Isn't She Lovely. . .

When Barack Obama presented Stevie Wonder with the Library of Congress's esteemed Gershwin Award yesterday, Barack said that if he hadn't been a Stevie Wonder fan, Michelle may never have dated him and they may have never gotten married!

I can't even bear the thought. . .let's just not go there.

Like most people of my generation (and the one before ours), from all over the world, Stevie Wonder's music has surely accompanied a relationship or a break up, a birth, more than a few weddings or simply a family car trip. Stevie Wonder was a part of my childhood, one of the few American pop artists I remember my mother singing while pressing plantains. Isn't She Lovely made me want to get up and do somersaults through our yard. Superstitious accompanied one of my first choreographic attempts. . . I thought I'd one day name a daughter Aisha.

I wasn't meant to have daughters (let's not go there either) but I can't express the excitement I experience whenever I see Sasha and Malia Obama and their lovely mother, Michelle. As a woman and a mother, I can't imagine a stronger, more intelligent and gracious role model to honor today, the last post of My Black History Month.

Will I honor her on any other day of any other month? Of course, but I'm still a believer of Black History Month (as I've mentioned before) and Michelle Obama's presence in The White House will always have a profound effect on my black history.

Bush Girl Alert: Lost in Assumption

Abby's Famous Head Tilt
Originally uploaded by jeffuwo

I tend to feel a bit like a dog being pat on the head when Germans--well meaning, no doubt--tell me how fantastic my German is. "And you have no accent!?" Everyone nods eagerly and smiles in agreement. "Amazing!"

I used to actually say thank you (see dog fetch bone) and now I just remind people that a decade in a country can do a lot for language skills. But I realize it has more to do with how they expect me to sound. I'm expected to have an accent or broken German because why else would they be surprised?

The other evening at a dinner party, I got an interesting twist on this common assumption. "So, since your parents were from Haiti, can you all speak proper English?"

I pause, surely I have misunderstood her. See dog tilt head. "You mean me? My family?"

"Yes," she says with a straight face.

"Of course." Did she forget that I was born and raised in America? That I went to university there? Hello?

And then, she proceeds to tell me how well I speak German! With hardly an accent. . .

Hear dog whimper and sigh loudly.

My Black History Month: Oprah Winfrey

When we spotted Oprah Winfrey at the fish stand in Baltimore's Lexington Market one afternoon, she smiled at me as if she knew me. I was barely a teenager and was thrilled that I was standing across from the only black anchorwoman I had ever seen on the local news. She didn't only smile, she looked me in the eyes and cheerfully said, "Hello, how are you?"

If dancing didn't pan out, I had told myself back then, then I wanted to be an anchorwoman, just like Oprah Winfrey.

Surely Oprah is a role model for many but she was mine before she became one of the world's most influential people. She wasn't yet telling women how to live to their best potential. She wasn't yet urging America to go out and read. She wasn't yet the great philanthropist that she is today.

Her life story, from being born into a poor and broken home and repeatedly sexually abused as a child by male relatives, to becoming a hugely successful anchorwoman in Baltimore (without being thin and light-skinned), would have been impressive enough. She was a "celebrity" to me so it was especially flattering that she addressed me, even if only for a moment. Television role models for black girls back then were rare and she saw just how much influence she had over me, in as short amount of time as it took for the fish to be scaled.

Pictured above with pupils from the girl's school she built in South Africa--beyond all her fame and mega fortune--I still see the simple and genuine pleasure she derives from inspiring and empowering young black girls.

Photo: Pan-African Newswire

How Long True Change Really Takes

Ironically, not long after I posted Monkey Business , The New York Post published this cartoon yesterday.

So, for all the blogs asking if we still really need to celebrate Black History Month, I'd say this cartoon is an example of why we should. America still has a very long way to go before we learn to stop throwing salt into old wounds, whether the intention is malicious or not. Every black person I spoke to yesterday (and also non-black) took offense to this illustration. What were they thinking?

Hey, Rupert, enjoy the boycott.

My Black History Month: Wyclef Jean

I'm not a hip hop connoisseur but I have always respected the musical genre when it provides important social commentary. As hip hop evolved there were many examples of artists aware of the huge responsibility of educating a generation that learns about the world through The Internet, music and television.

