When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost

by Joan Morgan

  What about the big-ass-big-titties-and-jiggy-good looks? “Yeah, I’m looking for fly and beautiful,” he sighs. “But it’s not just about that look good shit. Really. That wears thin no matter what. You can find something wrong with the prettiest girl after you’ve been looking at her for a couple of months. I want a woman that’s strong.”

  Clinkscales can’t even believe I’m asking the question. “Men who are successful in life,” he offers quietly, “appreciate intelligent and thoughtful women—I think much more than women know. When we’re looking for the long term, those are the qualities we want. Not chickenheads.

  “Now I admit that a lot of this understanding for men comes with age,” he concedes, “but all that aesthetic stuff goes away really quickly. As you get older, what’s beautiful to you really transforms. Aesthetic beauty is one thing, but I can’t even tell you how beautiful a woman is who has a soothing, calm personality in a world that’s otherwise hectic and completely ridiculous.

  “And she gets more beautiful as things go on.”

  P.S. Ms. Chicken. Eat your heart out.

  * * *

  I. Not her real name.

  II. Not her real name.

  III. Not her real name.

  IV. Not her real name.

  V. Not her real name.

  VI. Not her real name.

  VII. Not her real name.

  beyoncé, black feminist art, and this oshun bidness

  Beyoncé Knowles-Carter dropped Lemonade, her sixth solo album in total and her second visual one, a full seven days ago—and the world still stands rapt and focused. This is no small feat in a week that also rained/reigned purple and doves in an attempt to convalesce from bawling. This is the digital era. Attention spans are blindingly fleeting. Dog years are leisurely and long by comparison.

  It ain’t like the girl don’t deserve it. Set aside the film for a second. (I know, I know, hard.) Strip away poet Warsan Shire’s capacity to cut to the white meat of black girl pain specific to thwarted searches for love, the gorgeous Daughters of the Dust–esque visuals (h/t to its director, Julie Dash, because Lemonade carries her in its DNA), the silent but hella deliberate cameos of bawse black girl achievers who’ve been vilified in mainstream media (roll call Serena, Quvenzhané, Zendaya, Amandla, Winnie Harlow) coupled with the mothers (Lesley McSpadden, Sybrina Fulton, Gwen Carr) who’ve made the ultimate blood sacrifice of sons to the relentless state-sanctioned violence that birthed the Black Lives Matter movement. Try to stop reveling in its dexterous use of a feminist black girl arsenal that includes invoking all the #BlackGirlMagic to be found in Afro-futurism, ancestor veneration, amalgams of Christian- and West African–based spiritual practices, black sisterhood, girlhood, mother wit, love.

  You know what? Scratch that. Go right on ahead. This type of ish don’t happen every day. Oshun, the Yoruba orisa/goddess/witch whose province includes affairs of the heart, (self-) love, (re)birth, creativity, community, childbirth, taking her place center stage in the pop culture event of the year is a thang, and it deserves its moment.

  But back to the album. The fourteen tracks that comprise Lemonade are as sonically stunning as the film is visually arresting, making it Beyoncé’s strongest musical compilation yet. Like most in her cohort, Beyoncé has long been an artist who makes jawns for a singles-driven pick-choose-pass market. But Lemonade is deliciously and deceptively old school in both vibe and structure. From the breathy prelude (part Gregorian/part Lamaze) that precedes and supports “Pray You Catch Me” to the mento of “Hold Up” ’s infectious and dutty whine-inspiring dub, Lemonade traverses through the soundscape of black music. Beyoncé lays broad claim to an ancestral inheritance of black music throughout—rock ’n’ roll’s explosive rage, the slow simmer of seventies soul, New Orleans jazz, gospel, and country inflected with bluesdriven soul claps. The music, of course, is the assist to a narrative composed lyric by lyric to tell of heartbreak and anger, denial, numbness, reconciliation, forgiveness, transformation.

