Global Journal of Hip Hop Culture | Volume 7, Issue 2: Street Lit

STREET LIT

VOLUME 7 ISSUE No. 2

Staff

Dwayne Matthews Bennie Herron Jose Dominguez Tony Keith Don-nisha Johnson Naima Costello Saafir Rabb Simone Baskerville Timothy Anne Burnside Lisa Li

Executive Director Mazi Mutafa Editor Dennis L. Winston Associate Editors Alan King Alis Sandosharaj Art & Culture Editors Rodney “BUCK!” Herring Contributing and Advisory Editors Simone Jacobson Marcus Moody Yancy Burns Copy Editor Danielle Reed Art Direction/Graphic Designer Rodney “BUCK!” Herring, Mosi Design

Peer Reviewers

Bryce Henson University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign Chris Brown Minnesota St. University, Mankato Antonio Cuyler FSU, Tallahassee Thomas Sayers Ellis Blue Flower Arts Murray Forman Northeastern University, Boston Akil Houston Ohio University, Athens Mary Sies University of Maryland, College Park Katina Stapleton Institute of Education Sciences, WDC Nancy L. Struna University of Maryland, College ParkJeffrey McCune Washington University, St. Louis Mindy Chateauvert University of Maryland, College Park Joseph Richardson University of Maryland, College Park Odis Johnson Washington University, St. Louis P. Khalil Saucier Rhode Island College, Providence Rob Chester University of Maryland, College Park Tammy Henderson University of Md, College Park Alyssa Todaro Brooks National Institutes of Health

Clinical Center Andre L. Smith Howard University School of Law Alana C. Hackshaw University of Md, College Park

Publishing

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Words Beats & Life: The Global Journal of Hip-Hop Culture (WBLJ) Volume 7, Number 1 Copyright 2019 by Dennis L. Winston

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CONTENT Special Editor:

Keenan Norris 6 Introduction

by Keenan Norris

10 Once Upon A Street Lit Timeline

by Tatiana Diaz

13 Always Been a Hustler:

Legacies of Hip Hop and Urban Fiction: An Interview with Omar Tyree

19 The Bookseller: An Interview

with Oakland Noir Editor and Bookseller Jerry Thompson Scholarly Essays On Holloway House, Iceberg Slim, Sister Souljah And Hip-Hop Feminism

25 Binding and Pressing The Black

Experience: Holloway House Press and the Making of “Black Experience Books”

by Zachary Manditch-Prottas

35 Battling Black Womanhood in Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever: Extending Black Feminism through Hip-Hop Literature

by Leah Wilson

45 Literature Brave Enough to

Fuck with the Grays: Hip Hop Feminism and Street Lit

by Jacinta Saffold

53 Coming Home: Ice Mike After

Incarceration, Aya De Leon On Women In Street Lit, Roger Porter On Writing Oakland In The Midst Of Gentrification

54 Deeply Rooted:

Books of Revelation: An interview with Ice Mike

58 Street Lit Laureate: An Interview with Aya de Leon

67 The Souls of Displaced Folk:

Oakland Novelist Roger Porter Reflects on His City’s Soul

by Roger Porter

69 Street Lit In Education: Crowded Classrooms And Ivory Towers

70 California’s Classroom Crisis and

a New Path to Literacy for Black Boys

by Khalid White

74 “Lessons Learned, Degrees

Earned: Street Lit, Black Bodies, and the Contemporary Academic Classroom”

by Kemeshia Randle

76 Radical Eruptions of Desire

by Jerry Ward, Jr.

GUMBO: INTERNATIONAL CONTEXTS, SPOKEN TEXTS,

CONTENT 87 Home In, Turn the Party Outby Umi Vaughan

92 Spoken Word Is(n’t) Lit?: An

Interview with Marc-Bamuthi Joseph

97 Nickel, Dime Courthouse

(text by Raphael Cohen, photos by Ed Ntiri)

102 The Ghost Ship Tragedy:

Thoughts on Art and Gentrification from the Bay Area to Brooklyn

by Mario Hernandez (photos by Ed Ntiri)

118 Notes/References

INTRO

By Keenan Norris

Ice Mike was imprisoned for twenty-seven

contrasts of our modern life, its worst and

for this journal, he’d only been free for six

and here the fetid streets whose festering

years. At the time that I interviewed him

months yet he had written ten books while

incarcerated and had already published the entire Deeply Rooted trilogy. Ice Mike’s journey as a black man struggling

against squalid conditions and structural oppressions and ending up on the wrong

side of the law before finding redemption

in writing is archetypal to the street lit genre as it now exists.

But street lit’s origins are elsewhere.

Street lit reaches back to the nineteenth

century, when European authors began to chronicle the social impacts of the Industrial

Revolution on the masses trapped in

poverty in the slums of London and Paris.

The novels of social protest of Charles Dickens and Emile Zola presaged a genre

of literature that would cross the ocean and

by the late 1800s bear witness to the vast poverty of America’s cities. Nowhere was America’s urban blight more obvious than

in New York City, the financial and cultural

center of the United States. With the waves of impoverished, marginalized immigrants from Southern Europe, New York had

in effect become two cities: One for the wealthy, the other for the ethnic poor. “The

city,” the reverend Lymon Abbot wrote in 1891, “presents in microcosm all the

best aspects. Here are the broad avenues, filth pollutes the atmosphere. Here, palaces, on which self-extravagance has lavished

every artifice for luxury and display. And

here, tenements, where, in defiance of every law, moral and sanitary, men, women, and

children are crowded together like maggots in a cheese.”

Stephen Crane’s 1893 novella Maggie:

A Girl of the Streets is recognized as one

of the earliest examples of American social protest literature. The novel focuses on the life of a young Irish-American woman who

is ground down by the poverty, dysfunction, alcoholism and illness in her family and

neighborhood until she eventually resorts to

prostitution. Maggie’s

tragedy

was

emblematic of how not merely the other

half, to use journalist Jacob Riis’s term, but about three-quarters of New York City’s population was living at the turn of the century. Riis’s famed work How the Other

Half Lives, published in 1895, literally brought the situation to light with the

groundbreaking use of flash photography to display the grim tenement conditions

of New York City’s underserved. Indeed, the denunciation of African-Americans and Latino immigrants living in America’s ghettos

that has decisively marked the political 5

INTRO

rhetoric of the past four decades appears

experience, the prisons, the ghettos, the

swaths of white poverty that characterized

especially ironic in context of the vast American urban life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Theodore Dreiser, Upton

Sinclair and others would document that crisis in gritty literary terms.

The Great Migration would begin

in the 1910s, bringing scores of African-

Americans from the American South to

the Northern slums. Over the following six decades, fully six million black folks

would come North, replacing the European ethnics

who

steadily

assimilated

into

America’s white majority and left the cities for surrounding suburbs. As America’s

cities became blacker, so did the literature of its cities. The noir crime writing genre

that white writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler popularized in the 1920s and 30s would become a medium

of Chester Himes. Himes had, ironically, moved to Europe in the years after WWII and gave up the writing of social protest

literature to write the detective novels that would inspire the blaxploitation film genre two decades later. A Rage in Harlem, Cotton

Comes to Harlem, For Love of Imabelle and the rest would all take Harlem as their fictive home. Himes successfully invested the noir genre with the particularities of the

black street experience. With time, street lit has come to seem almost a sub-genre of

African-American literature itself, which is quite the achievement for a class of writing that’s major touchstones have been written

by writers who have come to the genre from the despised quarters of the American 6

activist circles.

