Deceptive Cadence : NPR: When people ask Tamar-kali where she's from, it can be a frustrating conversation.
"They want me to be able to compartmentalize it in this really neat package," she says, "like, 'Oh, well, I'm Jamaican,' or 'Oh, I'm Nigerian.' And it's like, 'No, boo, my people were literally kidnapped and enslaved and brought to America, and I'm the descendant of enslaved Africans and indigenous folk,' you know. It's like people just don't like the truth — and we're seeing that manifested so aggressively right now."
1 comment:
Tamar-kali is an American artist and in this interview, she speaks about education, culture, and intention. I really resonate with what she said about people wanting your identity to fit into a box. People in positions of power and privilege often want an easily digestible description of oppressed peoples because it allows them to stay in that position with little thought or challenge. She also speaks on intention–"I'm going to be a frame of reference for my people, for who I am — whether it's women, whether it's queer folk, whether it's Black folk — and I can either just lollygag and do it by default, or I can do it with intention. And I decided to do it with intention." I also resonate with this–often we are diluted into why we are oppressed, the markers of our identities. There's no way to change how other people perceive you, nor a way to change how their intentions are, but we can change our intentions going forward, while being aware of how other people are prone to perceive you.
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