Thinking out loud
Welcome to my blog, a place where I don’t really have to overthink what I’m writing.
December 29, 2021
Ok, so this blog is just turning into a place where some of my MFA assignments can live. So what? This is a piece of creative nonfiction. Enjoy.
Letter of Acceptance
for my WhatsApp Writers’ Group
“…but we had our own space and got into talking, joking, laughing and clowning, and had such a lovely time in our own company that Whites left their space to come over and find out what was happening, and try to join in.”
Roberta Sykes to Wanda Coleman from The Riot Inside Me
January 6, 2021
Dear Karen,
Congratulations for being selected as the Creative Fellow Scholarship recipient of the 2021 Writers Conference. To comply with social distancing efforts, we are conducting this year’s conference online. As such, we’re able to admit every applicant in need at a discounted price, so you’re not as special as you thought.
Our event will be held on a virtual platform allowing all of our attendees to network. We have created chat rooms like: Fiction Writers, Non-Fiction Writers, Poets, Memoir Writers, etc. Some of our attendees will create chat rooms like MFA Programs, Self-Publishing, Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), Literary Publications, and so forth. We’ll even have attendees create rooms that label the type of scholarships we’ve awarded this year: The White Fellowship with a white guy’s name that anyone can apply for but will most likely be awarded to a white writer, The Black Fellowship named after a Black writer, and the Asian Fellowship…you know where we’re going with this.
You’ll be able to see how active each chat room is by the red number above each label. This number indicates how many unread messages you have for that chat room. You are not required to read every unread message as each virtual room is selective for every attendee.
What we won’t be prepared for is the perpetual uptick of unread messages in the Black Fellowship’s chat room. The conversations there will be non-stop, even during workshop sessions. They will chat and joke as if they are family; but none of them will have met one other prior to this event. Still, you will find candid feedback on every workshop session that will hurt some of our instructor’s feelings.
You’ll also find an unprecedented amount of support amongst this chat room. If a Black Fellow attendee is reading, and another likes what he or she is saying, they’ll let others know through their chat group who and where to go. This sometimes results in a mass exodus from some workshops and an incredulous increase of attendance in others. The good news is this will leave room for attendees in the least populated workshops to read more of their work. Unfortunately, not every attendee will take advantage of this opportunity which will result in some workshop sessions ending early; and that’ll be a shame.
We’re also not going to be prepared for the onslaught of screenshots our white attendees will take of the Black Fellowship chats. While everyone is welcome in any chat room, we will not be able to fathom why you’ll feel the need to spy on the Black Fellowship chat when networking opportunities in other virtual rooms are just a click away. Not every Black attendee will engage in our HBCU chat room because not all of them will have attended an HBCU. As such, the room won’t apply to them so…
We will, however, be able to answer one of the burning questions you’ll ask: Is it safe for a conservative to be here? While it’ll be unclear how unsafe you’ll feel at a virtual conference as no one will make or even hint at threats against a people or organization, we will answer your question with an eye roll typing: Yes. Of course. We do, however, understand your concern will come from the written works shared by our Black attendees inspired by our workshops along with the disturbing events of 2020-21.
To appease this egregious offense of accepting a large number of bright and talented Black writers, we will reorganize the final night of this virtual conference at the last minute. While creating several virtual open mic rooms with different themes throughout the week won’t be good enough for you, we will create another virtual open mic room specifically for our Black writers. This way, you will not be intimidated by their talent or the Black experience.
In these unprecedented times, our organization is adapting to create a safe space for writers. Our goal has always been to bring writers together from every walk of life, to learn from one another, and enrich each other’s writing. We look forward to seeing your face online—even if we have to segregate a few.
Please send your discounted deposit via Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, or Zelle. Contact our coordinator if you insist on sending a check.
Once again, congratulations!
Sincerely,
A Writing Conference
That Must Deal
with White Fragility
and Insecurity Because
They, Not you,
Certainly Not You,
Can Afford to Enroll
Every Year at Full Price.