In the 1960s, as the Black Arts Movement

re-figured black artists not as adjuncts to

canonized white writers, musicians, painters, sculptors and dancers, but rather as the

keepers and developers of their own canon fully equal with any other, writers of even

the lowest, most marginalized black social

classes finally found the audience they had

always deserved. Gangsters, pimps, ex-cons and drug addicts now told their stories raw

and uncut: Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim and Claude Brown all penned what would become iconic hardcore tales of America’s ghetto

streets

and

prisons.

Zachary

Manditch-Prottas’s essay on the history of Holloway House provides a detailed examination of one of the major institutions

that brought the black street literature of the 1960s and 70s to prominence.

At the same time as these street

narrativists were achieving critical mass, Malcolm

X’s

autobiography

posthumously (The

published

Autobiography

of

Malcolm X, co-written with Alex Haley) made the rounds on college campuses and prison cells across the country. Malcolm’s story of

orphanhood, drug addiction, gangsterism, prison and religious, political and psychic redemption would serve to show just what

brilliance the best of America’s have-nots, incarcerated, neglected, broken, contained.

The book would become, in its narrative

arc from Malcolm’s criminal exploits and

incarceration to his successive redemptions religious and political, the template for the

reformed gangster turned enlightened

spokesperson. Rappers from Rakim to Ice

black ghetto narrative as any book penned

and Nipsey Hussle would use the rough

Wilson’s critical essay about the novel’s

Cube, Nas and Tupac to Kendrick Lamar coordinates of this archetypal story to tell

their own stories through hip-hop. In this volume, Jacinta Saffold’s critical essay examining the linkages between hip-hop

feminism and street lit, Umi Vaughan’s

musicological analysis of the oricha/MC/

selecta’ figure in black diaspora music and

Ed Ntiri and Raphael Cohen’s hybrid art all speak to the deep connection between street lit and hip-hop.

In the 1990s, as hip-hop became a

global, billion-dollar industry, the street lit genre would re-emerge. Omar Tyree’s debut book Capital City, published in

1993, would inaugurate a new era for street narrativists. Tyree would, of course, go on to

bestselling fame, elevating the genre with

his rise. Saffold’s interview with the ever-

quotable Tyree is one of this journal’s true highlights.

In Tyree’s wake would emerge many other

writers, but this time rather than a mostly male experience (as had been the locus of

hardcore street stories in the past), the most popular street lit novels and memoirs of

the 90s and 2000s would often be penned

by women. Sapphire (push, adapted for

the screen as the award-winning Precious), Cupcake Brown (A Piece of Cake), and most famously the New York-based activist Sister

Souljah would all make their mark on the

genre. Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, published in 1999, has, in the intervening two decades, become as fully associated

in black popular culture with the archetypal

by Donald Goines or Iceberg Slim. Leah

mosaic representation of black femininities stands

alongside

Kemeshia

Randle’s

examination of A Piece of Cake’s troubled relationship to academia in these pages.

As the 2010s come to a close and

gentrification American,

racially

displacing

re-maps

urban

African-Americans

from city centers to suburbs and to the South from whence we came, street lit has been conspicuous both for the ways the genre has evolved and how it hasn’t. In these pages, Roger Porter, the author of

The Souls of Hood Folk, contemplates how

his art might have to change once there’s a

Starbucks on every corner in East Oakland, Barbecue Beckys are sprouting rabbit ears

and calling the cops every five seconds. By

contrast, some street lit seems unconcerned

with these geographic and demographic

shifts: The No Limit novel series, for example, is less interested urban America’s whitewashing and continues to crank out

assembly-line crime fiction that fits inside the conventional street lit genre.

Meanwhile, Omar Tyree, the self-proclaimed

progenitor of street lit in its modern iteration, in 2007 announced his retirement from the genre with an open letter published

online. Then came The Last Street Novel, a meta-narrative about a hapless romance novelist whose attempt to take up a street

lit style suffused in illegal activities and toxic masculinity ends in disaster. And Aya de Leon’s 2016 Uptown Thief dramatizes the hustle of a woman who has seemingly 7

INTRO

escaped a life of prostitution and opened a

shelter for women in the same predicament.

But the shelter is a front for Marisol’s work as a madame, which is itself complicated by the altruism and feminism that are at the heart

of Marisol’s criminal enterprise. de Leon, Daniel Serrano and many other Afro-Latin

writers have diversified the street lit genre, bringing to the fore the lives and voices of

Latinos and Afro-Latinos. Our interview with de Leon goes in-depth into her career as a

spoken word poet/performer and street lit novelist.

Street lit’s status as pulp fiction has

probably forever marked it. Thought-pieces

by Black Arts Movement icon Jerry Ward, Jr. and filmmaker/scholar Khalid White

contemplate street lit’s status outside the academic mainstream and its positive impact

on young, socially disenfranchised readers.

While it is difficult to imagine the genre ever

receiving much mainstream critical acclaim, that was never the goal of these books. They

are not written for a graduate school seminar readership. Street lit has always delved the

desolation of urban America. It is of and for the streets, period, point-blank. Street lit is our most sustained artistic examination of

America’s system of mass incarceration.

It remains the voice of the prisoner, the

hustler, the pimp, the prostitute and all those in search of their personal redemption from

the American underworld.— Keenan Norris, Spring 2019

8

Keenan Norris’ novel Brother and the Dancer won the 2012 James D. Houston Award. He is the editor of the 2013 critical volume

Street Lit: Representing the Urban Landscape. His story collection by the lemon tree was published in 2018. He published “Post-Mortem Morning: Oakland and the Remains of the Left” and “Ben Carson, Thug Life and Malcolm X” in the Los Angeles Review of Books and has authored scholarly articles in PostSoul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights and Boom: A Journal of California. His short fiction appears in several literary journals, as well as the anthologies Oakland Noir, Inlandia: A Journey Through the Literature of Southern California’s Inland Empire as well as the upcoming anthology of San Bernardino literature.

by Joelius Dubois

ALWAYS BEEN A HUSTLER:

LEGACIES OF HIP HOP AND URBAN FICTION WITH OMAR TYREE

By Jacinta Saffold

Saffold: Hey Omar, thank you for speaking

success,

fiction novelist. I want to talk to you about

in Washington, D.C. gave me the contact

with me about your career as an urban

the Hip Hop cultural landscape and the book publishing industry.

Tyree: Yup, Omar Tyree. I am glad to be here sister.

Saffold: Alright, first can you to walk me

through the process of publishing your first

novel. Did you take a similar approach with Flyy Girl?

Tyree: Right. Well, I’m an Aries and I was born and raised in Philadelphia. I’ve always

been a hustler, who finds ways to make

things happen—make his own money.

When I came out with my first three books

Colored, on White Campus, Capital City, and Flyy Girl, I was trying to get published

by a major press but I was like 21 or 22 years

old at the time. The majors were not thinking about publishing a person that young back then. It was the early 1990s, so there

wasn’t much black popular fiction being published. And then Terry McMillan made

a big breakthrough with her books, Mama, Disappearing Acts, and Waiting to Exhale.

