BLACK DISPIRITEDNESS: GLAMORIZATION OF THE BLACK MODEL/WHITE-COLONIZATION OF THE BLACK MIND
By Kofi Forson
In the upcoming February 2022 issue of British Vogue, photographer Rafael Pavorotti gathers a group of African models for the cover portrait.
The stark image of glamorous African women on the cover of British Vogue refrains from the normal acceleration of white beauty generated by the all-too familiar sight representing what is sold to the world as naturalness, or what essentially has been recognized through-out art history, cinema and yes, fashion, as to what the ultimate sense and characterization of beauty is:
tall and thin Caucasian woman with blond hair and blue eyes; be it she is curvaceous or brunette, her essence is in the skin's whiteness, pink formation; what the artist would highlight with the combination of titanium white and ocher.
Very important to note this past week the famed editor at large at Vogue Andre Leon Talley passed.
In a poem I wrote and later performed as a lead-in poem during the Great Weather for Media Ten Minute Feature, I made a request:
"Andre Leon Talley, pardon moi monsieur, introduce me to that country place of Von Herrs".
Andre Leon Talley, in the poem, is shown a regard for preeminence. The application of his knowing the appreciation for wealth and prosperity is heightened by my suggestion that he might know the Von Herrs; a name that would suggest affluence.
Once again the progress and ascension of a black person with an erudite manner must navigate a white-accelerated "scene".
Much the clever circumstance for Edward Enninful, British Vogue editor-in-chief, to allow for such a marking and detailing necessary for the furtherance of what must be recognized also as commercial beauty, and that is blackness and the African woman.
What is important here, more than just appreciation for black beauty, is the regard for Africanness and the female.
Perception here would be what is beauty in the African American woman and how has that been ushered into the world's conscience, and what is beauty in the African woman, with all the prejudices showed against the immigrant?
How then is this exceptional cover of British Vogue specifically curating an article on beauty, or does it become renowned in proclaiming outrightly what once was beautiful in its original form and has been historically canceled, can once again be claimed as beautiful, if not rendered eternal?
There's a contra-speculation that brings up the "elephant-in-the-room" concept of non-togetherness within the black diaspora.
Furthermore, it creates a supernova of complexities that highlights hatred, jealousy and absurdities in how we as black people interact or fail to render commonality within the black race.
States in America, more so neighborhoods, each has a representation of vernacular which differs from neighborhood to neighborhood.
Imagine the controversy of how people fight, disagree, communicate to "get along" or to protect the diversity of what makes black people unique.
Back to the assertion of black beauty, this British Vogue cover is a pronouncement not only of black beauty but a lesser regarded notion of how beauty is marketed to populations in Africa, which in essence calls to the Europeanization of the African woman; a post-colonial reality which pulls from the majesty of the Queen of England to the model Twiggy.
Black women as an image on the cover of British Vogue references the Afro-futurist movement, or the quiet call to Black awareness or "wokeness" in politics, culture and entertainment.
Remarkably, it is Enninful, a man with a Ghanaian heritage working as an editor-in-chief of British Vogue, who is seemingly in a perfect position to highlight beauty in the African woman.
Whereas the African American woman has graced the movie screen, cover of popular records and albums, theater stages, television, music videos and so much more, there is little conditioned knowledge of who the African woman is and what she looks like.
Certainly, actress Lupita Nyong'o has created a world-wide ambition for the grace and beauty of the African woman.
History will prove that the model Iman heralded into the conscience of the fashion world the uniqueness of the Somalian woman's physicality and moreover her attractiveness.
Alek Wek followed with a celebration and charm from a Sudanese woman.
Ghanaian women were definitive of my early upbringing on the notion of familial love as well as budding sexuality.
All these were evident in the establishment of home-life represented among the young women from the villages of Takoradi and Kumasi and elsewhere who were brought into the city to live with and help raise the children of middle to upper class families.
Such women were present when my parents lived in an urban neighborhood called the Nyaniba Estates, and helped to raise me and my younger brother.
It was a traditional family with a home, an outdoor space with plants that decorated the front of the house, a tree and a cesspool were positioned far off and a gate which kept everything enclosed. We had a dog named Hope who was later euthanized for being sick. I soon showed signs of fear of art and music.
On the wall in the living room was a painting of a Northern tribe called the Dagomba. In the painting they wore masks and raffia skirts, carried spears and appeared to be dancing. The colors within the painting were dazzling and brilliantly displayed.
I feared this painting. There was something horrific about it. Not sure what about the painting made me afraid but revelry, dancing especially while masked, and the sight of spears all added to the notion of terror which was later exemplified among the Kakamotobe, a bunch of men on stilts who sauntered into neighborhoods during the holiday season.
I also cried when I heard the song "A Rose in Spanish Harlem".
This was where I experienced my first Ghanaian maid.
Without much recollection, I have a vague memory of a plump fair-skinned woman who bathed me, clothed me, fed me and helped me go to sleep.
