Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:06 Welcome to on the square. A special podcast brought to you by SAP, a little square in collaboration with the main dad. I am Dr. <inaudible> senior editor of SAP, a little square and curator producer of this podcast, where every month we get on the square and into some real talk about race at a slam in the Americas. I found this letter in my grandma's basement. It's the one that only his best friend's violent. It talks about a lot of things. Girlfriend, things like moving in with her boyfriend and a pregnancy scare and revolutionary things. And this last part, which she titled appendix number two, she talks about Dick Gregory's lecture to her campus. And I shaded Dick Gregory, who is hilarious in the third person and even 40 years after the fact, uh, Salaam-Alaikum I am <inaudible> squares history editor. What you've just heard is a brief excerpt from a performance piece that is part of <inaudible> archive by on the square is a very young curator and producer and stop below square senior editor, Dr.
Speaker 0 00:01:22 Sue ad Abdul Kabir. She joins us on this episode to talk about Udemy's archive, the importance of black Muslim women's material culture, and the histories they tell. Dr. <inaudible> is a scholar artist activist, the author of Muslim, cool race, religion, and hip hop in the United States and is currently an associate professor of American culture and Arab and Muslim American studies at the university of Michigan. So welcome and thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be on this. All right. Let's get down to it. So tell us about homie's archive and the inspiration behind it. For those who don't know who me is Arabic for my mother and, and a lot of black communities, that's how refers to their mother sort of like an alternative for mommy. And so OMI is what I called my mother. My mother was, I mean, I'm also hot as she was born in Harlem, New York in 1950.
Speaker 0 00:02:20 And in October of 2017, she passed away suddenly. And before my mother had passed away, my mother was the kind of person who lived an interesting life, but she didn't sort of sit you down and say, Hey, listen, here's my story, right? It'd be more like one time we're just driving in the car or something. And she's just telling me how she took pressure, how to at a prison. And she wasn't an inmate. And then the person who gave her Shahada, wasn't one of Malcolm X, his right-hand man, just kind of randomly just driving in the car. That's how something happened. I say that to say that before she passed away, I had started, began to talk to her right. A little bit. And I did like one of these ones of oral history video. I had gotten a camera, but then after she passed and she passed five months after my grandmother passed, her mother passed.
Speaker 0 00:03:06 And so when that all happened, you know, I'm the oldest of my mother's children. And so I just found myself one just in a kind of logistical situation where there's a lot of stuff that has to be cleaned out sorted through, just to kind of deal with the aftermath of what that means and like what death means. And in the process of doing that, the stories my mother used to tell me things she would casually mentioned, I would kind of begin to see connections through things I was finding in her things and her things in her parents, things and her brother's thing. She got on a Monday on that Sunday, she had went to her Arabic class when I'm in the archive and growth or things. I found a receipts from 1977 for like, maybe it was $3 or $9 for Arabic class that she was taking at 72nd street.
Speaker 0 00:03:57 Now they call it, I think I feel called third session. It was a mesh it on 72nd street in Manhattan. And the sister, I think her name was Fatuma Negi. So she had the receipt for her paying for her Arabic class in 1977. Right. And she became Muslim in 1975. So the connection was made, right. It was like, you know, the way which she was sort of taking Arabic then in 2017. And she was also taking Arabic in 1977. And that for me was important to find his, her own continuity, but also just what Arabic language and Arabic language proficiency, you know, learning how to speak Arabic, you know? Well, all those things mean to us as Muslims and as black people and even the institutions like 72nd street, like if you're from New York makes more sense to you. Right, right.
Speaker 1 00:04:41 Yeah. Right. 72nd street was the first location of the Islamic center in New York city, which then opened up a subsequent more central,
Speaker 0 00:04:53 A larger and larger space on 96th and third. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1 00:04:58 Yeah. And the 72nd was 72nd and Riverside, and this is a historic location. This is where Malcolm started getting his lessons before he made Hodge. And it was the Islamic center for many, many, many years. Yeah.
