I love us.
Black people, that is.
And I’ve been lucky (slash insistent) enough to make a great deal of audio that reflects that. These are five of my favorite early career pieces, when I was just figuring out my own voice.
My own understanding of Blackness was complicated by my parents’ lack of understanding of their own. I’m a first generation American - having immigrant parents while living in predominantly white areas was a recipe for cluelessness about where I fit into Black America.
In this audio essay for The Stoop podcast, I explore the journey I took to make it here. It’s goofy and vulnerable and my older sister compares me to a herd animal (unspeakably rude). You can hear the full episode at Radiotopia’s Showcase, here.
In this conversation, author Carvell Wallace and poet Imani Sims discuss a piece of hers based on the movie Black Panther; it’s called “Better Than Captivity.” They talk about the performance of Blackness in white spaces - when everyone sees you, but no one sees you. The space that’s needed for healing. And the willingness to die, unquestioningly, rather than living a life that is unfree.
This is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made. It was less than a year into my audio career, and it sounds like it - there are some awfully tight cuts. But it feels intimate and warm and like nothing else I’d heard on public radio. It feels like the kind of fly on the wall conversation that most white people will probably never hear.
The day it aired, I was terrified; I knew it would make some listeners uncomfortable, and was preparing myself for the angry emails. Then one of my colleagues said to me, “those listeners have twenty-three hours and forty-seven minutes a day to hear their experience reflected on public media. They can deal with seventeen minutes.” So: I went into an edit booth, settled in, and for seventeen minutes on an NPR affiliate, I heard myself.
Porsha Olayiwola’s debut poetry collection I Shimmer Sometimes, Too stuns (and stunts). It’s an ode to Blackness, to fatness, to queerness, to not staying small in order to suit others. It was the last artist interview I produced before Ms. Covidia ShaRona turned my life into ten solid months of interviews with public health officials. It’s a shining paean and a successful fight to find joy despite. As I spoke about R0 and aerosols, it sustained me.
“I think that sometimes in this world we move through it as individuals. And I want people to know that, you know, sometimes I shimmer and you know: if you say the sentence, also you shimmer too.” The interview with transcript is here.
Terrance Hayes is a poet, painter, Scrabble player, and National Book Award winner. He thinks in verse and in math, and both are on display in the book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin. Water flows through the book - Maxine Waters; the waters of a pool into which young Terrance is pushed not knowing how to swim; the waters of the Tallahatchie River that run through Money, Mississippi, where Emmett Till was lynched.
Sometimes the titular assassin is an antagonist; other times, it’s the man in the mirror. In the book, Hayes promises to tell the reader “how little writing rescues.” That promise is only halfway kept; the book is a full, deep breath.
One of my favorite things to do is put regional or non-American accents on the air. Treating Seattle listeners to twenty minutes of South Carolina made my week.
Angélique Kidjo’s cover of The Talking Heads’ Remain in Light is, in fact, the only version of the album I’m familiar with. And once I listened to the original after producing this segment, I felt perfectly fine with that. Her rendition of “Born Under Punches” is an excellent meditation on corruption in Africa.
She adapts much of the rest of the album to an African context, complicating narratives of appropriation and to whom music really belongs.
(Also during the recording she called me “quiet but powerful” and I saved the clip in like three places + can officially retire; it’s a career pinnacle I’ll probably never top.)