October 18, 2021
It only took forty-something years for me to finally get that hard work really does pay off. It just takes longer for some of us who didn’t have the head start of lighter skin color, generational wealth or blah, blah, blah. Following your dreams is hard because it takes faith. And faith is the substance of things hoped for and evidence of what’s not seen (Bible, can’t remember the verse). So, believing in something you can’t see sounds crazy, right? Well…
October 13, 2021
So this isn’t a “thinking out loud” entry. It’s a college paper I wrote after reading Blues Poems.
Rock ‘n’ Roll Originates from Blues Sung by Captives of Transatlantic Slave Trade, Not the Southern Parts of North America
The late rock ‘n’ roll singer, Elvis Presley, a white man is credited for being the King of Rock ‘n’ roll, the inventor of a then new provocative and outspoken music in the 1950s. To be outspoken is defying the notion of just being seen and not heard, a cultural expectation that was expected from women, children, and minorities—especially African Americans, a people who were sold, kidnapped, shipped to North America and sold again as chattel. When emancipated, they faced discrimination because of their dark skin color. Presley attributed his musical sound to Black culture in a Jet Magazine interview. He said, “A lot of people seem to think I started this business, but rock ‘n’ roll was here a long time before I came along… Nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people.” Rock ‘n’ roll is a musical merger of country music, working-class folk music, blue-collar American life, and the blues, a musical sound that’s said to be birthed on Southern plantations by slaves who sang in anguish and mercy to God under the harsh law of slavery. Raymond R. Patterson noted the distinct sound of blues in his poem, “Special Pain Blues”. He wrote, “Anybody can shout and holler, / It takes a special pain to sing the blues. / …It ain’t about losing your last dollar / Or having holes in both your shoes (201).” The last two stanzas of Patterson’s poem references country music’s narrative of white, blue-collar American workers. Since most of the hard labor in North America was assigned to African Americans with no pay under inhumane conditions, it could be said North American colonizers’ hardships weren’t as brutal and grueling as African Americans. So, while every man or woman sang his or her troubles, none were sung as soulful and with the depth of the African American’s blues songs.
The Upswing of Blues Evolving to Rhythm and Blues
The sound of blues with the added upbeat swing came to be called rhythm and blues (R&B). R&B started in 1940, a decade before rock ‘n’ roll began. Smithsonian Center for Forklife & Cultural Heritage Magazine defines R&B as:
a musical sound that draws from the deep tributaries of African American expressive culture…that was initially developed during a thirty-year period that bridges the era of legally sanctioned racial segregation, international conflicts, and the struggle for civil rights.
(Puryear)
The root of African American music—including rock ‘n’ roll, is the blues. Yet, it is the blues that seems to “belong” to the Black community—like how country music “belongs” to white America. This is because music is a legacy of culture and heritage. Country music’s song styles dates back to the 1700s from the British Isles. The blues songs didn’t start in Africa, but on the waters of the Atlantic Ocean dating back to the Transatlantic Slave Trade from the early 1600s.
The Heart of Rock ‘n’ Roll Did Not Come from Elvis or the North American South
What is it about the sound of rock ‘n’ roll that is so captivating, a sound that Elvis himself attributed to the African American? If rock ‘n’ roll came from the proclaimed King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, a man with Scottish, Irish, and Cherokee roots, then why didn’t this particular sound exist in the old world of Ireland, Scotland, North America, or even Africa?
Rock ‘n’ roll encapsulates a musical note that ensures one hears the distress of that singer, that musician, and of the culture that makes up that generation. Wouldn’t it then make sense to claim that rock ‘n’ roll is a sound mostly rooted in African American songs that did not originate from the plantations of the North American South, but in the bowels of slave ships during the Transatlantic Slave Trade? The heart of the rock ‘n’ roll sound is an African Atlantic note that was later coined “the blues” in the North American South.