Speaker 0 00:05:12 So yeah. So those are the kinds of things that sort of started happening. So there was this thing that I would find something that was very specific to my mother and her experience and her life trajectory, but it would immediately make me think of her peers. And then the histories that they're embedded in and the history is they created like that immediately happened all the time. Once that happened, I was like, okay, this is something that I need to figure out how to share with other people, because other people are going to be connected to this. Right. They're going to have their own receipt for my class. They're going to have pieces that I don't have, like going to help me understand better, have a third picture. And then they're going to people who don't know anything about this and who need to. And so that's kind of how I got inspired to start the party.
Speaker 1 00:06:01 That's so amazing. And I don't want to be like, you're such a history, anthropology nerd. There's a difference between a momentum and an artifact. And they could be the very same object, but it's how we view the object and looking at some of the objects that you have. I immediately thought back to Sapo squares, black history month feature this year in 2021, where we highlighted every day, a different object from the Smithsonian's national museum of African-American history and culture that helps tell the histories of Muslims. And, you know, some of the stuff is what you would expect, right? Like religious artifacts, but some of the stuff was like a flyer or a music instrument or an egg carton box. And so when I saw the objects, some of the objects of Boomi's archive immediately began thinking about the importance of material culture and how material objects can be containers and signifiers of our histories, our culture, our politics, and you sort of instinctively went there. Right. Um, I'm sure there was a brief, a period of time where you're going through these objects and it's a deep, deep, personal, emotional reaction. And then the intellectual side kicks in and it's just like, Oh, these are stories. And as you said, connected to people and other histories. So what were some of the objects, if you can get people a sense of the range of objects that you thought that helped you reach that kind of conclusion about their power.
Speaker 0 00:07:35 So as an anthropologist, I do think that, you know, one of the things that, that defines, I guess, anthropology as a form of study, or as a, follow-up trying to learn in a form of knowledge is paying attention to the small things. And the everyday things like everyday life is very important. Like even the method, right? So this qualitative research is, you know, you just kind of, you spend time with people and you're just paying attention to the small things because the small things matter and the small things create the fullness. You know, I think oftentimes we think of things that would be big and extraordinary to matter. And in fact, it's not, that's not the case. It's shorter things actually obviously do happen, but they don't happen without the ordinary things. Right. So they're always connected. And so for me, and to, even to, I don't think it was sort of like I was having an emotional and then the intellect kicked in, I actually don't think it was that kind of process.
Speaker 0 00:08:30 It's more like, you know, my mother, my sophomore, and was raised, I guess I already knew that our history is important. It matters because I know I can't go to school and learn about it. Right? Like this is waiting, which, you know, I was raised to understand that, you know, there's a concerted effort to keep us to not know who we are, not know what we've done so that we can't plan for the future and we can't build new things. So it wasn't so much that I was like, Oh yeah, I can do this too. I think those things were very much really intertwined. And so I really can't separate them out, which, which makes the project both exciting and challenging. Right. Because it is also very personal and like it was my mother and losing your mother is like the worst thing that could ever happen to you.
Speaker 0 00:09:17 So it's not like that's not there, but at the same time who she was, where she came from, that legacy is what sustained me in the first place. Right. So there's the kind of like, so anyway, those things kind of come together in terms of a range of items. I mean, really it is a range of things that are there. You have me thinking about just going back to the 72nd street example quickly in that same sort of pile of things that were sort of together was a calendar, a foldout calendar of the prayer times from 1977, from 72nd street. And there's also a cassette tape of the recording of, so there was a brother, they called him Dr. <inaudible>, who was from Egypt, a Maliki FIC scholar who studied as har and came to the United States. My mother's really good friend and mentor female bull Karim.
Speaker 0 00:10:09 She was older and a little bit older, my mother. Right. So she was kind of a, you know, she, they were friends and she also kind of deal, you know, so as she, as my mother was learning how to be Muslim. So anyway, onto Korean most, well, I call her, told us junior, we want a class, right. We want a sister's class, our class really. And he ended up doing class for the sisters. So I have some recordings from that class. Well, late seventies, it's a, one of the recordings is him talking about a missile Shabbat in the middle of Shabbat and the merits of that. Right. And Ramadan. And then I had this, the fallout of the prototypes rambled on. Right? So those things are kind of coming together. And that's important to me because having those two pieces of material culture, right. This kind of paper calendar, and this cassette tape, which has written on it, the date and the time and this, and then also the actual audio of it helps me sort of be able to imagine what it might've been like in 1976 to be a new Muslim and to be learning all these things.