Wyclef Jean, the founding member of The Fugees, has probably brought more attention to the dire situation in Haiti than CNN and BBC combined. When I was in high school, the only talk of Haiti was about AIDS, refugees overwhelming Florida's shores and Haiti's extreme poverty.

Today, younger people have a different portal into viewing Haiti thanks to Wyclef and his foundation Yele Haiti, which provides (among other programs) primary school scholarships, a food distribution program in conjunction with The World Food Programme, a rehabilitation center for imprisoned youth and tons of publicity on his trips to Haiti with celebrities like Matt Damon after devastation caused by Hurricane Gustav.

Celebrities have incredible power in influencing poverty, as Brangelina, Bono, Madonna, Mia Farrow and many others have shown (no matter what you may think of them personally). Wyclef, because he is Haitian, incorporates the history, culture and language in his music, which is a step beyond simply being an ambassador. Wyclef is for Haiti what M.I.A might one day be to Sri Lanka. And for the parents reading this thinking "I don't know who that is?" then take a second and google her, your children are probably paying far more attention to music than to their teachers.

PS: We miss you Lauryn!

(This is in Kreyol, but as the refrain says, "If you have ears, listen. . ."

Sleigh Riding for Immigrants

Dashing through the snow at a speed too great for my liking, I pretend not to be scared. I yell whoopee and hold on to my small son who is squealing in delight. By the second time we go down on our wooden sleigh (is there anything in Germany not made of wood?) I think we’ll hit a small child who hasn’t noticed the speed we’re gaining. My husband waits at the bottom, looking on with our other children, eager to see how far our sleigh will slide. I am something between excited and petrified, succumbing to our flight, knowing that it can end in bliss, or, my hidden fear, death.

My parents shook their heads when we went sleigh riding or ice skating with our American friends. Winter activities were simply not a part of their understanding. Winter was something to complain and moan about, wish away like bad luck. They never packed our family car with a sled and a thermos of hot chocolate, heading for the steepest slope. That nonsense was what their American children did by themselves.

And yet here I am, grinning and bearing it as I did some 20 years ago, to belong; to experience the thrill while unfortunately experiencing the cold. I will freeze to assimilate, shiver to allow my children a giggle.

I look up and see three Turkish boys without their parents. Their plastic saucer doesn’t pick up speed as well as the wooden sleighs. But they are delighted to be on the slopes, under the falling snow and breathing in the cold air that exhilarates as much as it numbs.


Photo: Ruimann

My Black History Month: Josephine Baker

I have to admit, I've gone back and forth between loving Josephine Baker and cringing in discomfort whenever I see the famous picture of her crossing her eyes, topless and in a banana skirt.

On the one hand, it seemed so self-deprecating to satisfy a certain cliche of a sauvage black woman. On the other hand, she claimed the caricature and thus had a certain control over it. After all, she performed in an era of cabaret entertainment in which nudity and eroticism were a regular part of the shows.

I've always found the 1920s one of the most fascinating eras in modern European history. Several African-Americans came here during this time because they didn't experience the racial discrimination that they did back home in the United States. Even pre Nazi Berlin couldn't get enough of jazz, and welcomed black American artists who performed not far from where I live now. Josephine Baker was enchanted by Berlin's "jewel-like sparkle". She said Berlin was where she received the "greatest number of gifts."

Josephine Baker's active role in the US Civil Rights Movement has landed her on many other Black History Month lists. But for me, here in Europe, her legacy represents something between a reality and a fantasy in a strangely magical period in which a poor black girl could have just as well grown up forgotten and unnoticed.

Bush Girl Alert: Monkey Business

I'm afraid I have to interrupt my regular My Black History Month entries with this Bush Girl Alert.

A good German friend of my husband's--a wonderful person with four children-- spent a couple of days with us while on business in Berlin. He was great with my children and was happy to play with them, tell them stories, bounce them up and down on his lap. He appeared to be genuinely fond of them.

One day my eldest son climbed on our friend and he playfully called my son a monkey. With my son hanging from his hip, the reference was obvious and there was absolutely no malicious intent. Then the twins came in the room and he said, "Oh look, there are two more little monkeys!" Well, my children (in the monkey loving age) proceeded to hoop and holler like the little apes and chimpanzees.