Her success propelled new opportunities for the people who came behind her.

Around the time of Terry McMillan’s

I

published

College

Boy

independently because another author

number for a printer. I paid to have College Boy edited by some Howard University

classmates. I had a cover designed and

put it all together. I begged for money

from family and friends to get College

Boy printed. It was October the 6th, 1992 when it first came out. I immediately started

selling books to family members, friends, and at book expo events. Then I followed

up with Flyy Girl in April of 1993 (which was the second book, a lot of people think it was

the first). I took the same approach with Flyy Girl. I got money from friends and family

members who believed in what I was doing.

I paid them all back for it in the end. And

from that point on, I was selling books like

hotcakes. And I have not looked back since.

Saffold: That is such a beautiful story, thank

you for sharing. Do you see connections

between Hip Hop culture, your early novels, and how you came to publish them?

Tyree: Well, yeah. I mean, Hip Hop—we just

called it rap music when I was coming up—

that word “Hip Hop” wasn’t even there yet.

And with that being the case, it was a part of

our culture. So, if I was going to write about

THE BOOKSELLER:

AN INTERVIEW WITH OAKLAND NOIR EDITOR AND BOOKSELLER JERRY THOMPSON Jerry Thompson: The Alexander Book

think I have this amazing hustle because I

I literally walked in and said I will work for

over again. I have friends who turn up that

Company was opening up down the street. free, and I did for nearly two months. I wanted to be around books. Nothing else mattered. That really began the journey of

harvesting and nurturing and celebrating African American writing, the Black writer

boom that came out late 80s and 90s: E. Lynn Harris, Lisa Jones, Trey Ellis, everybody

came through. It was just a wonderful time.

I’ve been in the book business ever since.

I stayed at Alexander Book Company

for eight or nine years and then I left there, opened my own book store in Vallejo, California, to pay homage to my favorite writer, Henry Miller. It was called Black

Spring Books. I bought a house there. I was gonna end my days in Vallejo, with my

book store. But then, before buying a gun, figuratively, I had to get the fuck out of town

and I moved back and I closed my store and Barnes and Noble hired me over the

phone. Barnes and Noble was fantastic— they said bring everything that you created

over there: I had this series called the Sister

Circle. That followed me. I have friends who

get to have the same job over and over and be like, ‘Oh my god—motherfucker, you’re here now, you still doing what you love?’

Keenan Norris: What brought you to conceiving of and being an editor for Oakland Noir?

Jerry Thompson: I like to do a whole blueprint for the entire year. I would book

out events three or four months in advance.

That being said, the Akashic series always

intrigued me because there are all these

cities that have already been published, um, and I find it fascinating: the idea that

these are mysteries, they’re crime stories, not psychotic, sexual crimes per se, but

just fun mysteries and gangsters, but good guys doing bad things. I assumed Oakland was already on there. I combed through

the list of maybe eighty of them there. It wasn’t there. I said, ‘Well, wow—I wonder

what it would take, who, who gets to be the person—.’

Nick was sitting in his office and we’d

chitchat about authors and people and books and things all the time. I asked him 19

what it would take—what has to be in place

them. He was right there with me. Wicked

began to coach me through the process. He

a co-editor and Eddie was the superstar

for this to happen? After he got in my ear, he sent me an email on Christmas day, during

our holiday: ‘Hey. Have a good holiday, Jerry.’ Personal. Johnny Temple reached out.’ We were connected. So, he took me

under his wing basically, and he said, ‘Send me what you would see if you could have

your dream list of authors that you want and the neighborhoods that you think they should write about.’

I went through my phone book and I

sent him the list and some people fell off

the list and we’d shift some things around

and then we had to pitch it to move further.

One day I—we, we were kinda just stalled and another whole season went by and

we weren’t doing too much and, and then I leaned in again and I basically sent him an email—as if he was sitting in front of me—I

told him exactly how I saw the book flow:

that Eddie Muller and I were sitting in our

front seat of this low rider perhaps, we were gonna get some greasy food at Esther’s Orbit Room. Phew, we were gonna get

in our car, we were gonna spend a day in

Oakland for these stories. We’re gonna ride

out to San Pablo, shoot over down by Lake Merritt, and pop on over to International

Blvd. Each spot was gonna be another story.

People were gonna lose their minds. We

were gonna hang out in Oakland and end up somewhere in Alameda, throwing some bodies off as we went.

It wasn’t just like plopping down some

stories. No—we, we were gonna create

a continuity, a thread, and that excited 20

support. Then Eddie came on and I needed here— [he had] already been published with

Akashic. Like, wow, thank you so much for allowing this underdog to take a path, take

a walk with you. And it wasn’t just me going

on this journey—that was the beautiful thing about it.

Keenan Norris: Noir—when you think of Noir, what kind of definition or what kind of

story pops in your head? When you think of

street lit, what kind of story pops into your head? What do you see as the similarity or the difference between the two?

Jerry Thompson: Street lit, I always defer to Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, Chester

Himes, even. Chester Himes last. Chester Himes is more so with Noir.

Keenan Norris: So that’s where I think you get the crossover.

I dig that. It’s the rawness of it. In street lit, of course, the street becomes a character, so I think that’s the most unique and underrated part about street lit.

Jerry Thompson: Oh yes. It’s a curve. I’m

leaning out—put my hand to the window

and I’m turning down into the cul de sac.

The phenomenal story of Iceberg Slim. He began to tell those stories. It’s based on

some truth. It’s gritty and it’s raw and it’s maybe not as well-written from a literary

by John Ortiz

BINDING AND PRESSING THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: HOLLOWAY HOUSE PRESS AND THE MAKING OF “BLACK EXPERIENCE BOOKS”

by Zachary Manditch-Prottas

Before the former pimp turned best-selling

press was far and away the most dedicated

Iceberg Slim, passed away in a southern

However, one should always be wary

writer Robert Beck, popularly known as Los Angeles hospital amid the 1992

Los Angeles uprisings, he left express instructions to his daughter to never let

Holloway House Publishing access his unpublished writing. Much had changed

and much had not, since his explosion onto

the American cultural scene in 1967 amid the still unsettled embers of the Watts rebellions. Beck’s rise as an author was

forged on the unsteady terrain of pages

printed by Holloway House, the publisher that served as an unlikely innovator of black

popular paperbacks. The grand historical

mapping of national literary publishing gives

marginal,

occasionally

touted

as “specialized,” consideration to the heritage of black popular fiction. Despite questionable motives, by the late 1960’s

Holloway House Press was the center of this cultural margin. Unrecognized by

mainstream publishing, in less than a

decade of existence the small Los Angeles

publisher of popular black urban literature. in assuming pioneers to necessarily be altruistic. Like the twisting narratives of the

shrewd anti-heroes that they published, the tale of Holloway House Press is one of intertwining exploitations and innovations.