Speaker 0 00:11:04 So there's stuff like that. There's things like buttons from when Jesse Jackson was running for president that's in the collection, there are lots of photos. And I, I says, I'm not an historian by training. I don't know if a lot is really a lot. Maybe it's not a lot, but for me, it's a lot. So like, for example, um, in the very first exhibition, there's a collection called service men. There's about 50 photos in that collection, but that comes out of about almost 500 photos that my mother's father or Jay weeks when he served in the military role were to, from his time in world war II, he was in what they call the forgotten theater of war was China, India, Burma. Um, so he spent time in Iran. He spent time in what was then India, Pakistan, and India, as well as Burma. Right? So they're all these photos from that.
Speaker 0 00:11:57 And you know, and also his collection too, there are some other photos that will show up later, probably in the last exhibition from the late twenties and Harlem. And because he grew up in Harlem, he was born in Harlem, grew up in Harlem. So like, so there's a lot of photos. There's like flyers, there's this? Oh, I found which I had no idea. So I find my mother, she was an educator and she was educated, lots of books. Right. One of the books that I found was, um, Angela Davis says woman raised in class. And so I'm like looking at the book. That's cool. And I open it and I'm like, who find this book? I'm like, Oh, that's Angela Davis. Right. So it's like a first edition copy dedicated to Amina. Right? So those are the kinds of things from books, papers, some clothes too. So, so it was a really wide range of stuff
Speaker 1 00:12:50 In curating this stuff. This is, this is a hard, hard decision. How did you decide what to include in the presentation and what not? Like, did you go by like this is representative, or did you go by things that you, that could speak to each other the way you talked about the, the tape and a cassette tape and the calendar, how does come together? Because I want to dive into a particular object, but before we do that, since we're already got a breadth of the materials, tell us about your organization. Cause I know you've, you've thought about these in terms of themes. How did those themes come to you?
Speaker 0 00:13:28 So I think there are two levels of this. So there's a logistic level of, you know, I have to clean out some places you have to clean out some rooms and I have to sort of make some decisions. And so it's funny. I actually was reading, there's a book called how we get free, which is the edited volume by Keeanga Taylor. And she interviewed Barbara Smith who was part of the Combahee collective. And in the interview, bars is talking about how, when they would have these retreats, they don't have any literature tables and they would have, they would just been copies of stuff because you couldn't get, it even comes up. And I was like, and it immediately took me to always archive because my mother had to go because it's like everything.
Speaker 0 00:14:11 I know it's because that is, that is the practice. Right? You find something good and important, you get enough copies of it. So she could share with other people like that is the way that that's how, and that's how you organize. That's how you educate. It's what you do. I say that to say that on some level, if there was multiple duplicates or something that I would just keep walking. And that was one way to sort of, kind of just make the volume less in terms of the exhibition. So I have six themes and the themes for me, I chose them based on what I thought really spoke to my mother and her generation in the broad sense, right. That could really kind of touch on these different points as well as in relationship to what what's going on right now. So the first, so we launched April 4th, the first thing was widens archive.
Speaker 0 00:14:55 And that was really thinking about the question of power in archives, in our stories. We'll talk about the letter into Gregory with that kind of talks about hope, but basically who gets the right to tell the story who becomes authoritative? The second theme is a martial law, and this is focusing on the spiritual lives of black muscle women. And my mother becoming a Muslim was significant, right? It was like one of the most significant thing that ever happens in her life. It was a choice that she made and then, and I want to, so I wanted to focus on that and I wanted to focus on the kind of world building and the kind of spirits through spirituality that these were my mother and her friends and these women, all these women that I was raised around what they did. So I wanted to focus on that hope.
Speaker 0 00:15:37 That was really central likewise. So there is the powerful, spiritual, intentional narrative of black muscle women. And then there's also an intimate and sometimes painful narrative, black performance. And that was also significant to my mother's life. And so that's why I wanted to do the next things and will judge the law and the law as a, as a chapter in the prawn called hoop seeds. And so I wanted to use that to talk about love and motherhood, but also heartbreak. And then the sisterhood, the next thing is right. We'll see too, because I shot guy, which is Swahili for black people. We will win without doubt. And I got the terms because during my mother's college years, you know, she was part of the black power movement. At the time she was an activist. She had joined the black Panther party. She was a Pan-African.