I didn't say anything because I figured that our friend just didn't know the painful historical reference of comparing black men to apes. It was clearly not meant in any other way than a playful one. So I grit my teeth and said nothing. It was a big issue to bring up for a short 2-day visit.

I wonder now, though, if I should have said something. I normally do, but it gets tiring schooling Germans about stereotypes. It's also not a caricature they seem to be familiar with because I remember another time when a music teacher called my son "a sweet little monkey". However, the caricature appeared here too, during a propaganda campaign called The Black Disgrace. The "disgraces" were the mixed children of French African soldiers who supposedly raped white German women while occupying the Rhineland area after WWI.

Well, even after our friend left, my littlest one thought it would still be fun to pretend to be a monkey. After all, monkeys are cute and furry and a big hit at the zoo. It wasn't until my son said he wanted to dress up as a monkey for carnival, that I finally opened my mouth.

"Oh, oh, why not be a rooster or a bear?" I said. "Or maybe a lion?" He took to the lion idea but I'm wondering, when do I tell them that black boys ought not to "monkey around"?


Photo: floridapfe

My Black History Month: India Arie

India Arie isn't particularly old, but this is my Black History Month list, which means these people have had some significant impact on me personally.

India Arie, with her beautiful natural locks, her songs about being who she wants to be and not what society expects of her (Beautiful Flower, Video,I am not My Hair) as well as her songs that simply inspire (Strength, Courage and Wisdom) empowered me at a time in my life when my identity as a woman was shaky.

New to Berlin and disturbed by the attention I received, I felt unsettled by the exoticism and unnerved by the ignorant assumptions. There were very few black people in Berlin who looked like me in the late 1990s and I felt how people were troubled trying to identify me. The Germans didn't know I wasn't African and the few Africans definitely knew that I wasn't. I fit neither here nor here and had to rebuild my identity, mostly for me, from scratch.

Long gone were the days that I was a little girl and wished I had flowing blond hair like my kindergarten friend, Amanda, who was often told how pretty she was. Since then I'd read Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, I'd had black women professors in college, I watched my own mother put herself through graduate school. I'd had no shortage of role models.

India got into my soul, she spoke to me the way music can sometimes crawl into your head and tell you what you already know, but tells you again anyway. Something about her voice, her honesty, her pride in herself inspired me to be just as strong and confident.

There is a time and place for Beyonce and Rihanna, but India, I think, is timeless.

My Black History Month: Edwidge Danticat

I'd just turned 21 when I discovered the writing of Edwidge Danticat. I was somewhere between rejecting my strict Haitian upbringing and wanting to discover myself as a young American woman. I was fresh out of college, green yet adventurous and with many ideas about the world and how I fit into it.

I straddled many shores and communicated in many tongues, as a child of two cultures is apt to do, and I searched for people who spoke my languages.

I couldn't have prayed for a clearer interpreter, a more intricately designed bridge, a stronger conjure woman than Edwidge Danticat. She wrote somewhere between her Haiti and my parents', her America and mine; writing in the language I studied yet sprinkling her text with the Kreyol of my childhood.

How could she know that I needed her so? Who sent her to me, this eloquent angel?

Only a few years after I began my foray into adulthood, my father died very unexpectedly, his last words to me being Happy Birthday. I was stunned by the suddenness of his death and so terribly disturbed by its permanence.

Praying, singing and remembering him helped when I was together with my family but being alone was the hardest part of mourning. Sleepless nights often led me to stand in front of my bookcase and solace came in Edwidge's prose. There she was to tell me about Haiti, the one that my father so loved. Patiently, beautifully and even cruelly, she described the landscape I barely remembered, the people I belonged to, the wisdom in our folklore. I could not have my father back but Edwidge was always willing to re-tell a fable, explain Haiti's pain while never forgetting to include every grain of its beauty.

Deservedly so, Edwidge Danticat is one of the most celebrated writers of our time. But for me, she is more than that. She is a guardian poet, an interpreter of the cultures that are a part of me and, although she doesn't know me, a dear friend.