When my parents moved further into the city, in a neighborhood called the Airport Residential Flats, I was raised by a young dark-skinned woman named Akua.
She was in her late teens and usually bathed me. Unusually, she was also naked. She watched me while I splattered water all around me, and with soap and sponge, she washed me clean.
The image of Akua as a young, nude woman brings to mind paintings of bathers by Mary Cassatt.
I was alarmed by the darkness of Akua's skin, almost as dark as charcoal. With beads of water over her body and washed over as well with light reflecting over it, she appeared precious.
Akua often sat with me and showed me pictures from a book. Times when she was very playful with me and she brought joy out of me.
There were other maids. One in particular was more feminine and mature. Her name was Efua.
She had a dominant persona and was very mothering. Times when she joined in on the activities in the kitchen to make fufu. A coordinated process whereby she sat with a wooden pot before her while a gentleman stood up holding a long wooden stick. With an up and down motion the gentleman pounded cooked yams and plantains within the pot and systematically, Efua used her hand to turn the yams and plantains around in the pot, until they became firm and shapely.
Efua was stylish and displayed a sexual identity. Moments when she had affairs with the men in the neighborhood. One afternoon I caught her making love to a houseboy. In a room with mosquito netting guarding a window, she lay on a bed while the houseboy performed on her. Outside the window, I stood on a bookshelf and I could see everything. Days later, she got into a dispute with the man. Efua cried and cried and was visibly shaken with her eyes red with tears.
There was another called Abena, a tall skinny woman with dry burnt umber-colored skin. She was sarcastic and often told jokes. Despite her slim build and potential elegance, she wasn't very feminine. It wasn't until she was joined by another maid, Koko, a shy unassuming woman, who stood with her arms folded and kept her gaze looking downward. Together they discovered makeup and lipstick, and casually wore pretty dresses during the day. Koko was later to join me and my mother and brothers on our way to the United States to live in New York City with my father. Before then we lived in a house on my grandmother's compound. During this time I was overcome by a sexual charge which was inspired by the girls who lived in the building of the Airport residential Flats, girls at the Royal Preparatory where I attended classes and friends of my cousins who came to visit when we lived with my grandmother.
When I was living in New York City with my father and the rest of the family, Koko discovered drawings I had made of nude women taken from adult magazines. It was a strange time of sexual self-discovery. My mother promptly enrolled me in classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where I discovered the nude art figure. These nude portraits were different from the orgiastic visions of women in the adult magazines. Overall, they were also images of white women. Much like the girls I studied with at a Catholic grammar school, I felt a strange attraction.
I had been quietly having psychological issues such as anorexia. I also experienced a psychosis of losing my sense of blackness when I literally felt blackness being pulled away from my conscience. During this time I had a strong hatred for Koko since I felt she was interfering with my upbringing. It resulted in me refusing to look at certain images of black people on television. The white-colonization of my mind had begun, fueled mostly by the notion of a whitened art history and heavy metal and rock and roll music. I survived the early hip hop craze peripherally, as I lived it voyeuristically through cable television and my brothers.
Black women were a nonentity in my life since I spent four years studying at an all-boys Jesuit high-school. Only black women I encountered were my mother's African friends from work who came to visit her. One such visit was from a daughter of one of her friends. She had come to get fitted for a dress. I made it a mission to woo her. It took ten years of an off and on long distance relationship that eventually made her my lover. She later died of a brain aneurysm.
The hyper-intervention of my white-colonized mind came when I sought housing and ended up living in a group program for some of the most disturbed people living in New York City. The nine years spent living this dangerous life experience, I was monitored by mostly female counselors. Living with black men and getting counseled by black women were my first intimate and detailed encounters with mostly African American men and women. More or less baptism by fire, I was introduced to street culture with its dynamic of drugs and violence.
The black female counselors shaped my notion of the African American woman. Someone I had seen mostly in hip hop videos, urban soul and crime movies or haphazardly met in passing on the streets.
I lived this reality of a reinstitution of the black female identity within my conscience and embracing of the black female as an added attraction to my masculinity as a black body.
Point of survival was knowing that I, too, was damaged, albeit as a matter of psychology due to racial transformation, and as a black body, there was no need to pretend.
As a sheep among wolves, I enabled a visibility of what it meant to be black; the awareness of history, both personal and cultural; vulnerability, acceptance of this as a weakness as well as a sign of strength; how to build on survival tactics particular to one's unique identity.
The counselors in this regard were less mothering as the maids. The counselors were more detailed in the psycho-social attempt to help me garner a sense of positive living and more so a healthy livelihood.
The black women at once glamorous on the cover of a magazine brought me back to the discipline of the love I had for black women. How the danger of a supremacist culture can damage the mind.
What it takes to recover a sense of blackness.
Realizing, once damaged from a system where the black conscience is altered from aggressive processing of white images, there's no-entry-way back to normalcy.
The world turns as the mind bends.