Speaker 0 00:16:27 And so she was learning Swahili. So in her corresponds with people she's using like Swahili as the greeting and the closing, right? And so there, and she also spent a lot of a significant time doing what's African dance. And so there, I was focused on that and then black August, August is black August. And so I want to talk about black power and its legacy in her life, both as our time as an activist in college, but also post and the ways her, her activism continued after that. And the final theme, I'm calling it a distant relatives with a question Mark. And I'm interested in talking about diaspora black ethnicity, black freedom, because my mother is the granddaughter of Caribbean immigrants to the United States. I'm a pause. And I'm going to just kind of go back over that really quickly. Cause I want to say something about time.
Speaker 0 00:17:15 I chose the things based on time. So why would we say archive is in April, April 4th is a mother's birthday this time we're opening it a month. A lot. We're launching that on May 8th towards the end of Ramadan. And so that's a spiritual lives. I will do that. The law is on June 12th. I was born on June 10th. So that's where that story comes in July 4th weekend, every year in Brooklyn, it's African street festival used to call it East. That's why I chose to do the theme on the black consciousness, black dance of like identity. Like I said, August is black August. And then September 4th weekend or labor day weekend is when, traditionally for many, many years I had the West Indian day parade. And so talk about this and relatives for me is important because I think there is a way in which the relationship between black people in this diaspora and that particularly the United States is being completely historicized.
Speaker 0 00:18:06 And the connections between black people who were enslaved in different places, right. When that we're all United States, I think is not actually being told the way it should. And so my mother story is of a granddaughter of these immigrants. And she's also someone who into integrated her junior high school. She's also someone who like fought for black studies on her campus, right? So there's a way we think about who is black and who's not, you know what I mean? That doesn't, that she would just be lost completely alongside other people like Harry Belafonte or something.
Speaker 1 00:18:35 I mean, I just love the poetics of this, the, the themes, how they speak to both your mother's chronology and the contemporary chronology, there's this very wonderful interplay of time and themes, and you couldn't have gotten it any better. Like, I, I don't know if it's like serendipity, you left out and these, these spoke to you or you impose it. However it happened. The poetics of it is just really, really amazing. And in the kinds of the ways that it helps you and the viewers or the audience or the people who'll be engaging, this material helps them wrap themselves around it, uh, such a sprawling archive. And toward that end, let's, let's dive into a particular object. So we open the, this episode with an excerpt, from a performance piece that you do built around a particular object. And this is a letter that your mother wrote while in college to her friend violet. So I wonder for those who can just hear you describe in detail, we're going to do a deep dive into this archival object. Um, describe the object and then we'll get into its content. And then we'll talk about its meaning, but let's start with what is it?
Speaker 0 00:19:59 So I think I should describe like how I found it. So I, so I was in my grandmother's house and my grandma lived in Queens and I'm in the basement and, you know, cleaning out the house and I find a draw like a dresser drawer. That's like broken. It almost is falling apart and it's full of correspondence. So greeting cards, bridal, shower, invitations, et cetera. Right. And there's a white envelope that has some folded pages in it. And the older pages are sort of note a small note book size, right? The kind that you tear the page. And it's like, you know, it's a little bit yellow now. It has blue lines and it's written and some, sometimes the ink is black is blue. Cause it's like, it's like a, maybe like a nine page back and front letter. And the first half, you know, she's just dressed to violet.
Speaker 0 00:20:48 And my mother had a boyfriend in college and they had moved in together. And so she was talking about just kind of those mundane things, like going to an auction for the first time or something. Cause she's, she's in New York, you know? So like the country that she's living in Ohio, right. And then it's appendix number two is she literally writes like appendix number two, which is, to me is also interesting, right. This idea that you haven't a letter have an appendix. Right, right. Like I said, the first half, it's not as politically charged, although there is a point where she talks about birth control and she warns her friend to watch up and birth control. Cause basically we don't, these white folks are still on birth control. So she's like, when are you going to take? Right? And so the second half, like the cook we listened to.