My Black History Month: Sweet Honey in the Rock

At 20 I didn't yet realize that I couldn't devote my life to several causes at once--no matter how worthwhile--or march in every protest or constantly shout for justice without ultimately losing my voice. Like everything, I learned with time and experience that I had to choose and focus my protest and that protest comes in many effective forms.

When I first heard Sweet Honey in the Rock, 20 and passionate about world hunger, discrimination, the rights of children, education reform, immigration, government corruption (the list goes on) I felt like all of the world's problems, every tyrant, every unfair policy on every continent was being addressed with contrastingly beautiful melodies.

Because they sing a cappella their words and messages are never muffled. They sing about hard working mothers, the poor, people with AIDS, rights in South Africa during apartheid, unfair American foreign-policy, neglected Native Americans, and many other important issues. And with each song, which is musically stirring in its own right, I still have the feeling that they tell a story as urgently as a report on the BBC.

Discovering Sweet Honey in the Rock changed my life in college and their music is a reminder of how integral music is in political movements (US Civil Rights, anti- apartheid movement in South Africa, The French Revolution!).

I still get goose bumps when I hear the six women's rich blend of voices articulately protesting the many wrongs in the world. But I also feel inspired by them to focus on my cause, as small as it may be, and make even my voice heard.

My Black History Month: Movin' On Up

The Jeffersons was probably the first American television show that my father truly enjoyed (other than Sixty Minutes). The otherwise serious intellectual who was often strict with us, broke down chuckling, tears of laughter streaming down his face when his hero, George Jefferson shimmied into view on our television screen.

While my father knew that George Jefferson pulled politically incorrect strings, he also represented what every immigrant dreams of when he comes to America, to move on up and get a piece of the pie.

For us children that meant growing up in white neighborhoods and going to white schools, which sometimes caused resentment on our part. But back then, in the 1970s, when George Jefferson moved to the Upper East Side to get a taste of the good life, the best neighborhoods and schools were the white ones. As far as I know, Atlanta's black middle class hadn't yet blossomed. In fact, the black middle class in America was still not a pan reality. Long before Bill Cosby became a part of American life, there were few examples on television of blacks who had made it.

Hard to believe we have come so quickly from that reality to having a black president but here we are and The Jeffersons is, well, history.

My Black History Month: Dance Theatre of Harlem School

Dance was a huge part of my childhood and by the time I was 16, I was training up to six hours per day every day (plus weekends) to prepare for a professional ballet career. I didn't have a boyfriend in high school and I didn't go to parties. All I did was train, rehearse, or watch ballet movies.

My Haitian immigrant parents were very concerned about this preoccupation because "what kind of future is there in classical ballet?" They meant well. They had worked hard coming from Haiti and centered their lives around their children becoming successful Americans. That translated narrowly into a career in medicine, law or engineering.

Ballet was something to be appreciated. My father set aside trips to the theatre or museum on Sundays so we would be culturally literate. But to actually become a dancer, well, that upset my parents terribly and there were many fights with my parents about my future.

My father remained firm and discouraged all my ballet training. My mother tried to stick with my father but she also saw how serious and driven I was. Even after he forbade it, my mother drove me 200 miles away (from Maryland) to attend The Dance Theater of Harlem School, the first time I ever saw black ballerinas.

Arthur Mitchell, who was the first black dancer with The New York City Ballet, founded the school in an old garage the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. By the time I got to the school in 1987, the building had come a long way but the neighborhood was still rough around the edges with far too many opportunities for young kids to get into trouble. But in the midst of that Harlem neighborhood, black boys and girls learned discipline, poise, persistence and beauty through an art form that white choreographers insisted was not intended for black bodies.

When I went to Dance Theatre of Harlem, skinny, naive,young and hopeful, it was the first time that I remember feeling beautiful. I walked through Harlem with my head held high, my feet turned out and my chest lifted as if I were some kind of queen. I probably looked ridiculous. I remember my teacher at Dance Theatre of Harlem school telling us, "You are always a dancer, even when you leave this studio. That is something special."

So, to the founder of Dance Theatre of Harlem, Arthur Mitchell, and all the stunning black ballerinas whom I admired, I thank you and honor you today.

Photo: Bluediamond08