement of your rebellion from mainstream politics, mainstream mores, from what you're supposed to be and dothat push back. Certainly signifying goes way back but the particular way that signifying manifests in hip-hop

Nia: Would you mind explaining the term for folks who may not know?

Ajuan: Ohh, wow...

(both laugh)

Ajuan: I think if you really want to have a deep and rich understanding of hip-hop you should read Henry Louis Gates, Jrs The Signifying Monkey, so I'll just say that as just a caveat. But signifying for me is all about that African diasporic aesthetics of excess, so that aesthetic isn't just the idea of something that's just empirically beautiful, but there's beauty in how excessive you can be. Beauty in wittily pushing the limits your in terms of your language and your speech, and then there's the degree your effectiveness in doing that also become this way of establishing social hierarchies within friend groups and within culture. We talk a lot about signifying with language, yo mama jokes for example, and playing the dozens, but those are kind of the paradigmatic examples that a lot of scholars like to use. We cannot not notice the way that you can signify by how you walk down the street, you can signify with your car, you can signify by the way you move your head when you talk to someone, you know? So signifying becomes this larger way of inhabiting the world from, rooted in this Afro-diasporic thing. It's about an aesthetics, it's almost like I always think of the notion of variations on a theme, in some ways signifying to me is kind of taking the theme and turning it until it's not quite ridiculous, but really creative, really interesting, and a little bit out of bounds. I think a lot of why hip-hop upsets some people so much is because people don't understand what signifying is really all about.

I really like a lot of the raps by the rapper Too $hort. And Too $hort says some things that sometimes I find when I think about it out of context, even in context I'm like Hmm, that's kind of difficult for me to hear. But then I again I also think that the character, the persona he's putting on as Shorty the Pimp is signifying all over the place. The idea of just saying something because it's outrageous and funny and part of the humor is the audacity of that statement. Some people are really good at it, some people are just terrible at it so it just feels like hate. And then there's the degree to which one wonders how much I would say not everyone who is kind of drawing on the signifying tradition knows that they're signifying. You know, the whole idea of hip-hop being about what's real takes a lot of the play out of it, but for many artists a lot of it is about playfulness, sometimes playing with really hard stuff that sometimes from a mainstream American perspective you're not supposed to play with. But when it comes to signifying in some ways the rules are there are no rules.

Nia: Yeah. (laughs) Sorry, you're so smart, it's really overwhelming. (laughs)

Ajuan: That's very kind.

Nia: (laughs) Sometimes when I talk to academics it's a little hard to like... (laughs) reel them in.

Ajuan: Oh, (laughs) I can understand that.

Nia: It's all really good stuff. But I think I want to come back to Black nationalism because I think it has so much to do with the frame through which Im understanding the things you're saying about Black literature historically. I feel like it was Richard Wrightyou would clearly know this better than Iwho had a very strong stance that art should be political and uplift the Black race, and that that is purpose of Black art and the function of Black art, is to serve that political end, is that wrong?

Ajuan: You know, probably. I've read a lot of Richard Wright's work, but I have not done a lot of reading about what he thought.

Ajuan: He's an intense guy.

Nia: (laughs)

Ajuan: Very intense. Not a feminist.

Nia: (laughs) Unlike Too $hort.

Ajuan: Unlike Too $hort who is out there, he's a card carrying member of NOW. I have to say, just as an aside, Richard Wright's The Man Who Killed the Shadow, if people don't understand the effect that racial terrorism like lynching, has on people's psyche, they need to read The Man Who Killed The Shadow. I've never read anything before or since that explains that more clearly. It's just a profound short story. Richard Wright's Eight Men great book, great book of short stories.

Nia: I mean he's mostly well known for Native Son and Black Boy.

Ajuan: Black Boy. And people use those texts to very problematic ends sometimes in their teaching them. But, mine is not to judge.

Nia: (laughs) Well, I don't even know if it was him.

Ajuan: I know that W.E.B. DuBois had that notion, that Black art needs to be about uplifting Black people and it's something that the Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance struggled with.

Nia: And resisted, I think, in a lot of ways.

Ajuan: Yes, certainly did. I mean, people like Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown who, instead of writing in say, the sonnet form or the villanelle, the sestina, all these European-based forms, put their ear to the ground and they listened to the forms that Black people created in American. I love Sterling Brown's work. Langston Hughes is a lot more famous, and I love Langston Hughes for using the blues in the same way that some of his colleagues were writing amazing sonnets. Claude McKay's sonnets are incredible, but Langston Hughes blues poems are so wonderful and so beautiful to me because they come out of one of the genres that Black people created here to speak to their experience of what it is to be this identity that only exists out of the Middle Passage. It's powerful.

Nia: Yeah. I'm going to try to articulate this again. In terms of the way that Black nationalism affects the way that we understand Black literature today, I think what I was trying to get at is that there's this paradigm or framework for understanding the at the things Black people say, which is either they're uplifting the race or they're not uplifting the race. (laughs) I wish the listeners could see the face you're making right now.

Ajuan: (grumbles)

Nia: Either you're saying the things you want us to say or you're Uncle Tom, essentially.