The

story

of

Holloway

House

oscillates between seemingly bifurcated

themes: authoritarian publishing and selfdetermined authorship. In the 1960s major

publishing houses were racial fortresses

that only few black authors managed to scale (indeed, they still are). Of course, there is a heritage of African American

authors that preceded and coincided with Holloway’s offerings. Authors such

as Ann Petry, Richard Wright, Chester

Himes, Malcolm X and Claude Brown

found mainstream acclaim writing about black urban experiences. Yet novels like

Native Son or memoirs like Manchild in the Promised Land were aberrant. An

annual “black book” seemingly sufficed for 25

BATTLING BLACK WOMANHOOD IN SISTER SOULJAH’S THE COLDEST WINTER EVER: EXTENDING BLACK FEMINISM THROUGH HIP-HOP LITERATURE

by Leah E. Wilson

Sister Souljah’s first novel, The Coldest Winter

such as bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins

of Black women’s self-empowerment to a

Blackness, womanhood, and community,

Ever (1999), extends the raptivist’s message

wider, mainstream audience and helped

establish the “hip-hop lit” genre. Souljah, a popular MC and writer, has been a

prominent figure in politics and culture since her emergence as Minister of Information

for the hip-hop group Public Enemy and

her controversial argument with former U.S. president Bill Clinton (Philips, 1992). In The

Coldest Winter Ever, Souljah exposes how

materialism and individualism ravage urban African American communities through

the story of Winter Santiaga, the daughter

of a Brooklyn drug king. Once police jail her father and her family dissolves, Winter seeks men and money to reclaim her own

fortune and status, which eventually leads

to her own arrest and downfall (Souljah, 1999). The author highlights that African

American women’s demise precipitates the dissolution of their communities. I argue that she offers feminist approaches that draw from prominent Black feminists

and moves past victimization to celebrate creating what Joan Morgan (2000) labels “hip hop feminism.”

Looping diverse visions of womanhood

throughout her novel, Souljah wrecks controlling images of African American women by showing how differing female identities, such as the community-driven

character of Sister Souljah (who appears

as herself in the text) and Winter’s “Bitch” persona,

cypher around one another.

Featuring a collage of women’s lives in her text, Souljah’s work demonstrates a feminist

consciousness that becomes hip-hop in its celebration of the complex, individual

lives of women, that, like hip-hop, shares, as Morgan (2006) states, “the voice of

people who have not had a voice” (Chang, p. 238). The development of a hip-hop

feminism becomes a tool that combats the self-destruction and violence that decimate African

American

women

and

their

neighborhoods. Thus, Souljah employs her 35

LITERATURE BRAVE ENOUGH TO FUCK WITH THE GRAYS: HIP HOP FEMINISM AND STREET LIT

By Jacinta Saffold

As the generation of black and brown youth

Such language and theories found a home

1984 reflected on the social, economic, and

Street Lit novelists, some of whom were

in the United States born between 1964 and cultural shifts of the 1980s and 1990s, their hurt, anger, jubilation, pleasure, and pain found expression through creative outlets

collectively known as Hip Hop. In addition

to break dancing, graffiti, DJing, and MCing, the Hip Hop generation took up paper and

pen to immortalize the conflicting duality

of grit and glam on concrete cityscapes in America through African American urban

fiction, known as Street Lit. Concurrently, black women scholars like Patricia Hill

Collins, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde were calling

for

the

empowerment,

sexual

liberation, and pluralistic re-visioning of

black women within Feminist frameworks.

Hip Hop and Black Feminism, oppositional as they may be, were inextricably entangled

with the Hip Hop generation’s quest for selfexpression. Turn of the twenty-first century black cultural theory necessitated dynamic

language and fluid theories to articulate the

power of combining Hip Hop and Feminism.

in Street Lit.

previously drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, gangsters, and incarcerated persons used

print to register their individual experiences

with poverty, crime, and violence on a

shifting urban terrain. Street Lit grappled with subjects that often overlapped with women of color Feminisms and Hip Hop

culture, including the pressures of selfexpression, sex, sexual trauma, and urbanity within black girlhood. In Omar Tyree’s novel, Flyy Girl, cyclical sexual violence and

black heteronormative gender dynamics are called into question through a mother-

daughter relationship, while G-Spot by Noire traverses black female sexual maturation

through money and men. These and similar Street Lit novels demonstrate how

discourses in Hip Hop and Black Feminism lead to productive understandings of black popular culture.

Placing Hip Hop in conversation with

iterations of Black Feminism has created 45

Literature Brave Enough To Fuck With The Grays: Hip Hop Feminism And Street Lit

sub-cultural spaces where the code of ethics

narratives of human experience. For the

womanhood shift dramatically. Hip Hop

of Street Lit to be fully comprehended, the

for understanding blackness, urbanity, and Feminism allows for the candid and often

politically incorrect stylings of rap music, Street Lit, urban independent films, and other cultural expressions from the 1990s

and early 2000s to be celebrated for their educational and aesthetic value while being

critiqued for their misogyny, sexism, and

patriarchy. Hip Hop Feminism encourages

real and relevant conversations concerning

the problematic aspects of contemporary urban youth culture, without denigrating the

art, the people who created, or the people who love it (Pough).

Hip Hop Feminism does not deal in

absolutes, but instead pieces seemingly oppositional

experiential

standpoints

together in a melodic manner. Hip Hop

Feminists are able to achieve personal

reconciliation between the sexism in Hip-

Hop and their quest for a more just and gender inclusive society. According to Joan

Morgan, Hip Hop Feminism does not let the

tensions between Hip-Hop and Feminism overpower the productivity of the pairing

because, such a “Feminism simply refuses to give sexism or racism that much power” (Morgan 60). Further, adding Street Lit to

the coupling of Hip Hop and Feminism highlights the utility of the pairing while elevating the genre in academic and cultural discourses.

Street Lit, like Hip Hop, was charged

with being misogynistic, patriarchal, crass,

and embarrassing (Chiles). Nevertheless, Street Lit endeavored to tell dramatic fictive 46

Feminist, cultural, and academic benefits

genre needed a framework strong enough to work through cultural incongruences. In short, Street Lit (like Joan Morgan argues

that Hip Hop) needed “A feminism brave

enough to fuck with the grays” (Morgan 59).

A kind of Feminism that is brave enough to fuck with the grays makes allowances for the anti-feminist pitfalls of Street Lit while exploring the rich Feminist possibilities of the same.

Street Lit novels interrogate hetero-

normative partnerships from the vantage of black girls and women. Men characters

are typically primary wage earners, macho protectors, highly competitive with other males, and dominant in the lives of the

women around them. Alternatively, women

in Street Lit novels are usually submissive, beautiful,

materialistic,

passive-aggressively

disloyal,

combative

and

towards

other women. Within these roles, authors

are able to tell allegories of dysfunction

concerning love, parenting, and friendship.

Generally, the gender expectations in Street Lit cause breakdowns in kinship and friendship circles. The expectations are often hyperbolic and intended to spark

lively and honest conversations about urban

living, real and imagined among readers.

Feminism can be of tremendous value in

trying to fully comprehend the magnitude of these gender roles and, by extension, the

diminishing kinship ties in fictional and real communities of color (Kelley).

In

Omar

Tyree’s

Flyy

Girl

the

Deeply Rooted: Books Of Revelation Interview With Ice Mike

DEEPLY ROOTED:

BOOKS OF REVELATION INTERVIEW WITH ICE MIKE Keenan Norris: Ice Mike, tell me about your

over the head with it. I wanted them to get it

Ice Mike: Currently, I have three books in

and be able to appreciate the storyline,

work, brother.

publication called Deeply Rooted, parts

one, two and three. And I have another

book coming out in about another week

or so called Golden State Heavyweights.

