Author: Brandan Ramnandan (Page 6 of 7)

“Aajee”

By : Brandan Ramnandan

“Aajee”, Although I never knew it was spelled this way, is a word that will forever have so much meaning to me. I remember when I was younger and my parents first introduced our grandparents as “Aajee” & “Aajah”. “Aajee ” represents “Grandma” in guyanese (On the fathers side). In my heart though, it’s much more than just Grandma, she’s the woman who taught me and my brothers so much, and raised my father to be who he is today. Growing up, I would always say Aajah to my grandpa but I would always say Grandma to my grandmother, i’m not exactly sure why but that’s the way I did things.

After losing my grandmother last year, the word Aajee means more to me than ever before. She was ill with Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s, now everytime I hear someone say Aajee, usually it’s my little cousins, it almost tears me up because I automatically think of all the memories with her, especially my last, she held onto my finger and wouldn’t let go, I know she was going through the worst of pain inside and I’m glad she’s in a better place now but the memories I shared with you my Aajee I would never forget, thank you for being the best grandma you could’ve been, and thank you for showing us how truly strong you are with all you put up. I’ll never forget when we first found out she was getting sick and I called and she just kept repeating my name over and over, you can hear the pain in her voice as she was struggling to speak. Aajee I love you forever, and everything I do, one of my biggest reasons for doing them will be to make you proud.

Brandan Ramnandan

Week 3 HW

HW Day One:

A side note: we read another piece by Abdurraquib in our first week of class, when he wrote about his name. In that piece, he wrote about being Muslim, and never mentioned being black.  In this piece, he writes about being black, and never mentions being Muslim.  That is to say, in each of these fairly short pieces, he focuses distinctly on one community (and its language), though he is a member of multiple communities, as we all are.

There are few things I love more than watching black people joyfully greet each other. There is much to be made of the act, in almost any setting, even though the tone of it may vary. The familiarity of a too-forceful slap on the back during a hug, or the more gentle How your mama doin’? pitched across a parking lot while someone throws down their bags and makes their way over for a hug. The more subtle nuances of a joyful greeting, sometimes rooted in relief or exhaustion: I walk through a sea of white faces in Salt Lake City, or Portland, or anywhere in America where I am made especially aware of the space I am occupying and how I am occupying it. From the sea emerges another lone black face, perhaps two. We lock eyes, raise an eyebrow, smile, and give a nod. One that says: I see you, and you see me. Even if no one else does, we know we’re still here.

It is an art, really. One that, like all institutions of black joy, gets dissected, parroted, and parodied — but only the language that comes from the body, and rarely the language that is spoken. On the other end of the jovial How you been doin? that bursts from the mouth of someone who you haven’t seen in awhile is often a response of “all right,” or “fine,” or, a favorite among people I know, “I’m working on it.”

I sometimes consider this, how marginalized people quantify their own lives when compared to others who occupy the same world as we do. I say that I’m “all right” even when I’ve had good days. My father, a caring and deeply thoughtful person, has been “all right” for all of the years I’ve known him. The black woman who works in the market next to my apartment sighs, pats my hand, and tells me she’s “all right” as she hands me back a receipt for another purchase.

If there is a cost to this, the reality of fear, the fights that grow and seem insurmountable, the obsession with your grief in America as a beautiful and moving thing, it is a lowering of the emotional bar. Waiting for the other shoe to drop instead becomes dodging the avalanche of shoes, occasionally looking back to see the avalanche claiming another person you know, love, or have been on this journey of survival with for so long, you could be family. I celebrate expressions of unbridled black joy because I know what it takes to unlock this, to have the joy of the body drown out the anxiety of the mind, if only for a little bit. I know that blackness, when turned away from the mirror of itself and back into America at large, is most appealing when there is a type of suffering attached to it — sadness, anger, struggle, dressed up and packaged to the masses. A quarterback dances to celebrate an accomplishment in a violent game, and words like “class” appear, hanging in the air for months. The daughter of a black man murdered on camera by police records an ad for a presidential candidate and the white people who support the candidate are so moved by her retelling of a life without her father. And I do imagine that it must be something, to be able to decide at what volume, tone, and tenor you will allow black people to enter your life, for praise or for scolding. I think about this when I go to the gym and hand my gym card over to the same front desk person, always a white man. I ask how he’s doing. Most days, he says “Good. Really good.”

The link between black music and black survival shows up most urgently when the stakes are at their highest. When I say that music is how black people have gotten free, I mean Harriet Tubman echoed songs along the Underground Railroad as a language. I mean the map to black freedom in America was built from music before it was built from anything else. Black music is the shepherd still pointing us toward any needed liberation, giving us a place to set our emotions, a room of our own.

More than any other song on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, “Alright” signaled the arrival of a new song to nestle itself into this new historical movement, led by young black people from all backgrounds: black women, black college students, black queer and trans communities. The black song that sits in the movement has often been a reflection of black people in America, hope rooted in a reliance on faith, but still so often looking over its shoulder, checking for an exit. There are trains or chariots coming to take us away to a better place, a place just for us (“People Get Ready,” “The Gospel Train,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”). There is the imagery of water, that which carried black people to this place, and that which will save them from it (“A Change Is Gonna Come,” “Wade in the Water”).

