I refuse to cede this summer to cruelty. I have rubbed the roof of my mouth raw with pomegranate hard candies. I have learned how to take rapid-fire selfies at flattering angles. Underwhelmed by artisanal popsicles, politics and my own work ethic, I have brooded. At my best I have ridden the 2 train through […]
Author: jalylah
writer/educator/dj
this is how we do it: the crunk feminist summer mixtape series
Josephine Baker famously fled the U.S. for the reprieve from racism post World War I France provided. She called France her home for the rest of her life but continued to perform stateside. She also protested. She addressed the masses at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and juxtaposed the measure of […]
soul glow: the crunk feminist summer mixtape series
Summers ago, the sage Cee Lo implored us to “drop the top and let the sunshine in.” But we don’t all ride around and get it: some of bus, bike and stride. I pound the pavement in part because I was terrorized by a jheri-curled narcoleptic on my mid-aught subway commutes. Each morn this ostensible, […]
the light of us: a mother’s day mix
call it our craziness even, call it anything. it is the life thing in us that will not let us die. Poet Lucille Clifton’s language for lineage was cherished. “roots,” a poem from her 1974 collection An Ordinary Woman named it light and I choose to liken it to mothering. it is the light in us it […]
always arriving: a black scholar’s mixtape
But we knew. And our knowing was like a sister’s embrace. Sonia Sanchez, “A Letter to Dr. Martin Luther King,” homegirls and handgrenades (1984) I first sat at the feet of Sonia Sanchez at Spelman College where I was assiduously loved and educated. Sanchez was invited by the Women’s Resource and Research Center to help […]
thank you: a women’s history month mix
“You are magnificent.” So read the final line of an email I received from the CFC’s Moya Bailey the first Friday of 2012. The subject line was, “Love for you in the new year!” It recalled the summer we became friends and its consequence on her journey. She offered thanks and called me by a […]
we: a thanksgiving mix
Thursday we feast. We who have it good enough to put a turkey on the table and lament the tryptophan-induced ‘itis with loved ones over card tables. And that we won’t include me. I won’t be home for the holidays but here in Harlem and I haven’t done turkey for more than a decade. I’ve […]
so far to go: a mix on finding your way
Listen, this isn’t what I expected: adult-onset acne, speech and eating disorders. I would have been struck dumb had you asked me to forecast these grown-up times in my ponytailed private school days. I daydreamed a lot but my imagined life was clipped: a timid choose your own adventure whose stalled plot was as foreseeable […]
take a load off family: black women, hair and the olympic stage
I am no athlete. I have not won an individual sports competition since maybe the second grade. I recall Usaining all comers in the 40-yard dash but, as Kasi Lemmons learned us, “memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others indelibly imprinted on the brain” and I might have photoshopped that one. My middle […]
a praise song for mamas: a mother’s day mix
I am invested in sepia mamas. My mother lines my eyelids and floats my dreams. She sits on the right hand of the throne she abdicated to all I might become. “Mama gonna work it out,” Martin versioned at his best. Her frame, I shouldn’t calcify. And I’ll leave her flesh be. I know they […]