These books are urban fiction/street lit. It’s something I’ve been very passionate about

from a young age. I think I was thirteen years old when my mom, she bought me a book

by Iceberg Slim and that was the first book I ever read in my life. That was my introduction

into the literary world. And I think that seed that was planted—that was in like 1982... It

started up into something and I didn’t really realize what it was up until like 2010, when I started writing books.

I just wanted to write a bomb-ass story,

but a story that has a potential to touch on

deeply rooted issues in the urban, in the African American community. Things like

the absence… and the negative effects of growing up without a father. And this

newly-shifted mindset of the thug mentality.

You know, that it’s okay to be a thug and a

gangster and all of that, to the point where as a community we’re starting to become

desensitized to violence and trauma. I

wanted to write about it, but not beat people 54

and read the story, get involved in the story, but also, subliminally, plant these seeds throughout the course of the story about

all of these different issues that I feel are

impacting the African American community.

The fourth book will be out later this year.

Deeply Rooted, part 4—it’ll probably be the

final book to this series. I didn’t wanna go

much further than four books because I wanted to be able to touch on other things in other stories. I have a lot of stories in my head that I feel like need to be written and published and presented to the world.

My

other

book,

Golden

State

Heavyweights, is basically the story of a

brother who’s like super ambitious, but he had a criminal mind that’s based off his

history as a child. And he decided that he

wants to build an all-Black criminal empire in California. It’s a recreational type of read for people’s entertainment.

… I’ll [also] be releasing a book of poetry in the next year or so. I’ve suffered a lot of

trauma in my life, so I had a lot of things going

on inside of me that had to come out, that

needed to come out, in a different manner, because before they were coming out in a

violent manner, a destructive manner, and I

by Joelius Dubois

Street Lit Laureate: An Interview with Aya de Leon

STREET LIT LAUREATE:

AN INTERVIEW WITH AYA DE LEON

KN: When I first moved to the Bay Area, I

for a number of years and having a theater

you’re a novelist: You’ve published Uptown

learned of you as a spoken word artist. Now, Thief and The Boss.

Aya De Leon: Every artist’s journey has twists

and turns. One of the things that’s been funny about the twists and turns of my journey is—

there have been things that I’ve almost been

running away from and then there are these

other things that I’ve sort of stumbled into.

In my twenties, I was already a novelist. I

had ideas for novels. I was working on them.

And I’m a pretty extroverted person, so the

process of having to sit still long enough to write a novel—I just didn’t have the attention span in my twenties.

I had a history as a performer in middle

school and high school. I was very, very

strong in theater. As a Black woman, it was

clear between Broadway and Hollywood, that there was no love there, particularly

back in the day. It’s gotten a little bit better.

But that just didn’t seem like a place that I was

gonna wanna go. So, I started focusing on

the writing, but then I found myself literally sort of stumbling into these spoken word

scenes. And I started writing short prose pieces. And I started writing poems. And then I stumbled completely into slam, and I slammed. And, you know, the combination of having taken my writing very seriously 58

background, I was able to be successful.

I had developed a skill set that came

together and worked well there. Sarah

Jones and Will Power came to the Bay. Theater Artaud in San Francisco presented an evening where they each did excerpts

of their work and it was the first time I had

ever seen hip hop and theater together.

You know, there’s a range of what hip hop

theater is. I looked at that and I was like, ‘Oh, no—I’m never doing that. No, that look, that looks like too much work. No, no, no!’

And yet, really quite unconsciously, I was developing a show.

So, I found myself writing these short

slam pieces about hip hop and lo and

behold, at some point, it occurred to me, like:

I have five pieces; I’m writing a show. And so, I accepted my fate and I totally stumbled—I

mean I was completely unprepared to

engage in theater. I had nothing. I had no

director. I had no plan. I had no funding. I

had nothing. But, you know, I managed.

Using what I had figured out as a spoken word artist and just different connections

that I had, I made a show, Thieves in the Temple: The Reclaiming of Hip Hop, which was really wonderful for me… It was the first time that I developed a full-length work.

It was great to get to be in hip hop. The

THE SOULS OF DISPLACED FOLK:

OAKLAND NOVELIST ROGER PORTER REFLECTS ON HIS CITY’S SOUL

by Roger Porter

The Souls of Hood Folk was published

my neighborhood as somewhere where

writer from the San Francisco Chronicle.

humanize my hood. Just like W.E.B. Dubois

five years after I had a conversation with a This conversation took place while I was

an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. The reporter was doing research on an article

that he was going to write concerning

racism on campus and had reached out to me to have a sit down and discuss that

particular topic. I spoke to him about how difficult of an adjustment it was to come

from a culturally rich, predominantly black community, only to be tokenized as one of

the few blacks majoring in English at Cal. He

asked me where I grew up. I told him Deep

East Oakland, not far from Eastmont Mall.

He looked at me quizzically and said “Really.

That’s where we go to cover murders.”

His

response

wasn’t

altogether

shocking to me because I knew my part of

town was known as the killing fields. The Oakland Tribune (now defunct) used that moniker often when speaking of the area

roughly between 73rd Avenue and the San

Leandro border, but when that grizzled 40 something year old white journalist made

that statement I took it as a challenge.

In my head, I was like “Fam you are not

going to oversimplify and ultimate dismiss

people get shot—the end.” I needed to

had humanized African-Americans when he

wrote The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. The Souls of Hood Folk was published one year

after I received my MFA from Mills College in 2010.

I was yearning to make the people that

I had gone to school with, played football with, fallen in love with, and had fist fights with, fully realized and three dimensional

in the eyes of my readers. It was important to me to be able to immortalize Deep East

Oakland in literature just like Zora Neale

Hurston had put it down for Eatonville, Florida and like Richard Wright had done

for the Southside of Chicago. I was 28 years old. I was trying to completely change the

game and bring hella grimy ghetto content to my work, but at the same time I wanted to polish it up a little bit and make it palatable for my more educated readers.

That’s why when I wrote the short story

Language Barrier about a teenaged sniper, I decided to filter his thoughts through a third

person omniscient narrator who is highly

skilled at translating the killer’s actions into the language of the civilian. The narrator 67

The Souls of Displaced Folk: Oakland Novelist Roger Porter Reflects on His City’s Soul

makes what the uninitiated may consider to be a savage response into something that is

understandable. I never intended to make his actions agreeable, just understandable.

I walk the ledge of the same high rise

in A Foretaste of Elysium, a short story

The one part of town that remains largely untouched by the global trend of gentrification is Deep East Oakland. We are still here.

that was originally published in Zyzzyva

largely untouched by the global trend of

Folk was released. The story is written in first

are still here. We still have our store front

magazine a year before The Souls of Hood person narration from the perspective of

a young hustler at a sideshow (in Oakland

the sideshow is where young people go to meet the opposite sex and show off their cars). The present tense portion of the story is written in strong East Oakland vernacular while the past tense narration is written in 19th century Victorian English. I wanted to

show the mental and spiritual complexity of my young protagonist. I wanted to show that he was capable of love—because love

is something that we should all want to understand. I wanted the reader to find the character’s pursuit of genuine love to be relatable and hopefully disregard the

chasm that lay between themselves and the young man. And all of this to show that the

place where I was raised is not a concrete graveyard for young black bodies but rather it is multifaceted, nuanced, and gorgeous— well at least in my eyes it is.

