One of my favorite books is So Long a Letter (1981) by Mariama Ba. In this short little book (less than 100 pages), Ba performs the very difficult task of cultural reassessment. In the book, she looks at all facets of Senegalese life: religion, cultural traditions, marriage, and government. Ramatoulaye, the protagonist, feels that in all facets of life, some things need to be kept and others should be promptly discarded. Anything that impedes the progress of Senegalese women should be discarded; the progress of the country, Ramatoulaye feels, is linked with the progress of its women. For instance, Ramatoulaye does not disdain Islam. She's a very devout Islamic woman. However, she does despise the way the mostly-male religious officials interpret the rules of Islam to benefit an oppressive patriarchal society. She doesn't hate the cultural traditions of Senegalese society. She hates those part of the traditions which declare a woman must be kept ignorant in order to be a good wife, and only certain ranks can marry other ranks…even if it means incest.
Ramatoulaye's cultural assessment is very difficult work. It comes at the heels of her husband's death –after he totally abandoned her for a younger woman (her daughter's best friend). It is difficult to look at one's own culture and examine it. Quite frankly, most of us never question our own traditions or how we were raised. And at other times, we are so quick to enter into modernity and leave the past behind that we throw away cultural jewels without ever learning the value in them. African Americans have been guilty of the latter. After integration, we were so anxious to climb corporate ladders and amass material goods in America's consumer-driven economy that we left behind priceless jewels in our own culture. For instance, most of our grandparents could take scraps of clothes and make works of art for their families. These patchwork quilts, some of them containing scraps of slaves' clothes, were not only artistic, but practical. For African Americans, art is not something that we go to a museum to see. We live it. We create it. We are art. But no more.
Because traditional avenues of artistic expression were largely closed to African Americans, we developed our own vernacular: in the way we talked, danced, created music, and wore our hair and clothes. We created America's only original literature (literature which did not imitate European literature); we played African music on European instruments and created new genres of music (jazz, blues, and even country); we harnessed our pain and cried out to God and created a brand of religious music the world had never known (spirituals); we took the scraps from the master's table and created a totally original cuisine (soul food); we didn't have much spare time, but when we did, we danced away our pain and created new forms of physical expression (the cakewalk and jazz dance); and with our homemade clothes and hair dos, told America what was cool and fashionable (Afros and bell bottoms).
But somewhere, that ended. Rather than producers of creativity, we have become the biggest consumers of globalized sameness. Instead of creating our own worth with our own productivity, we have become ashamed of our mother's sewing machines, and look to department stores, labels, and price tags to tell us what we're worth. And in the process, we've lost some of our greatest art forms. For instance, most people are ashamed to admit they even own patchwork quilts. We haven't passed that artform along to our children and now those quilts have become treasures. On sites such as etsy.com or even amazon.com, a good patchwork quilt costs at least $250, and our grandmothers used to give them to us for free. Has anybody noticed that Generation X and Y have contributed absolutely nothing to the fashion scene? Everything that we do is retro –recycled things from the hey-day of our parents. That's because we are the first generation to grow up without hearing the sound of our mothers' sewing machines whirring in the night as they created for us. Most of our clothes were purchased from department stores. We've missed out on the power and pride of being able to say, "I made that. I produced that from my own mind." We were taught that store-bought is better because it symbolizes economic upward mobility.
And has anybody ever thought to do a cultural assessment of our churches? It is no secret that even progressive leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. practiced a form of religious patriarchy that was oppressive to women. Civil rights leader Septima Clark had a nasty falling-out with the ordained Baptist minister because he absolutely refused to give her the respect that her age and years in the struggle accorded her. After all, she had been in the struggle years before he was even cognizant of it, but her sex was seen as a barrier for King. He felt that his maleness automatically placed him at the top of the hierarchy and that he had nothing to learn from a woman who was clearly the more experienced of the two. Fast-forward almost 50 years, and we still have these deep-seated gender divisions within African American culture both inside and outside the church. It doesn't matter that many women are just as called and sanctified as a man to preach. Many men and patriarchal women do not respect God's freedom to call a woman to the ministry. They'll tell anybody quickly that God doesn't call women to preach –as if God needs humans to tell Him how to do His job. And because many of us do not question our cultures, we allow these injustices to continue.
It has been almost 50 years since the passage of most Civil Rights legislation. Since African Americans never stopped to do a cultural assessment like Ramatoulaye, integration and entry into America's consumer economy has devastated and decimated many facets of our culture. In these rough economic times, I think it's best that African Americans around the country take time to do just what Ramatoulaye did: sit down, assess our progress, examine what we consider "progress," seriously look at what may be impeding us as a people from within, and write ourselves "so long a letter." Sometimes, the first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge that we have one and then articulate it.
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