  All alone, the album’s ability to sing one black girl’s blues would qualify as a relatable, cathartic piece of work. Who among us hasn’t parsed the difference between jealous (internalized and dangerous) and crazy (dangerous still, but at least not just to you, here’s to fucking up someone else in the process)? Had the connect-the-broken-dots epiphany that the man who is breaking your heart bears a stark resemblance to the man who broke your mother’s? But Lemonade is a visual album comprised of two parts. Its genius lies partially in form. Alone, the album is a tale of a singular journey of personal growth. Read against the text of the film, however, it becomes something else. Like the patron saint it claims as its sire, the film utilizes Oshun’s needle to stitch the album’s singular story into a larger diasporic narrative of community comprised of black women’s struggle, sacrifice, survival, and transformation. Of all the tools Oshun is said to carry, perhaps the most powerful one is her mirror. The layperson mistakes this for a sign of her vanity. Those of us who know her a bit more intimately, however, recognize the mirror as the tool Oshun holds up to our faces when she requires us to do the difficult work of really seeing ourselves.

  So what does it mean that the baddest piece of black feminist art we’ve seen in a minute comes from a woman who, when she publicly declared herself a feminist in 2014, was met with nothing short of a polarized shit-storm? Black feminist muvva bell hooks infamously called her a terrorist during a panel talk at the New School. Others deemed her feminism woefully “bottom bitch,” too hypersexualized, capitalist, opportunist to be anything more than a publicity stunt. When Bey coos achingly in the film Why can’t you see me? Why can’t you see me? the mirror requires we acknowledge that she’s talking about more than her husband, racism, and sexism. She’s also talking to us.

  Hopefully it’s clear by now that Beyoncé, as a black feminist, also knows that no amount of money, global pop stardom, or #BadBitchery can inoculate any of us from heartbreak or the exhausting limbo state of hyper-visibility and invisibility prescribed for black women by lingering legacies of racism and sexism. For that project we have to rely on each other. Lemonade makes it quite clear that Beyoncé has signed up for a tour of duty in this long-standing mission of rendering our images visible. It helps that she’s also given us a tour de force.

  afterword

  i got (18+) questions: a birthday interview by dr. treva b. lindsey

  Happy Birthday Chickenheads!

  By the time this drops, you will be eighteen and officially on your grown woman. I was eighteen when we first met. I picked you up my sophomore year at Oberlin College and have carried you with me ever since—both physically and in my spirit—as I made my journey and cut my own path to grown black womanhood. The floodgates opened when I read your words. You armed me. You did it when this world told me I wasn’t good enough, when I was struggling to figure out my black feminist identity, when the academy dismissed me or rendered me invisible. You held me down. And at eighteen, I got the blueprint for a feminism that was bad-as-fuck and could reckon with any ism. I needed your road map then and know for damn sure another generation of young girls and women will need you now.

  Especially now.

  We are in perilous times. Violence—both state-sanctioned and domestic—is a daily, onerous threat to the lives of black girls, women, femmes, and transwomen. Our reproductive rights are under assault. And the presidential election revealed that more than fifty million Americans voted for an unqualified misogynist, racist, fascist, Islamophobic, xenophobic asshole, and in doing so, they demonstrated a frightening tolerance for AmeriKKKa’s special brew of white supremacy and patriarchy. This has left the rest of us—us nasty women and bad hombres—to find our way through a familiar and yet wholly new world of white rage.

  I can’t think of a better time to return to a book that anchored my pledge to become someone who refuses to yield to the tide of injustice. I came back to you as I assemble my arsenal for the war against our communities that I am certain is to come.
And as always, I found love and laughter between these pages and found solace in your beautiful, powerful words.

  And then Joan, there’s you. I’m grateful to both Professional Black Girl Jesus and your Orisha Yemoja that they had something even greater in mind for me than my love affair with your book, that eighteen years later they saw it fit to gift me a friendship and a black feminist sista-scholar-partner in justice and retail crime.

  So I got questions. A million really, but in honor of this book’s brilliance and its birthday, I’m going to keep it to eighteen and a thank-you: to you, from all of us black and brown girls finding a way to unapologetically laugh, live, and love.