Ajuan: It's kind of harsh.

Nia: Yeah, it's extremely narrow and limiting but I guess I understand that framework as coming from Black nationalism. So when I listen to you talk about the man who wrote the book saying Black people are everything you're saying you are, oh well, there's the archetypical Black man who's not saying what you want him to say, therefore he's an Uncle Tom, we discredit this, he's doing the work of the white supremacist. But it's such an incredibly limiting way to look at Does that framework play a role in the way that you look back at Black literature historically?

Ajuan: It does. It definitely has. Actually, I'm really that glad you said this because I had not necessarily thought about that in relationship to 19th century text. It certainly has historically as in the 60s on and difference writing say in the 70s and 80s and writing now, I think is all about people negotiating their relationship to this idea that there's a way to be traitorous to Black people on paper. And I believe there is. I mean William Hannibal Thomas's book is highly problematic.

Nia: Do you think that idea didn't exist at the time he was writing?

Ajuan: You know, I think it did, and people where shocked and horrified by that book, except white supremacists who thought it was awesome!

Nia: Just what we've been looking for!

Ajuan: Right. Finally a Black person who tells the truth! Forget the other 600 of them. But I think that book is really problematic. I would say less problematic William Wells Brown looking back and in some way, finding I mean this is a man who had to go to Europe while abolitionists tried to negotiate for real freedom for him, he'd escaped, but he technically wasn't free. So he had to go there, just like Douglass did while people tried to work out the details of actually emancipating him. But what I love about the fact that William Wells Brown was able to write this book late in life look back at his plantation life and talk about how beautiful that house was makes me incredibly feel uncomfortable. But what I also see is someone whose freedom has been really internalized, like that he can hate slavery and wrote very effectively about why slavery is a horrible institution, and yet he doesn't hate who he is.

It reminds me of, I don't know why I can't remember her name, but there's this writer who in the New York Times is a trans columnist and I can't remember her name she's an amazing writer, wrote a column about looking back on her boyhood with nostalgia and thinking about how cool it was to just ride a bike a day long, and a lot of people felt, a lot of cisgender people felt, she was being untrue to the trans cause. But we've accepted you as this. You can't mess with out heads and be happy about having been this! And I what thought here's someone who inhabits their identity

Nia: You're complicating the trans narrative therefore you're setting us all back.

Ajuan: Exactly! And I thought what is up with cisgender folks don't who feel like she can't own all of her life? She loves herself enough that she can she love the things about being a boy that felt really good to her. And in some ways William Wells Brown, when he looks back in this way that makes me feel uncomfortable, and says Boy, that house was really beautiful, he's reached this point in his age and his freedom that he can still own the things about being a boy that felt good to him even in that time

Nia: Even during slavery.

Ajuan: That no one could enslave the fact that he did in some moments have an eye for beauty and pleasure. I feel like Black writers since nationalism have had to find a way to write their truth in a ways that sometimes push back against the some of the boxes that nationalism attempted to create. Octavia Butler's a perfect example. Michael Thomas's intense Man Gone Down, in which he does four days in 400 pages, so many of the things that he wrote would not have fit very well into the nationalist agenda. Asali Solomon's Get Down in which she writes about queer Black manhood in one of her short stories, queer Black manhood on an all Black men's college campus.

I often say to my students that today's writers are the freest that Black writers have ever been because they're not anymore allowing themselves to think Is this good for Black people or is it not? They're really thinking how do I pursue my line of artistic inquiry into what Black experiences are in this setting or in this time period or what have you. They're just being really audacious and they're making us by grow by sometimes writing scenarios in which we're not comfortable.

The Black text is not a safe space, and when it is safe and everyone is saying everything that makes Black people feel good about themselves all the time, then I don't think we're growing. These texts, I found some of these 21st century writers, their work is just absolutely exhilarating. A woman I know started reading a 21st century Pulitzer prize winner, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, one of the best novels about slavery since Song of Solomon I know who's now in her early 70s, I said This is a great book, you gotta read this book. She about read the first probably 10 pages and put the book away. She's like I can't read this. (laughs)

Nia: I think I had the same experience. (laughs)

Ajuan: Really?!

Nia: I think I tried to read it and did not get that far, but I'll give it another chance. (laugh)

Ajuan: Give it the old college try. (laughs)

Nia: (laughs) But I'm not in college anymore, so there's no one to make me read it.

Ajuan: (laughs) That's true. It wasn't what she needed a Black text to be.

Nia: In what way?

Ajuan: Well, you know, it starts out with um what she, being in a very different generation than I am, would probably say is, (imitates voice) It started out with an episode of self-abuse (laughs) and that is not appropriate for a book about slavery.

Nia: It's a very unforgettable beginning to a book. (laughs)

Ajuan: It is, I have to say.

Nia: He's just out there in the woods.

Ajuan: Yeah, in the rain.

Nia: Yeah. (laughs)

Ajuan: Never mind that it's about an African-American person who owns slaves.

Nia: Oh, yeah I didn't get that far. (laughs)

Ajuan: That was the hook! (laughs) Edward P. Jones wrote a book about Black people who owned slaves and it started flying off the shelves.