Speaker 0 00:21:28 So basically she describes the Gregory coming to her campus to Gregory. I learned later when, during research, he came to Ohio state a couple of times throughout the year. So he was a sober, frequent visits, Ohio state. But this one time he comes in November of 1971 and she in her letter and the appendix to her letter. And I'm assuming it's an appendix because it wasn't, this was just a PS. Yes. Right. Um, but she and her handwriting is like, it's not super clear. Right. So you said some deciphering I'm doing, trying to see, you know, is that a T and I, you know, got a, B I was in cursive. Right. Um, and so, you know, she writes about his visit and then she goes on and that those pages are blue ink. That's a page, maybe five, six, and seven. And then by page eight, it's in black ink and she's basically giving a play by play.
Speaker 0 00:22:18 So Kathleen Cleaver came to our campus. She talked about the split in the party. And then she, this play by play of all these, like, and it says like, dig, you know, like you did, that's very time timely. And it's like in North Korea, this is happening. And the Congo, this is happening in Vietnam, this is happening. Right. And she's kind of laying out all the geopolitical sort of things that are going on there. And then she sort of posed the letter with sort of like Terry tells, tell her when I said, hello, how they're doing. And then she has her PS know. So, so the letter itself, I was completely drawn to the letter because one is a complete document that has a beginning and it has an end and it covers a range of her personal experience. But also it's rich with the time you feel like you're in 1971, by the words, her word choices, the things she's concerned about the letter appears in the first exhibit.
Speaker 0 00:23:08 And it's also what I'm hearing the black August exhibit, because she also talks about prisons. This is before the prison industrial complex is really sort of full and full steam, but she was doing some work in prisons as a college student in Ohio. And she talks about, you know, racial inequity and sentencing and this kind of thing. And even in drug too. It's interesting too. She talks about people getting hemmed up for like REFA. And, but whereas the mob is not doing that. And now here we are. We have like, marijuana is legal. This question about what, about all the pain, right. And injustice that we haven't experienced. Part of the reason why I was drawn to the letter is because the things that she's talking about in 1971 are still extremely relevant in 2021. They're not old, they're not out of dates. These are still issues, right.
Speaker 0 00:23:54 And the passion and her conviction around these things are something that I share. And I think we also see that in our communities with people who are very much so organizing around, trying to educate around these questions of inequality and justice reproductive justice, you have to really, I mean, healthcare, I mean, these are the kinds of things that we're still very, very much dealing with right now. And so I think that's also something that I was drawn to learn. So it was, it was like, that was a no brainer. I was like, this is something that definitely folks need to see
Speaker 1 00:24:24 You get this letter. That's so rich in content. Tell us what kinds of things did you do to contextualize it? You know, you have a pretty good grasp of that time. Um, but what, what were the steps you took to situate this letter, both in terms of your mother's life, did you know who violet was? What did you kind of wonder who violet was? Did she show up anywhere else in the archive, but also in terms of the broader stories that are told in the letter?
Speaker 0 00:24:51 So I think I'll say three things about that. So one violet, I definitely knew she was violent then my mother or for him, and for instance, they were 12. And it's interesting about this letter and I sent a copy of it cause I've actually never mailed it. So she wrote the letter, but it was never actually mailed well that's right. Yeah, exactly. Right. So, so, you know, violet, and like I said, they integrated their school, the junior high school together and stuff like that. So I've known her my whole entire life. So I knew who she was. I knew they were very close, intimate friends so that I knew, um, when I see the deck, the Gregory piece, you know, to Gregory is hilarious. I mean, it's like, it's funny. Cause I'm crying at the jokes. She's retelling his jokes in the letter, right. Like 47 years after the fact.
Speaker 0 00:25:36 And he's still funny. So the first thing I do, I'm like, Oh, I want to see like caught me back around newspaper, clipping about him visiting the campus. But really the first complete thing I find is FBI file, which is now online. And so two Gregory had been under investigation through COINTELPRO, right? The counter intelligence program under Jaeger Hoover for many, many years. And so, because of that, you know, they were the federal government, the FBI, they were tracking and spying on him basically. And following them around the country because that'd be our file. It was like hundreds, almost thousands of pages long. So I went and I found the thing on Columbus, Ohio, and I'm tripping because I'm like, okay, so she sent this and they said that. And so there were places where these things, my job, but then there are significant places where they don't.
