“Ana, I was wondering, how do you find the time to be both a mother and an artist?” asks a woman who laces her questions with a confession of maternal guilt disclosing her inability to find an appropriate amount of time to be a professor and a good mother to her two children.
Ana Tijoux, Arizona State University Performance in the Border/Land’s guest and Chilean Hip Hop female MC, responds, “Do you ask men that same question?” Her question ruffles the congested audiences feathers as they all are stunned by Ana Tijoux’s reaction. She continues, “I am sorry it’s not attack against you, but that is what I ask journalist when they ask me that same question. I am a mother. I do what I have to do. But, I never see people ask male MCs the same question, “How do you be a father and an artist?”
On Wednesday, October 15, 2014, I attended a panel with Ana Tijoux, Dr. Nia Witherspoon, Dr. Mako Fitts-Ward, and Dorra Areola. The panel was contrived of female artists, scholars to pose questions and answers with Ana Tijoux on politics, feminism, and the power of music to inspire a political shift. I often ask Hip-hop, “Where are you headed?” When I view the globalization of Hip-hop I am reminded of commodification of enslaved Africans swept up in the Atlantic Slave Trade forced to move through time and places like Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States of America. It seems looking back in history no matter what White America thought of Black folks previously they have stole and sold it; Black bodies, art, fashion, music, and literature.
The late Griot, Amiri Barak once said, “The future is always here in the past.” The New Black America is caught in the contrapuntal narrative. It is neither here nor there because what it means to be Black has been created, cultivated, and shared through the contrapuntal narrative. Even though Hip-hop is known for being born out of the despair and celebration of people’s survival in the Black experience in the 1970’s its five elements; MCing, Beatboxing, B Boying/ B Girling, Graffiti, and Knowledge. Hip-hop was first conceived on the waves of capitalism’s Atlantic Slave Trade and the African Diaspora, including the four major migrations of African and Black folks in America.
The current migration of Black America is illustrated in the contrapuntal narrative Hip-hop dressed in Afrofuturism. I believe Hip-hop is an Afrofuturistic agent that combines all the aforementioned elements with an Afrofuturistic language that has the ability transform and uniting the identity of tomorrow’s Blackness with the it’s history present African Diaspora. Ana Tijoux is one of many Hip-hop prophets telling a story of hope and retribution in all shades and bodies of Blackness. As long as Hip-hop continues in the hands of MCs like Ana Tijoux the voice of the Black experience will be in the words, for all true Hip-hop disciples know, “It is not where you’re from, but where you at.”
Words with Black Yoda 