  Eighteen years ago, you gave birth to hip-hop feminism, a concept that is now routinely thought of as a critical intervention in black feminist thought. We’ve got hip-hop feminist studies, anthologies, courses, and dissertations. Did you predict any of this?

  Oh, absolutely not. First of all, I was so removed from academia. I left Wesleyan as an undergrad just grateful to graduate. I had zero plans to return to academia ever again, which is funny since I’m now a doctoral candidate. But the irony of Chickenheads finding a home in academia is that I specifically wrote the book to be anti–ivory tower. I wanted it to feel like the conversations you have with your girls at two o’clock in the morning. Its pacing, its cadence was deliberately crafted so that you could get through it in about two days if you were really feeling it. Two weeks tops, if you weren’t. I never imagined it would find a home in academia, although I’m happy that it did.

  Talk to me about that. What was the initial reception by black feminist scholars?

  I would say chilly. It was at best a slow thaw. Not that I was aware of a lot of it at first, because for the first few years the book was out, I was still very much a journalist who functioned in the world of magazines and in the world of hip-hop. But yeah, there were some black feminist elders who were pretty dismissive of it for any number of reasons. Some of them don’t speak to me even now, to be quite honest.

  The absence of “theory” was a problem for some folks. That critique has never bothered me. I was very committed in writing this book to stay away from academic jargon, or any language, really, that felt unnecessarily multi syllabic or exclusive. I wrote it the way I spoke. Chickenheads is very much my voice and an embodiment of all the worlds I walked in at the time—hip-hop, the South Bronx, Jamaica, a downtown NY club and art scene, etc. And then part of it is just my get-down as a writer. I believe in an economy of words. I’m not impressed by obtuseness. I write with the intention of being understood. And on a very fundamental level, I need my shit to sing.

  But I also had the privilege of creating this book outside of academia. Chickenheads is very much a text that’s on its own shit. It breaks rules, it chops shit up, it remixes at will, it’s faulty, contradictory, messy, and deliberately inappropriate. It’s impolite and it’s honest as fuck. In that sense, it’s much more hip-hop than it is scholarly. The academy is a particular kind of self-replicating beast. There’s a monitoring and policing of not just how you produce ideas but how you are allowed to introduce new ones. Now that I’m in grad school, I realize that I would have never written this book if I had gone straight from Wesleyan to a Ph.D. Everything that’s fly and free about it would’ve been beaten out of me in the name of proper scholarship.

  Who did you imagine yourself to be in conversation with as you were writing? Because I remember reading it and feeling “She’s talking to me.” And I think that’s true for not just me but a generation of black feminists who do work in popular culture and are pushing the boundaries on how we read representations of black women.

  So let me say this. I wouldn’t be a feminist if I hadn’t encountered bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. That was the gateway drug. It was the first time I heard feminism articulated for me in a way that made it feel like it might have something for me as a black woman. It opened up a world of possibility for me in ways that are very similar to how people talk about Chickenheads now, in the sense that it allowed them to see themselves as feminists for the first time. Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter was another. As a first generation immigrant, studying African-American history was very important to me because this was not my family’s lived, historical experience. That book helped me realize that black feminist women have always stood at the forefront of justice and resistance in this country. So did taking an undergraduate course with Hazel Carby, who of course is one of the premier black feminist scholars of our time. But before those experiences feminism was a thing I loosely associated with white women, bra-burning, and the seventies.

  But after reading them? I started claiming everybody as feminist. Harriet Tubman? Feminist. Ida B. Wells? Feminist. Sojourner Truth? Feminist. My Jamaican mama? Feminist. Toni Morrison’s Sula? Feminist. I definitely didn’t identify as a feminist when I read it and I wouldn’t for years to come, but there was something about how badly behaved Sula was that made me feel validated and free. I knew that if I was ever going to identify as feminist, then mine would have to include space for transgressive, sexually free women who give zero fucks.

  But while I was very clear about the debt I owed these black feminist works I was always very clear that I wasn’t writing this book for them. They weren’t my audience. I was writing for the same women who’d been reading my work in Vibe, in Essence, in the Village Voice. But I was also writing for the homegirls I grew up with in the Bronx who may or may not ever have set foot in a college. I wanted the audience of Chickenheads to be the same women who curled up with Terry McMillan’s novels in the nineties.