It is now 2018 and Oakland, just like

Brooklyn and Brixton and most every

other solidly black community in the western world, has been gentrified. The complexion of West Oakland and North

Oakland has gotten a whole lot whiter as many black residents have been priced

out. The one part of town that remains 68

gentrification is Deep East Oakland. We

churches and our barbershops, our beauty salons and our sideshows. And we are still unashamed, however, there is anxiety in the air. People are slowly being priced out

and the homeless population has grown

exponentially over the past few years. There are definitely barbarians at the gate. But this

is the way of the “civilized” world. What are we to do?

Assuming that gentrification consumes

Deep East Oakland next and let’s say they put a giant Starbucks right in the middle of

the hood (this is actually in the works) and

five years from now nothing but Silicon

Valley techies will be able to buy property here. If all of this takes place, then at least

people will be able to read my book and see that this community once had a soul.

Roger Porter is a writer and educator from Oakland, CA, whose first book, The Souls of Hood Folk, is available at lulu.com. He has a degree in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College.

He describes himself as “an average everyday man from East Oakland who writes about average everyday hood life.” He blogs at ghettosun.com.

by John Ortiz

California’s Classroom Crisis and a New Path to Literacy for Black Boys

CALIFORNIA’S CLASSROOM CRISIS AND A NEW PATH TO LITERACY FOR BLACK BOYS

by Dr. Khalid Akil White

Many of us have heard the phrase that “reading is fundamental.”

As cliché as that phrase has now become, it is a simple, yet extremely profound and truthful statement. The ability to read, and read well, is fundamental to success.

Founded in 1966, the Reading is

Fundamental

(RIF)

established itself

organization

has

as America’s largest

children’s literacy non-profit. For more than 50 years, RIF has been driven to ensure that

childhood literacy remains at the forefront of our nation’s educational priorities.

According to the RIF website, “There

is a significant and cyclical literacy crisis facing America today and it begins with

our children. Twenty-five million children

in the U.S. cannot read proficiently. Sixtyfive percent of 4th graders read below grade level, contributing to 8,000 students

dropping out of high school every day” (www.rif.org/about-us).

To

be

clear,

dropping out of high school increases the

likelihood of arrest and incarceration as an adult.

As a Professor of Ethnic Studies, in the

San Francisco Bay Area, I have the privilege

of educating hundreds of young adult learners annually. And yes, some of my community college students did drop out of

high school or have enrolled in community college after suffering incarceration.

70

Even as high school graduates, there

are scores of young adult learners that enroll in community college courses reading and writing far below “college level.”

Many community college students that

struggle with their reading and writing also struggle in passing classes, transferring, and

graduating within the intended two-year timeframe. Consequently, a great number of

those that struggle, drop out of community college altogether. This is symptomatic of

the significant and cyclical literacy crisis that begins in childhood.

In June 2017, Matt Levin, of the Cal

Matters organization, penned an article for the San Jose Mercury Newspaper, further

expressing childhood literacy concerns.

More specifically, Levin’s article highlighted the childhood literacy crisis as related to African-American boys in California.

Levin’s article shared a sobering realism

that “75% of black California boys don’t

meet state reading standards. As early as

fourth grade, for example, nearly 80 percent

of black boys failed to meet state reading standards” (Levin, 2017).

Unfortunately, as 75% of California’s black

4th grade boys read below grade level, they

by Joelius Dubois

Lessons Learned, Degrees Earned: Street Lit, Black Bodies, and the Contemporary Academic Classroom

LESSONS LEARNED, DEGREES EARNED:

STREET LIT, BLACK BODIES, AND THE CONTEMPORARY ACADEMIC CLASSROOM

by Kemeshia Randle Swanson

“A little while later, as we were tooting lines, I recited my freshly created past to Tommy. He liked it instantly. He said it was refreshingly devoid of sex, drugs, and violence—an acceptable, normal, ordinary past.”

a group of people blinded by privilege and advantage. I am sure that this group of

people never uttered the following words:

“I want to be abandoned by my mother,

raped by my father, drugged by my brother, stabbed by my sister, and pimped out by my friend.” Maybe no one has ever uttered

-Cupcake Brown, A Piece of Cake (2006)

these words. However, the reality of these

“I done been away from high school for six years, out in the world, conversing with doctors, lawyers, and men from all walks of life. I been using English (among other thangs) good enough to make hundreds and thousands of bucks and stay alive, and I need some square White folk to help me write about my hood. I don’t think so.”

overwhelming. And, while the subject of

incidents actually occurring is shockingly trauma is one highly regarded in many fields in the academy, I wonder how many scholarteachers engage in these conversations with

their pupils. How many scholars practice, with others, the healing process that they

theorize about? How many scholar-teachers encourage their pupils to write about and speak the language of their “hoods?”

I firmly believe that any great research has

-Elaine Richardson, PHD to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life (2013)

a foundation in practicality and beneficence

What is acceptable? What is normal? What is

people outside of the academic institution

ordinary? Who determines the status quo?

I’d be willing to bet that it is the same group

of people who establish the literary canon, 74

to all who might engage the findings And

because humanity is comprised of more than within, it is important that scholars

broaden their reach and connect with nonacademic

communities,

i.e.

other

Radical Eruptions of Desire

RADICAL ERUPTIONS OF DESIRE

by Jerry Ward, Jr.

The invitation to write about “the treatment

full disclosure or robust, nuanced attention

African American literary studies more

opposed to what pedagogical ideologies

of street lit within academia or even within

specifically” for readers who have vested

interest in “street lit’s place, or lack thereof, within

academia,

combating

illiteracy

amongst black and brown youth, and in relation to the prison-industrial complex”

was too attractive to refuse. Here was an opportunity to plunge with eyes wide shut into the magma of argument regarding

blind spots in American literary and

cultural discourses, to spend a season in the “cultured hell” to which Claude McKay drew attention in the poem “America,” in the territory where radical eruptions are commonplace.

From the vantage of literary history as

a subset of an always expanding cultural

history, it is fair to suggest that, especially in

the twenty-first century, American academia

is an animal farm not a palace of wisdom.

It might be argued that calling a certain

body of works “street lit” rather than “street literature,” and then incarcerating the body in the prison of urban fiction is a signal. Is it a signal that radical eruptions of desire

(which have ineluctable kinship with despair and pessimism) are genuinely threatening?

Does American academia really fear what 82

to what large numbers of people read (as

contend they should read) might reveal?

Probably, the answer is “YES.”

Only in venues or public spheres where

literary and cultural studies are more or less

detached from the obligations, theories, postures and beliefs, disguised traps and

deceptive civility, enslavements and critical practices of the Academy might street lit be

accorded a fair hearing. Much to the credit of scholars and writers who contributed to Street Lit: Representing the Urban

Landscape (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow

Press, 2014) and to the scholars, critics, and writers listed in the bibliography for

that anthology, urban fiction did receive a

fair hearing. And it would be irresponsible to contend urban fiction and nonfiction

has been neglected in books and articles which explore the phenomenon of hip hop. Nevertheless, American academia in general excludes street lit from its multicultural canon.