An Inheritance of Blues Songs in Place of a Home
African Americans never had the privilege of land legacy without upsetting white North American society. African Americans were forced to labor on land that wasn’t their own. They cried out this injustice through song while working in the fields and singing gospel hymns in church. When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued in 1863, African Americans weren’t given any reparations regarding land, jobs, housing, justice, or equity during the boom of Western frontier life when land was given, taken, and stolen. African Americans also cried out this injustice merging field and gospel songs which were later called the blues; but inequality, inequity, and the brutality of slavery aren’t historically or even biblically new. Yet, the blues song wasn’t recognized until the era of African American slavery.
There is something unique about the blues songs and it doesn’t wholly account back to the African American blood specifically spilled on North American soil. Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, “Absence” alludes to this:
In the absence of women on board,
when the ship reached the point where no landmass
was visible in any direction
and the funk had begun to accrue—
human funk, spirit funk, soul funk—who
commenced the moaning? Who first hummed that deep
sound from empty bowels, roiling stomachs,
from back of the frantically thumping heart?
in the absence of women, of mothers,
who found the note that would soon be called, “blue,”
the first blue note from one bowel, one throat,
joined by dark others in gnarled harmony.
Before the head-rag, the cast-iron skillet,
new blue awaited on the other shore,
invisible, as yet unhummed. Who knew
what note to hit or how? In the middle
of the ocean, in the absence of women,
there is no deeper deep, no bluer blue.
(Alexander 63)
“Funk” is another word that’s associated with African American music. It’s a sound that originated in the 1960s that mixes soul (R&B and gospel), and jazz—another African American blues sound that originated in the late 19th—early 20th century. The way the word “funk” is used in Alexander’s poem is not musical. It describes the consequences of the dire situation Africans were in when they were chained and stored at the bowels of slave ships like sardines in numbers ranging from 250-300 with no plumbing. During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a voyage from Africa to North America would take approximately 35 days. The funk Alexander refers to is the odor of the captives’ physical condition, the stench of death where one can assume corpses weren’t immediately removed and thrown overboard for insurance purposes. It is the funk of the captives’ misery and broken spirit, a funk so potent, that the guttural anguish expressed within those 35-day voyages across the musty and salty Atlantic air came from deep down past the bowels of the hull. It was a melancholy symphony unlike any other melody calling out to fellow brothers and sisters who were raped, ridiculed, and beaten, who sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. The blues hits a note that’s deep as or even deeper than the sea. The survivors carried those notes to the shores of North America and sang it to their babies who were ripped away from them. And those babies kept that song in their heart and sang that same note when oppression siphoned their soul, and they sang it to their babies, and so forth and so on.
Safia Elhillo’s poem “self-portrait with yellow dress’ says, “& sometimes we do not die / we are born to a body dressed in black / & do not wear it to a funeral we live forever // our mouths open & a song falls out thick (29).” The legacy of song is strong in any culture, but for the African American, it speaks to the condition of humanity. Perhaps this is why that first note moaned over the Atlantic ocean is rooted so deep into the bedrock of creation that its foundation is strong enough to uphold soul music, R&B, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and future meters of music. Just like the presumed King of Rock ‘n’ Roll admitted, this music, this sound was here way before he—or any African or white person came along—(on American soil to be exact), because no one can sing the blues quite like an African Atlantic American.
WORK CITED
Alexander, Elizabeth. Absence. American Sublime. Graywolf Press, 2005, p. 63.
BBC Worldservice.com. The Story of Africa.
Patterson, Raymond R. Special Pain Blues. Blues Poems. Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, p 201-02.
Elhillo, Safia. Self-portrait with yellow dress. The January Children. University of Nebraska
Press, 2017, p. 29.
Little, Becky. Details of Brutal First Slave Voyages Discovered. History.
https://www.history.com/news/transatlantic-slave-first-ships-details. 18 August 2018. Accessed 1 April 2021.
Young, Trina. Elvis Presley and the Black Community: Dispelling the Myths. Elvis Biography.
https://elvisbiography.net/2020/02/12/elvis-presley-and-the-black-community-dispelling-the-myths/. 12 February 2020. Accessed 31 March 2021.
Yeah, I got nothing.
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Zorina Frey 