Reaching the Mountaintop of the Healed Regal African Female Self:
A Black man and father Speaks
by ‘bro.
zayid’
“Under a dead blue sky on a distant beach,
I was dragged by my braids just beyond your reach...”
Maya Angelou, Excerpted from her The Million Man
March Poem,1995
“There are days where I cried because I had to face
the internal racism
about my hair that society has placed on me”...Yvette
Modestin
“I am my hair”...Yvette Modestin
Storytelling is the heartbeat of
global African culture.
It is also an enormous means by
which hurt people can heal.
Being dragged by her braids, just
beyond our reach...dragged by her precious braids of beauty into centuries of
genocidal abuse that was the TransAtlantic Slave Trade!
Let’s be clear about Ms. Angelou’s
poetic point of reference.
Let us also be clear that that is a
lot to heal from!...
Beloved world traveled ‘cimarrona’* Yvette Modestin’s humble and
intimate storytelling magically did that Saturday transcending the virtual
limits of our Covid covered reality with her reknown Nubian Butterfly grace for
RIA House, a rare treasured space that helps and empowers women and girls who
have had to endure the awful travail of sex trafficking.
The proud Afro-Panamanian founder of
her own healing and empowering vessel Encuentro DiasporaAfro weaved a story of
her ongoing triumphant battle to be self-determining, ‘unapologetically Black,’
in all that she does, including necessarily her hair, or her always adorned “crown.”
She began telling of the joy of her
richly insulated childhood environment where the beautification of a Black
woman’s hair, no matter the character and manner, was a big and endearing
deal.
She then told of her beaming days of
her adorning her huge proud Afro and its striking statement of beauty and
power. She told that it was also there where her journey faced the
psychological slings and arrows that black women have faced since the early days
of the slave trade. It being nappy, ugly, anything but beautiful, in its
natural state. It being something that “doesn’t fit in.” It even being something
that has to be policed, like the bodies of Black woman and men, continue to be violently
policed.
Yet the incredible army of one that
she is, Yvette soldiered through it.
She then told of her need to make a statement
to the LatinAmerican world that continued to invisiblize and minimalize Afro
descendants in their broad language of identity Latina, and of her need to
confront that with another statement of beautification...locking her hair!
She heard the ancestral “whispers”
on July 24th, 2017, she said, and she took the bold affirmative step
to actually do it the very next day July 25th, which happened to be
International Day Women of African Descent and the anniversary of the passing
of her mother, Elicia Juanita Modestin Durant.
Her decision to lock her hair was a
tribute to her ancestors, and it was “one of the most powerful decisions I have
ever made,” she said under smiling full breaths, suddenly taking off a gorgeous
Afrocentric headdress for everyone to take in her courageous claim of her beautiful
red velvet dreadlocked hair.
Yet even recently, she continued
courageously, after that bold intimate step, after some years now into her
seasoned and cherished global walk for Black identity and power, she still had days
where “I cried because I had to face the internal racism about my hair that
society has placed on me,” she conceded.
Thankfully the whispers of her
ancestors allowed her to rise above that “internal racism” and love herself and
her new locked crown in any variety she choose, as she pulled out a kente shawl
to frame her crown and her moment and wrapped it around her shoulders to
capture the regality of her choice and step.
“I am my hair,” she asserted with a
glow akin to giving birth.
Finally, she punctuated her story by
placing a flower in her hair honoring her Black female beauty tradition of her beloved
Rainbow City roots in Colon, Panama.
As a survivor of some of the worst
of what’s in the streets and as father of a brilliant teen Black teen who has
never known a non-natural moment of her hair in her life, and who will
soon face those same slings and arrows, I was blown away!
“My child really needs to hear this,
and a whole lot of my child’s girlfriends need to hear this too,” I thought to
myself.
Yvette Modestin beautifully shared
how she conquered “the racial mountain” Langston Hughes taught us about nearly
a century ago that particularly confronts Black women with their hair! An
unrelenting brutal battle of psychological warfare!
Imagine how many Black Girls in
trouble, growing up without the loving environment that Yvette relished, being
abused and berated from their hated hair, their skin, their bodies, down to
their toes, would end up finding themselves trapped in something dark and
dangerous like Trafficking out of the violence that comes with the sheer
absence of family love, community love and self-love many of our girls face.
And what about those legions of violently
abused Black women in captivity in the West, from Panama to Peru, from Colombia
to Charlotte, from Rio to Raleigh, over the centuries...centuries!...Dragged by
their braids into the Slave Trade, to Black women today, dragged by their hair
from their cars profiled by the police or from their classrooms, to being
denied work, no matter how qualified, because of your hair “you just don’t fit
in,” or to even being assassinated for asserting that the humanity of being a
Black woman worthy of all of her human rights is right and just like Marielle
Franco was recently killed in Brazil!
How many of our ancestors never made
it anywhere near the top of that mountain? How many Black women today, hundreds
of years later, still may not get to that apex of image self-determination and
well-being.
Yvette’s ancestrally bound story was
indeed “magic” that made legions of our unnamed and unknown female ancestors
smile. It could also help a new generation of our beautiful black girls find
their own “magic’.
Let’s liberate those “snatched”
braids, no matter who is doing the snatching.
Let’s make a better world where our
daughters and granddaughters can and will be honored and respected for their
‘magic’!
#BlackGirlMagic
#BlackHairMatters
#YvetteModestin
*Yvette Modestin, the Nubian Butterfly of Colon, Panama, is an
empowering legend in the greater Boston area and throughout Latin America. Nubian Butterfly is the title of recent
volume of affirming poetry. A ‘cimarrona,’ or a descendant of
cimarrons...Spanish for ‘maroons’...fugitive slaves who attacked the slave
trade from underground positions, Yvette is featured narrating a stunning
documentary of Panama’s maroons, Cimarronaje
en Panama. She has just been appointed as the Int’l Ambassador on Reparations for
the Rastarian Alliance of Panama (Alianza Rastafari de’ Panama). Follow her on
Twitter @soulfulAfro...
‘bro.
zayid’ Muhammad is an organizer, poet and actor
based in Newark NJ. He is the founding press officer of the Malcolm X
Commemoration Committee in NYC and a proud ‘cub’ of the NY chapter of the Black
Panther Party. He was spotlighted recently in the Netflix documentary ‘Who Killed Malcolm X?’ Reach him at babazayid@gmail.com...
©2020
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