This past month I’ve been looking back at my personal relationship with documenting and celebrating Black History. For me, it began with talking to elders in my family and community and this conversation continues to drive my work as an artist. It will also be one of the highlights of my solo exhibition which opens on May 19th at Queens Museum inshallah.
It was my 5th grade teacher who I lovingly call Aunty Barbara, who taught genealogy to me and all of her students in our 99.9% Black, mostly Afro-Caribbean-American public school in Brooklyn. To fulfill her assignments, I began talking to the elders in my family and documenting the stories they conveyed to me. Through this process, I gained insight into the untold stories of Black History with a more detailed picture of the Black experience in the time and places where my family’s elders and ancestors lived. It also made me curious about the community that I grew up in, and it’s no surprise that with As The Veil Turns, I photographed and preserved the oral histories of elder women in my historic mosque community in Brooklyn.
Though looking at Black History through a wide angle lens is important, in order for this history to give us a better understanding of who we are, we need to get closer to it.
So, how do we get closer?:
- Talk to our family members and listen to elders in our communities. Document their stories.
- Enrich the narrative of Black History by contributing our own stories.
- Make space in our homes for art that helps us tell more nuanced stories about the Black experience so we can share it with others and be reminded of it every day.
I got closer to Black History – its heroes and specific moments, when I photographed and interviewed Sister Alberta for As The Veil Turns. She was one of the oldest women at Masjid Abdul Muhsi Khalifa and I knew that Sister Alberta had been attending our mosque since Malcolm X had established it in 1959.
In our interview, Sister Alberta told me that she had escaped sharecropping in South Carolina by stealing away in the middle of the night in a rescue effort planned by family members from up north who supported her desire to leave the American post-slavery institution that kept Black people like her family bound to their ancestors’ former slave masters.
Relieved and excited to have left the south, she just knew that would never have to see Black men hanging from trees again. But even as she sat in a Harlem temple, listening to Minister Malcolm X speak to her powerful words of Black pride, hope, and God’s promise – there they were.
This time, instead of running, she was lifted off of her feet.
Now you’re talking to me!
Listen to an excerpt from Sister Alberta’s As the Veil Turns interview here.