Speaker 0 00:26:20 Right. And one of the ones I've just mentioned here is that this idea around basically the FBI said that Dick Gregory said call for a black boy, caught economic boycott. When in fact my mother says, he says, um, white folks and black folks should do it. Which if you know anything about the Gregory mixed more mixed, much more sense in terms of who he was as an activist. But what was important to me about, and this is why I was in the first exhibit, was that my mother, a 21 year old black female student from Queens in Jamaica, New York as at school, Ohio state would not be considered authoritative source. The federal government would be, although they clearly have all kinds of biases and not for nothing, but there's the book, the student newspaper, the lantern, when they report on his visit, they call us one mother said, cause he's like you young people, you do X, Y, and Z and Ohio.
Speaker 0 00:27:14 State's our black school. So he's clearly talking about a multi-racial right coalition to end the Vietnam war. But because the federal government was intent on silencing black resistance, black rattled action. He, his work was interpreted as something that was a threat and it was dangerous and that came out not, and I didn't know all that when I read the letter. Right. Like, I mean, I knew about some of this, about the Gregory, but I didn't know. And I ended up wanting to help robe. I didn't know how, like how they all come together and how I think one of the other things that was really significant for me in that kind of discovery of sorts is how will you think about your family? You think around a family archive, you think about things like a letter or you think of things like photos, but you know, the reality is that there are federal documents that are also a part of your family archive.
Speaker 0 00:28:04 Right. And I'm, I'm boiling for my mother now. Right. But you know what I mean? Like that's also part of it, which is kind of chilling, but also important to sort of recognize. So I think in terms of that, that's kind of how that all came together for me. So I had, like you said, I had a history, like I knew the broad outlines and I knew who to Gregory was things like that. And so I went looking via Google, I got the FBI file, but then I went, I visited Ohio state university. I emailed the librarian and I asked them some questions and they were like, Oh, let's do newspapers online. You can just look them up, you know? And then, you know, so it was kinda like he's investigating, right? So you're piecing sort of things together.
Speaker 1 00:28:49 I love that. It's almost like an archeological, you know, you get these fragments and you have to put the bones together and we create the body of the story, thinking about a letter. I hadn't even, I hadn't realized, uh, the quote, the implicit question of how did you end up with the letter that your mother wrote, but the fact that she didn't mail it, but that raises a question of intended audience, which I think a lot of archivists are people who are archiving materials of, of individuals come across. And that question is the question of how do you navigate the balance between privacy and public engagement of something that may have been intended for a specific person or a specific audience or sometimes the self. Right. Um, how do you balance that desire to tell the story while maintaining that agency of the original narrator, right. How did you weigh that in terms of what kinds of questions did you ask yourself when you decided like whether or not to include it?
Speaker 0 00:29:54 So to take this letter as an example, so, you know, this essay, there's a first half in the second half, and I haven't talked a lot about the first half. Right. That's intentional knowing my mother, who she was, she was a very open person and particularly as she got older, so she was not someone who was afraid to share even very personal things about her life. So I, one level I wasn't knowing who she was and knowing how she lived. I have very few apprehensions about sharing something from the archive, because I feel like she would definitely also share it. However, there is like in the, in the more personal or a part of the letter, I decided not to sort of focus on that per se, because I felt like it was kind of personal. Right. And so I wasn't, I'm not really sure yet what I want to do that.
Speaker 0 00:30:39 So I mentioned the pregnancy scare. Right. I mentioned that because I think there, there are things that have to have a purchase and a value outside of just her experience with them that I think are important because we need to know about those things to make those connections. And then there are some things that are very personal that it's like, okay, well, I'm not sure. So I'm not sure. So for me, I guess if I have questions that I'm not sure, I don't write until I have certainty when I have certainty is like, everything's super transparent, so that's kind of how I've been doing it. So I think it's been around who my mother was, what I think she would have been open to this. Even at first, I have a lot of that, to be honest, I think she probably would have been okay with that to be quite Frank.
