I GOTTA GO HOME—
aaliyah dejamone' johnson
“And I don’t know any more tricks / I am really colored and really sad sometime and you hurt me / more than I ever danced—“
(Ntozake Shange ’70, for colored girls who considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, 1974)
“And so I continue: a Black woman who would be an agent for change, an active member of the hoped-for apocalypse. I am somebody seeking to make, or to create, revolutionary connections between the full identity of my love, of what hurts me, or fills me with nausea, and the way things are: what we are forced to learn, to “master,” what we are trained to ignore, what we are bribed into accepting, what we are rewarded for doing, or not doing…Ah, momma, did the house ever know the nighttime of your spirit, the flash and flame of you—“
(June Jordan ’57, Notes of a Barnard Droupout,1975)
“And listening to that kind of talk is just like opening your mouth and letting the moon shine down your throat…you got to go there to know there—your poppa and your momma and nobody else can’t tell you and show you. Two things everybody got to do for themselves: they got to go to God and they got to find out about living for theirselves.”
(Zora Neale Hurston ’28, Their Eyes Were Watching God, 1937)
I imagined a capstone project that would encapsulate all that I am—the young woman Barnard has crafted me to be. In the last two years, I have meditated on who that woman might be—Ntozake carried my soul out of the dark night and to a stage, into a choreopoem, a dance, a song; June showed this damned black child that those feelings of pain, confusion and bitterness related to her origins were the product of the political and economic realities underlying the black condition in white America. Zora showed me about going places and taking God with me. Through these women, this sisterhood bestowed upon me by this place that has brought us together, I was shaping my identity—keeping myself alive. I realized then, that this little dance I was engaging in with God, myself and the other, was my performance—I was curating my own show! The cornerstone was survival—and now, I GOTTA GO HOME.
-about [the artist]
- about [the capstone project]
[CITATIONS.]
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