Despite the esteem that is justly

accorded to Barbara Christian’s widely

anthologized essay “The Race for Theory” (1987), we have scant evidence that the

Academy makes everyday use of the lessons

she sought to convey. Christian said nothing

very humanity?” (349)

focus on critical difference and distance,

about urban fiction. Her purpose was to on the strategies of academic institutions

to inspire fear regarding tenure and

promotion and to silence or symbolically criminalize dissenters. Two passages in particular deserve notice. The first was an observation about the dominant position theory occupied three decades ago.

“Perhaps because those who have affected the takeover have the power (although

they deny it) to be published, and thereby to determine the ideas which are deemed

valuable, some of our most daring and potentially radical critics (and by our, I mean black, women, Third World) have been influenced, even co-opted, into speaking a language and defining their discussion in

terms alien to and opposed to our needs and orientation.” (349)

The second (too lengthy to quote fully)

was a stunning claim about how ordinary theorizing

was

among

people in her ethnic group.

non-academic

“For people of color have always theorized—

but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to

say that our theorizing …is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and

proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on

our bodies, social institutions, countries, our

On the one hand, Christian made

a stinging criticism of hypocrisy in the

academic world. On the other, she valorized

the entitlement of her folk to use language(s) and forms that satisfied their needs and preferences. What academic critics still fail

to grasp is the legitimacy of street lit as a genre and mode of narrative knowing as they blithely dismiss it.

A

second

example

of

blindness

among academic critics is the failure to

accord esteem to what Carolyn Rodgers contributed to discourse on literacy and criticism. On neither side of the fence in

the Academy between those who have

fashioned themselves to have no color and people who are thrown into a suspect and coded category (people of color), do we

find due diligence being given to Rodger’s

pioneering work in vernacular theorizing, namely her Negro Digest/Black World

essays which pre-date Stephen Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry:

Black Speech and Black Music as Poetic

References (1973) and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of

African-American Literary Criticism (1988)

and Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature :A Vernacular Theory (1984).

That Rodgers created tools for the

analysis and interpretation of poetry in the then current language/nonce vocabulary of the street is not acknowledged in such

critical guides as Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary 83

by John Ortiz

HOME IN, TURN THE PARTY OUT

by Dr. Umi Vaughan

For several generations now, scholars such

tuguese-speaking regions of the Americas.

Karin Barber, Nei Lopes, Paul Gilroy, Yvonne

bistas and emcees as performative leaders

as Kwabena Nketia, John Miller Chernoff, Daniel, and Mark Anthony Neal have given attention to the importance of music, dance

and other performances as social discourse and as means for individual and collective

social/political action in black communities.

Inspired by such contributions, I have done

my own work on performance, black identity and the deeper meaning of music and

dance in the Black Atlantic (check out Car-

los Aldama’s Life in Bata: Cuba, Diaspora, and the Drum and Rebel Dance, Renegade

Stance: Timba Music and Black Identity in Cuba).

My most recent work explores how

lead singers in specific African Diaspora

musical traditions guide their communities on journeys through history, reflections on

the human character, local experience, sex, race, social justice struggle, and other top-

ics all while using performance to provoke

acts and create energies that help sustain the group. Although I have been focusing on other musical genres, hip hop is part of

my upbringing and always at the back of my mind.

Communal

singing

traditions

exist

along a continuum from sacred to secular, throughout the English, Spanish and Por-

In this short piece, I focus on akwpon, samwithin the specific call and response sing-

ing traditions of Yoruba-derived religious

music, samba, and hip hop as developed

in Cuba, Brazil, and the U.S. respectively.

I maintain that these communal singing traditions are part of what Mark Anthony Neal calls the Black Public Sphere. As such

they are spaces for community reflection, critique, and social action (physical movement and sociopolitical struggle). It is interesting to compare black popular music

forms such as jazz, soul, R&B, and hip hop

as highly mediated expressions of the Black Public Sphere with more underground

contexts in which African Diaspora singing

lives and functions such as oricha singing and samba. The experiences that unfold

within these events, under the guidance of singers, are in Neal’s words, “…efforts to

transcend both time and space…through the creation of metaphoric [and sonic] landscapes rooted in literal communal ef-

forts to subvert unacceptable conditions.”

Oricha

The Yoruba-derived Afro-Cuban oricha singing tradition was established in Cuba along

with batá drumming in the early 1800s. As 87

Spoken Word Is(n’t) Lit?: An Interview with Marc-Bamuthi Joseph

SPOKEN WORD IS(N’T) LIT?:

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARC-BAMUTHI JOSEPH

Raphael Cohen: You bring a multidisciplinary

like ‘Do you have a book in you?’ and I was

narration, music, visual projection, history,

in mixtape form. I make mixtapes for the

approach, spoken word poetry, first person African dance, spirituality. Content-wise

you’re also crossing boundaries and in

Pelota’s case you’re also looking at soccer from both a deeply personal and broadly

political vantage point, crossing borders, nationally,

Haiti,

Brazil,

South

Africa,

Brooklyn, New York, so for me it often feels

like form and content mirror each other in your work. How much does Hip-Hop

influence that approach and how much do literature and other arts contribute to this artistic fusion?

Marc Bamuthi Joseph: The writers that are the most influential in my life are Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Nikki Giovanni

and Sonia Sanchez. They are also Black

Thought, Chuck-D, KRS-One, Jay-Z and Nas. So, in terms of the construction of syntax

and urgency which is something that we

talk about in academic setting and also informally. It’s actually very difficult for me to

write for the written page, my paradigm, my

literary paradigm is more oral, performative, and ephemeral than it is about the printed moment.

I just read Jesmyn Ward’s novel Sing,

UnBuried, Sing and, you know, I’m going on

and on about it with my wife and she was 92

like ‘No. That’s not how I write.’ I kind of write stage. I don’t sit down and say let me make

a piece of Hip-Hop for the stage. In terms of rhythm and energetic flow, my frame for doing those things is Hip-Hop. There’s kind

of a canonical association with anyone from

Dubois to Jean Toomer to Richard Wright

where I’m informed by writers, journalists, that committed language to the page. I’m informed by that lineage from a canonical

standpoint and from a historic standpoint, but just in the terms of what I make, all that is framed by an allegiance, to an alliance to, a

kind of grounding in Hip-Hop culture in the 70s.

Like, I don’t have a lot of interest, as

complex as Kendrick Lamar’s language

is and as fun as it is, to go on genius.com and be like ‘Damn what did he just say?’ I

just want to hear him rap, you know what I mean?

Raphael: The immediacy.

Marc: Yeah, I don’t want to go to a Kendrick Lamar book signing. I want to see him rock in Vegas.

Raphael: We do see an uptick in Hip-Hop aligned bodies of literature, for example De-Coded. There have been a number of

emcees and spoken word artists who have

made their name on the stage and then

segmentations of what inspired what kind

essentially their lyrics for multiple albums

of generational flashpoint in the broad

years later produced publications where

or multiple pieces are transcribed. And so, given where you stand on that, what are

your thoughts on how we see over the last few years Hip-Hop’s stamp on literature and theater, too, with the popularity of Hamilton?