Speaker 0 00:31:16 But at the same time, I do feel like there needs to be some kind of ethical, measured way of dealing with those kinds of things. Right. And so that's what I knew. I'm particular, that's the space where I'm, where I'm most challenged with that. But looking to do that because the thing about uncle do I do that is like my mother experienced a lot of heartbreak in her relationships with men as an adult. And to me that's important to talk about because I think black woman in general spreads a lot of heartbreak and our society, both black and fighting borders. Society is super dismissive of it. Like it doesn't matter as inconsequential and maybe it was your fault. And I think it's really important to honor black women's hearts and what they experience. And honor, I say stories of love, right? Heartbreak consistent. And to honor all the women who also have broken hearts, but who helped each other and continue to build a world.
Speaker 0 00:32:14 So my mother had these relationships with it and work out, but she also was a part of 28,000 organizations. Right. She raised two kids. She, she educated, I don't know how many kids yet, so she kept going. And so I think that's really important. So there are things in there that are very personal, but again, knowing my mother, I don't think she would have any qualms about people knowing about them, but the half of the, a certain level of care that you do and sharing that. So one of the things I hear you saying is
Speaker 1 00:32:40 About the framing, how to frame certain stories so that they are interpreted in a way that you think is in the spirit of, of who your mother was. You know, that makes me think of what a lot of people who do museum work or work with archivists or work with archives, or for me like as an oral historian, a concept we call shared authority, which is this idea of like, once you start engaging a source, some scholars take ownership of the source and it's like, there's to do whatever they want with it, to tell whatever story they want to tell. And what I hear you is saying is more in the spirit of shared authority, where you are treating your mother's archive, not just as a, a source of history, but as an interpretation of that history and you are sitting with your, and her interpretation and engaging each other.
Speaker 1 00:33:37 And so there's a, there's a dialogic process here where you are in conversation, not just with the content of your mother's story, but you in conversation with her telling of that story. Uh, cause there's a, there's a sort of implicit telling that comes out of the saving, right. Um, when someone's saved something there that's, that's part of us, that's a storytelling act, right? Well, first of all, when they create the thing, right? Like whether it's, uh, the creation can be the saving of an object, like I'm keeping this flyer or it could be actual production, like I'm taking this photograph, I'm writing this letter, those are acts of storytelling. It's so fascinating to hear you try to access or disclose the world that served as the reference point for all of these objects. And so that brings me to
Speaker 0 00:34:34 One other thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Yeah. So I was going to say, I think in addition, so I think, so I think there's a, there's both, I appreciate what you're saying. And that's really helpful for me to hear as well in terms of kind of a shared authority and also choices being made also because it's interpreting my mother's story, but also in the sense of knowing that her source it to other stories. So it's also like the people who are still alive, who show up in this stuff, right. Who also be considered in terms of like what's happening and how it's being shared. And then also conferred to, so like, I didn't, I didn't know my mother's college boyfriend. Right. That was all before speaking Muslim, all four, I was born, but I found him like, I've looked him up and I found him and I've talked to him and we've had conversations and he shared things with me, you know, or like her friend, like, you know, I was like, I've interviewed her. So it was also like any single onscreen, but I've known my whole entire life, but still right. And you get these pieces of things that you're trying to figure out what to do with it or what it means. There are people who are still around, who also can contribute violet, like I've talked to, right. Like, you know, as well. So I think that was also part of the,
Speaker 1 00:35:40 You said something, when you were talking about the letter of how, you know, your mother here's, this college student who would not typically be considered as the authoritative interpreter of Dick Gregory's visit versus say the FBI or even the college newspaper. I wonder if you can talk about what Boomi's archive means as an intervention in creating a space of agency for a storyteller or a history teller like your mother specifically, or even more broadly. One of the things that I've encountered, I think many people I've encountered who studied the history of Muslims in the United States. And certainly the history of Muslims of African descent in the United States is there's so many of those histories are leader centered. They're male centered. You know, we could probably run through the list of men who serve as the containers for a whole community stories. And then when the question is asked, well, what about women's experiences? And one of the responses which some of which is coming from a place of good faith and genuine, uh, NIS is, well, the archive is not there. Right? So tell us, you know, what do you think, you know, work like yours of umiat archive means for our understanding of black women's histories, our understanding of black Muslim women's histories, our understanding of Muslim women's histories, however you want to situate those circles.
