December 16, 2016 - 12:36
do you think
calling me ‘angry’
is an insult.
every time you call me ‘angry’
i hear your voice salt with guilt
and
i laugh.
look how easy it is to reveal you.
--- anger is a healthy and natural response to oppression
salt. by nayyirah waheed.
2016 has been a rough year for Gabby. I’ve lost people, I lost love, I lost patience. And here I am angry, because I don’t know if I’m capable of feeling anything else. When I entered this 360, I was hoping to direct some of the energy I had about oppression to theory and academia. I think I got that opportunity in Monique’s class, which unfortunately was only once a week. I have been so engaged and interested in that class. I found the ways that race has been constructed through exhibiting Africa and Africans forever useful in my daily life as a black woman, and in the work I will be doing next semester as a sociology major. I also enjoyed learning about the history of how institutions like Bryn Mawr have acquired African art and objects, because that was a hidden history that I, as someone who likes to think of myself as politically engaged did not know about. Monique’s class really challenged me to think about how my position as an African-American (but Caribbean-American identifying) person is connected to things that are African. Whitney’s presentation of their exhibit gave a nice perspective on that question, which is that as African- Americans have been displaces and uprooted from their identity and history, so have these objects. Some of them, we will never know the history of. But history is also a concept that is not stable or reliable, because as I learned in my sociology junior sem, most history is made up and guesswork. Which does not make it any less valid, but is important to remember when looking for history and truth where it may not want to be found. What I wish we did do was learn more about the school to prison pipeline, and how to have discourse around the black and white binary. I think those two perspectives would have been significant to my education as a sociology major, and as a person navigating the world.
To mention the exhibit, if we had more time and resources I would have loved if our group had been able to focus our portion on themes of family and the home. I was the one who talked about my Aunt’s belief that a house must be lived in to be maintained, and I found very interesting articles on how Yoruba people decline to repair things that are not in use, even if in western society it would be an object that would be considered valuable. If it is not in use, it is no longer thought of. Linking that to what we found about Yoruba home and family life would have been a rich exhibit, I think.