  What I couldn’t have known back then was that my audience was you, Treva. Or Brittney Cooper, or the women of the Crunk Feminist Collective. Or a Janet Mock. I was simply incapable of imagining you.

  Honestly, I couldn’t have imagined Beyoncé.

  Feminism has entered popular culture in an unprecedented way. What does this mean for girls and young women coming of age in the twenty-first century?

  It’s fascinating to watch. If you’d told me when this book was published that one day there would ever be a black global pop star—a star as huge as Beyoncé—who would comfortably and publicly identify as feminist—I would have told you that you were buggin’. It is an incredible moment that also speaks to a body of concerted black feminist work of a particular generation. The work of people like myself, Rebecca Walker, Gwendolyn Pough, Elizabeth Méndez Berry, dream hampton—that bridge generation of black feminists—people who came after bell hooks and before the generation that we see now.

  I feel really good about being part of a cohort of black feminists who helped to give this current generation language. There are many reasons black women in my generation struggled with embracing the f-word, and one of them was hearing it spoken in language that felt like it was their own. This allowed too many of them to misidentify feminism solely as “white women’s shit.” Once I could identify what black feminism was for me, I was very, very clear that it absolutely predates a white 1970s feminist movement.

  We’ve been doing black feminism for hundreds of years. Some of my peers didn’t see they were far more caught up in semantics and language than I tended to be. I’ve never really cared if black women didn’t embrace the title if they were already doing feminist work. I see and claim black feminism everywhere. For example, when 94 percent of black women voted for Clinton, that to me was a black feminist effort. Now I’m sure if you asked that 94 percent of black women if they identify as feminists, that a good number of them would tell you no. But we showed up and voted the way we did because black women fundamentally understand intersectionality. Because we have to. We know our very bodies are intersections of race, gender, and class, and because of that our fates are interdependent.

  Black feminist ideology underscores almost every foundational tenet in the Black Lives Matter movement. We demand that protesters #SayHerName because we know that we cannot afford to let anyone thi
nk that this violence is just about the deliberate targeting of black men. Whether we say that as feminists, or we say that just as black women, or we say that as womanists, or we say that as Africana feminists, I don’t care. No matter what you call it, if you’re showing up and doing the work, then you’re a feminist to me.

  Chickenheads predates the social media revolution of the Internet. Who could have imagined Black Twitter? Do you view social media as a potential, or perhaps an already powerful, feminist tool?

  So much has changed since I wrote Chickenheads. I really felt very alone when I wrote this book. I didn’t have a black feminist cohort of girlfriends. I didn’t know where the like minds were. I had plenty of girlfriends, don’t get me wrong, and we roll hard to this day. But in terms of black women who were thinking about feminism, working through feminism, trying to articulate language for a younger group of women . . . I didn’t have that. I didn’t have the feminist cohort that I do now. I certainly didn’t have “The Pleasure Ninjas”—you, Brittney Cooper, Yaba Blay, Kaila Story, Esther Armah. Now it’s easy for me to figure out how to do collective black feminist work.

  I think we underestimate the power of the hashtag. When we hashtag #BlackGirlJoy, #BlackGirlMagic, #CareFreeBlackGirls, #BlackFeminism, we’re creating digital archives that not only say this is who we are, this is what we say, and this is what we look like, but we’re also identifying allies diasporically. We know who’s doing the work in Kansas, who’s doing the work in Canada, who’s doing the work in Ghana and who’s doing the work in London. And we know who to reach out to. In 1999, I felt like I was alone writing about this in my Brooklyn apartment. In 2017 I can get on social media at any point in the day and go all over the globe and see where my sisters are. Where my male allies are. That is an incredibly empowering thing. If it’s empowering for me at fifty-one to be able to do this, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be born into this, to be born into a proliferation of language and tools to express yourself and build on these concepts. I mean, I didn’t have hashtags that said #BlackFeministSexIsTheBestSexEver #SoYouBetterComeCorrect. That took me a very long time to get to.