Speaker 0 00:37:11 Okay. So in the project, I've defined archive as a reclaimed a claim space where we remember in dream and I did so because the archive with a capital, a that's the kind of place where like everyday people with what we think we know about the past, right. That place has not concerned itself with or valued a lot of people's experiences. And most particularly, it was just significant to me is people of African descent. And so that is something that needs to be rectified. Right? And we rectify that by remembering. And I think people sometimes say, well, there is no archive and that's just not true, right. There is right. It's about where you're looking and what you're looking for and whether or not you're able to identify the story embedded in things like a receipt for an Arabic class, but it's also a place where we dream.
Speaker 0 00:38:03 And so I think about there's some people like Cynthia Hartman in particular who, whose work I've been acquainted with, who is thinking about archives and like speculative ways. So there are things that we don't know. So for example, in the archive and the first exhibit, there are these two photos from my grandfather's time and we'll work to any Ron there in laws, which is a city. So what I've learned is that most black men who served in world war two did not see combat and they did sort of work. Um, and so he was a part of his regimen. They built supply roads to ally position. So they worked one of the places they work was the Persian corridor. So that's why he's in Iran, he's in Iran. And I was in 1944 and he has the same picture twice with two different inscriptions. One description says trouble in the land, right.
Speaker 0 00:38:55 And the other inscription says social gathering. Now, I don't know, I actually don't know the sequence of this, but I'm imagining that perhaps his first evaluation of what happened at that moment was something that was maybe potentially somehow prejudice, right. You know, or he's there for war. So there must be some, a commotion. And then after some time and some nuances of intimacy and some relationships, because he has other photos, right. Where he talks about this is my friend and this kind of thing. People who are local to the parts of Iran, he was in, it's a social gathering. It's not some dangerous thing. So that's speculation, that's imagining. Um, but also imagining in the sense that what we learned, the knowledge that is in this family archive, the knowledge that are in the things that my mother chose to save, that her father chose to notate that her mother told her to save the knowledge that's embedded in those things are also resources for us to dream and to imagine, and to build a better future, right?
Speaker 0 00:39:52 Because they were all committed to that. And my mother in particular, I didn't know my grandfather. Um, but obviously he raised those. So he had some impact on our growing up. But my mother in particular was very, very much committed to building a better world. And so this is the intervention that I'm trying to make. I'm trying to say that, that thing on your grandma's shelf, that you did talk to her about it and find out what's going on with it, because it has knowledge. It has things we need to know that can help us now and into the future. So that's, that's the intervention I'm trying to make.
Speaker 1 00:40:25 I love that. Thank you so much for this wonderful, wonderful conversation before we go. We like to include in all of our episodes, a fun question. This is our, on the square question. What is your black Muslim theme song? Or if black Islam had a theme song, what would it be?
Speaker 0 00:40:45 So since we're in Ramadan, I think the first song that comes to mind for me, if my black Muslim theme song is Shahada SWAT element, and the reason why I'm choosing it, social hada. So, so I mean is, you know, she's a pioneer in the community and she has the song that I grew up listening to quell Shahada. And it's like this RMB kind of bluesy song that is all about, um, being Muslim, like Shahada. And there's a point in the song, like towards the end where she's like stand up and be counted among the righteous
Speaker 0 00:41:26 And every time I hear that, it's like, it's still gives me chills. Right. And it's like, and I love the song because it's culturally, it's mine. It's a good song. It's not what he's lacking, but also she's, you know, staffing, the counter is like, you know, something that people would say all the time growing up. Cause it's how does being a witness. Right. So stand up and be counted. So Ramadan edition my black one, some things on his Shahada. I so thank you so much. Thank you.
Speaker 1 00:41:56 Thank you so much, Dr. <inaudible> for joining us. Thank you all for tuning in to this episode, up on the square, real talk on race and Islam in the Americas, a special podcast series brought to you by stop Willow square and the maiden. Thanks to our guests. Again, Dr. Souad Abdul Kabir. You can find more information about what we discussed, including links and more by visiting Cibolo squared.com forward slash on the square or the may dan.com forward slash podcast. Our theme music was created by fanatic on beats.