Nia: Maybe I did, maybe I just forgot about it. Anyway I'm going to cut all of this out.

Ajuan: So now you're making me think about these 19th century people, when we see them writing these are folks who are who had to negotiate their freedom to have oppositional, antagonistic, audacious ideas without any affirmation for their freedom from the larger society, because the larger society didn't even think they should be writing. So I wonder the degree to which the fact that there is a narrow space for the Black writer and the Black thinker, to what degree have we created our own boxes, and are fearful of pushing outside of them. We don't want to be untrue to what's truly revolutionary. How have we set up our own I don't want to say litmus test because that makes me sounds like I'm on Fox News. But have we created these spaces where there's peer pressure to adhere to a particular way of depicting Black people?

With some of my paintings I've actually had people look at them and several times tell me they look like caricatures that are derogatory. I had a show recently, I think in the summer of 2013, one of the folks who worked at the place where the show was really had a problem with them. I think she was embarrassed by the images.

People are always talking about noses, lips, and eyes if they feel like it's a derogatory representation, and I always think it's interesting that people think way I do lips or noses or eyes is racist or looks like those old caricatures, because I don't see that but also because I'm starting with the features I like the best. I always start with the nose and then go up to the eyes or down to the mouth, but I always do the center and then I start working outward and so I emphasize these features because I love the ways that for a lot of people regardless of skin color or dark or light, there are ways in which Blackness is written on the body. Sometimes in really subtle ways sometimes in rather significant ways. But the people take my love of these features for I think in some ways my ridiculing of them, which is kind of intense. But I love that somehow I've just developed an aesthetic that is without me even thinking about it pushing back against some sort of orthodoxy against about what kind of Black people's features you're supposed to draw.

Nia: Yeah, I'm so glad you brought it back to that because I was like how are we going to get from literature back to painting. I was looking at some of your work last night on your blog and having some similar thoughts. I can see some similarities. Your aesthetic is very you have a very unique style. The way you draw portraits is very stylized. Is it fair to say features are exaggerated, or at least stylized?

Ajuan: Yeah, I think that's fair, I think my brand of stylized is probably exaggerated, yeah.

Nia: My understanding is that the intent of your project, being to draw 1001 Black men, is to showcase all these different types of Black masculinity and ways being Black men of the diversity that exists within people that either identify themselves as or are read by others as Black men. And the purpose of a caricature is to reduce something to a symbol that is not human and not relatable, where as what you're doing is creating an archive of the sort of different ways that Black men can look, so in that way I don't think it's reinforcing stereotypes and I don't think they're caricatures. On the other hand, I think because of the way that it's stylized and features are exaggerates I can sort of see how people interpret that way. Does that make sense?

Ajuan: Yeah totally, totally.

Nia: You have such a distinct style and aesthetic. Did you start out drawing that way or is it something you developed over time?

Ajuan: You know, I didn't start out drawing that way. At some point you'll probably be at our house and I will trot out some high school drawings and I did a lot of very realistic drawings and I look back on like Oooh, did I do that?

Nia: Because it's so good?

Ajuan: Yeah. (laughs) I haven't drawing in that realistic way in a long time with the shading, and you know art class exercises. But I did a lot of line drawing, cartoon type of drawings, and when I was trying to evolve my style kind of I felt that I needed a style that (laughs) Summer of 96 I started doing this and I thought, I need something that is going to take the part of art that I like the best, and in some way can maybe push beyond just my doodles. I love drawing faces and I love drawing with pen and ink, so I spent the summer drawing with huge pieces of paper probably like 24 by 36 and I just filled them with faces. Faces of Black men and women. I thought I like the heavy Black line, I like stained glass, and the way stained glass will use color. Several different shades of green to give us a field of green.

I then I started just joining up the lines in faces and kind of breaking it up into planes so that instead of drawing someone with cheekbones and then of shading them, kind of using the line and just taking one piece of their face and that would be one color green, and then I would do another piece that would be a slightly different shade of a similar green and just influenced in some ways by stained glass and by my love of the heavy Black line and by street art which I think is so awesome. People using Black lines and color and wheat paste and making such cool work that is about this immediacy of rendering an image. And of course a lot of street art takes forever and then people run out and put it up. So I just try to bring all those things together.

But I needed it to be something that I could do not necessarily easily but that would give me a lot of pleasure and I love to draw so I wanted to make a very drawing-centered style.

Nia: Yeah, so the actually medium that you use for these is acrylic? The final pieces?

Ajuan: Well actually, for the pieces that are on the website those are all ink on paper and then I scan then and I add color in Photoshop or a weird background. Photoshop becomes you just go down the rabbit hole and next thing you know you're thinking, 12 hours later (both laugh), I have this amazing piece but where did my day go? The biggest show I had was at CIIS and I showed 200 images from the website and then I did 10 paintings. The next 10 drawings I did as painting, as acrylic paintings. I did paint pen, and acrylic paint and also found objects for those.

Nia: Awesome, that sounds super cool.

Ajuan: It's fun.