Marc: Yeah, I mean, the author that jumps

to mind first is Paul Beatty, right? Colson Whitehead’s book Sag Harbor which I

wanna say is based in the late 80s, early 90s, is full of Hip-Hop references. I think

that the blogosphere is full of really deeply

thought but quickly produced Hip-Hop

literature. Ta-Nehisi Coates. Nikole Hannah Jones, the journalist who writes about

education and segregation in America.

I would say that there’s a kind of vein of

podcasters who have a deep literary sense, and sports commentators like Bomani

Jones, Stuart Scott before him. There are any number of any writers in their thirties and forties in particular who came of age

in Hip-Hop— which is not to disqualify folks

in their twenties nor is it to kind of age out folks in their fifties and sixties— but I would say folks in their thirties and forties who

really were the first generation born not knowing life without Hip-Hop culture. For

those folks, the literary sensibility is both the intersection of the institutional canonical, To

Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye

and the Shakespearean or the Greek canon and this litany of Hip-Hop, of tapes, cassette tapes, and all it is, is language to us. All it

is, is language. So, to kind of separate out or to kind of create these kinds of micro

of writing— ultimately, Hip-Hop is a kind trajectory of code switching that has marked African-American culture in particular.

I made this opera, We Shall Not Be

Moved and not so much getting into

what opera is about there’s a line where a character says ‘We’re gonna go West like

a smart man with a complex’ and just kind of keeps going. The director, who’s a sixty

year old genius Bill T. Jones, says ‘Why do we need that line?!’ I said, ‘We need that

line’ and he was like ‘Is anybody gonna

get it?’ I’m like ‘No. Not everybody but for the people who do get it, it’s gonna be so important, it’s gonna be so meaningful, to have that in the context of an opera that it’s totally gonna be well worth it and it’s not like we’re gonna lose anybody, you know?’

Raphael: It’s a signpost?

Marc: It’s a signpost. It’s also kind of a mark of a generational division. This is a man

who like kicked it with Maya Angelou, you

know what I mean? This is a man who like deeply informed my other sensibility; which is

contemporary

performance,

coming

out of the Justin Church, kind of Merce

Cunningham, Trisha Brown school of dance that also is who I am aesthetically and as

my Hip-Hop self-announces itself he’s like ‘How is that relevant?’ and the mere fact that we’re having that generational conversation

is evidence in and of itself that it is relevant, that that’s what we continue to do. So, I would say that there’s a conscious attempt

to create a Hip-Hop literature, it’s just that

I am of a Hip-Hop consciousness. And so, 93

The Ghost Ship Tragedy: Thoughts on Art and Gentrification from the Bay Area to Brooklyn

THE GHOST SHIP TRAGEDY:

THOUGHTS ON ART AND GENTRIFICATION FROM THE BAY AREA TO BROOKLYN

by Mario Hernandez (photos by Ed Ntiri)

Introduction

objects obscured safe exits and made the

warehouse fire claimed 36 lives in the

visitors), which facilitated the spread of the

has been described as the largest fire in the

the fire resulted in 36 deaths, the victims

with the causes that led to the events of that

national origin and age- the youngest, still

the Fruitvale Bart Station where Oscar Grant

artist space was located in the heart of East

building inspectors for the entire city, to the

International

31st

landlord (who remains in police custody at

Devised to function as a ‘24-hour

manslaughter charges) or the building’s

It’s been a year since the Ghost Ship

warehouse a ‘tinderbox’ (as described by

Fruitvale area of Oakland, California. In what

fire and ultimately, the loss of life. In all,

city’s history, many are still coming to terms

ranging in background by gender, race,

night. Located just around the corner from

in high school, was just 17.

was killed by a security guard in 2009, the

under way, from the city having only four

Oakland, off of one of its primary arteries,

fire department’s response, the “eccentric”

Avenue.

the time of this writing, facing involuntary

Boulevard,

at

1305

The process of assigning blame is still

creation space,’ the 10,000-square foot

owner, who is said to have become a “triple

Derick Almena and a partner Max Harris, the

The space offered live-in residence for

Wells, writer for The New Yorker states, “to

live in the city, an event space where artists

seemed both necessary and ridiculous.”

The facts of the events that transpired

emerged in the wake of Ghost Ship—about

documented— a fire broke out around

urban renewal, the housing crisis and racial

attended by around 50 people. Comprised

the story doesn’t begin or end with the tragic

converted warehouse had been leased to

millionaire overnight” as a result of the fire.

former serving as the landlord since 2013.

sense of the fire as well, as Benjamin Wallace-

artists who otherwise would not be able to

answer questions about building codes

performed and showcased their work.

With the range of conversations that have

on the night of December 2, are well

the role of artists in cities, gentrification,

11:20pm during an electronic music show

and class inequalities—what is clear is that

almost entirely of wood, the mass of

events themselves. This much is suggested

102

News reports are struggling to make

a decline that was brought on for a variety

and city planning combine to increase

economic recession of the 1970s. While the

image as a competitive advantage [vis-a-

of reasons including the rise of suburbs and

reversal of this trend has been in the works in various places for some time, this growth has been particularly widespread since the early 1990s, and much of the literature in

urban studies in recent years has centered on accounting for the reasons for cities emerging once again as the center of

economic and cultural life for the majority

of Americans (Furman center, Sassen 2010; Hyra, 2015).

Often referred to as the “back-to-the-

city movement,” census data has shown

that for the first time in a half-century, more people are moving to cities, than away from

them (Gallagher 2013, p.14; Hyra 2015).

Scholars have shown a variety of factors that have contributed to this shift, including global market flows that accentuate service

and information sector economic growth centered in cities (Sassen 2010; Castells

2009). This combined with a global tourism industry has led to massive infrastructure

investment in cities on the part of a variety of political actors at the federal, state and local level.

But, as this is becoming a model

of growth for an increasing number of

cities, the competition in the market for luring tourists, people and cutting-edge

creative industries, the need to develop a

unique

“brand”

image

or

identity

becomes increasingly acute. City branding has taken off as a vehicle and model of

growth as tourism agencies, real estate agencies, developers, commercial interests

a neighborhood or entire city’s brand vie others] for tourism, people, industries/

jobs such as tech and investment. The branding of unique urban environments

has become increasingly institutionalized, often entailing hiring consulting firms to develop and strategize regional differences

and particularities to foster growth in a method popularized by the success of

the I Love NY campaign (Dinnie 2011).

In this way, what is unique to a particular

region, such as its natural landscape (e.g.

Baltimore’s waterfront redevelopment) or

particular history (e.g. Milwaukee brewing or Nashville’s country music scene) become

focal points in accentuating its unique identity and particular draw.

Building off such cultural “raw material,”

development strategies around this model

seek to develop a similar set of amenities

that appeal to a specific “consumer” group, such as urban walkability, bike lanes, the preservation of historic buildings and

districts, modern restaurants and downtown

condominiums, all that serve to attract young urban professionals and recent

college graduates. In the process, these cities hope to attract cutting edge growth

industries, usually in tech (such as Google

and Facebook), as can clearly be seen in how cities are positioning themselves to

attract Amazon’s proposed headquarters construction—which would contribute an

estimated 50,000 jobs to the city’s economy.

There are a lot of issues with this growth

model, to be explored in what follows. But 103