I’ve always viewed “Alright” as part of the evolution of these songs. It’s a song that clings to the idea of a hope that rests primarily on spirituality, but also a song that meets the people where they are and doesn’t try to take them away. The dynamics of “freedom” have changed, the idea of freedom and escape becoming less physical. When Kendrick Lamar, before the first chorus hits, tells us “I’m fucked up / Homie, you fucked up,” it feels like permission to revel in whatever we must in order to feel alive. The song is a gradual unpacking of the author’s failings, his rage and vices, all held close in the idea of surviving. Where so many songs from the past promised a new and improved paradise on the horizon, “Alright” promises nothing except the fact that there is pain, and there will be more to come. We can push our backs against that door and hold out the darkness until morning, but the night has been so long it feels like it might never end. “Alright” tells us to, instead, revel in the despite of it all. When a smiling, joyful black person says they’re “doing all right,” I imagine it’s because they know “good” may be too close to the sun. I imagine it’s because they’ve seen things burn.

The heaven that Kendrick tells us is touchable might not be real, or I maybe saw heaven this fall, when Yale students marched across their campus in a demonstration against racial insensitivity. It was a seasonably chilly November day, and the well-attended and vocal march was visibly draining some of its participants. To fight for a country to see you as human is an exhausting thing, that exhaustion compounded by the physical exertion of marching, chanting, making your space your own. After the march wound down, someone found a loudspeaker, pressed play on “Alright,” and this imagined cloud of despair pulled itself back. People danced, hugged, rapped along with what parts they knew. I realized then that the magic of “Alright” is the same magic that exists in the body language of the joyful black greeting. It fits so well into these movements because it pulls so many people on the front lines of them to a place of healing. It works as both a rallying cry and a salve. It meets you at eye level and gives you what you need — an escape from the fight, or a push to get back into the fight. It is the warm nod and knowing smile from a black face emerging in a sea of white.

Earlier this month, an activist and poet from my hometown, MarShawn McCarrel, took his own life on the steps of the Ohio statehouse. I found this out when my wife called up to me in the office of our apartment, miles away from Columbus, where I knew MarShawn. Where we spent countless hours joking around at poetry open mics or bullshitting at local action events. I am used to the feeling of knowing the dead, having a touchable relationship with someone who is no longer present. Yet the immediate moments after the news arrives never get any easier to manage. I went to MarShawn’s Facebook page and saw his final message of “My demons won today. I’m sorry.” Right below was a picture of him and his mother, smiling at the NAACP awards. Right below that, a screenshot of a threat that was emailed to him from someone telling him that they wouldn’t rest until he “shut his nigger mouth.”

The truth is, once you understand that there are people who do not want you to exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table. There is no liberation, no undoing that knowledge. It is the unyielding door, the one that you simply cannot push back against any longer. For many, there are reminders of this every day, every hour. It makes “Alright,” the emotional bar and the song itself, the best there is. It makes existence itself a celebration.

I hadn’t spoken to MarShawn in months, a thing that we feel most guilty about after a person is gone, especially if we are miles away from home, or on a plane to somewhere even farther from home, on the day of a funeral. The last time I saw MarShawn was at a protest. We hadn’t physically seen each other in a while, and we embraced. I slapped his back, perhaps a little too hard, and asked how he was. He told me “I’m all right, you know. I’m still here.”

Maybe all of these heavens are the same — Kendrick Lamar’s heaven, the heaven that all of the trains and chariots took our ancestors to, the heaven on the other side of Harriet Tubman’s river. Maybe all they ask is that we help hold back the darkness for as long as we can, and when we can’t anymore, they’ll save us a room. They’ll make sure “Alright” is playing, and we’ll feel the way it felt hearing it for the first time, in the face of all this wreckage. Full of so much promise, as if all of our pain were a bad dream we just woke up from.

Each of my annotations are in bold.  I agree with many of the authors points throughout this reading. Especially about “one you understand there are people who do not want to you exist, that is a difficult card to remove from the table”. The reason I heavily agree with this is because in life I do feel like there are many people who don’t want you around and just hate you because of your race, or what your doing in life, or even something that happened a long time ago and it can be hard to move past it. We see this when his friend passes away and he quickly mentions their last meeting before it happened, this is what happens when people pass away and we think back to our most recent memory before they passed, but what if that memory isn’t a good one? It would probably eat you up inside. Another thing I noticed is about the black people greeting each other and I think it’s really cool to look into this because every community has their own way of greeting each other. In paris they say bonjour, in hawaii it’s aloha, for me, in guyana they say “AYE BAI” which is a way of saying Hi Boy, in our language. Another thing relating is in guyanese when people are leaving we tend to say “alrite “bai” or “gyal”. Depending on if it’s a boy or girl.

Okay after reading and from my understanding, We are all part of many communities. For me, one is my family. We speak in guyanese to each other but when at work I speak regular english. Guyanese is just a broken version of English like jamaican. At work, I learned that we can NEVER accuse the customer of stealing unless we physically see them take something and open it and put it in their pocket. We can say things like, hey sir do you need help, or did you pay for that, and if you see them stealing you can say something like hey put that back and if they try and leave you can’t stop them, it’s policy. Another community I’d say is when I’m with my boys, it’s completely different the way we speak compared to when at work and at home, there’s no filter and it’s pretty “hood” since we grew up in some rough neighborhoods, it’s just a part of us. Then I’d say there’s school, which I would have the same attitude towards as my job, serious and just getting it done, being respectful, like saying “Mrs”. or “Mr.” to your teacher or “professor” if you’re in college like me. Saying “may I go to the bathroom” instead of  “lemme go to the bathroom”. It’s just different approaches you must take when in certain situations, you have to be able to be versatile and know when it’s time to turn up or get to work. I did feel part of the “in-crowd” because knowing in the hospitals they have to do similar protocols like we do at CVS, as they couldn’t say if the patient’s blood pressure was falling, instead having to word it differently like we do if someone is stealing. It’s really cool thinking about it that we are really all part of many communities.