Host Cara Hagan and Dr. DaMaris B. Hill, author of Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, explore what it means to 'hoist one's younger self upon ones shoulders and move in the world as a black woman.
Host Cara Hagan and Dr. DaMaris B. Hill, author of Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, explore what it means to 'hoist one's younger self upon ones shoulders and move in the world as a black woman.
Resources:
Learn more about DaMaris B. Hill, PhD https://damarishill.com
Learn more about Cara Hagan http://carahagan.net
INTRO: Welcome to How People Move People, a podcast about the impact that our words, art, stories, and lives have on each other. Each series’ journey unfolds in a sequence of six episodes. The first series titled ‘Back and Forth’ is hosted by Cara Hagan, a New York City-based choreographer, professor, and mother who explores the influence of pop culture on the lives of black girls, from the the 1990s to today. Guests range from poets and thought-leaders to mom-and-daughter teams, to an original Fly Girl from the Wayans Brothers hit ‘90s TV show, “In Living Color.”
CARA HAGAN: Black Girl, you are dancing. Hair bouncing, clothes twisting, sneakers squeaking as you turn, stop, and slide. Is that your favorite song? How many times have you heard it now? How many times have your practiced that move – that swivel the way you swivel. Who taught you how? Black girl, standing in front of the screen, studying the women trapped inside that box. Do you think they’re beautiful? Smart? Heroic? What do they know about the world? What do those women know about you? Maybe you want to walk like them. Talk like them. Twerk like them. Maybe you want to make money like them, spend like them. Black girl, you are wondering. Head-scratching, experimenting, trying it on – a persona that speaks to you. Are those women real? Are some too good to be true? How many of them look like you? Come from where you come from? Know the people you know? Black girl, you are learning, you’re a tiny super computer, crunching algorithms, synthesizing loads of information, reflecting back to the world. You are part of a dizzying loop.
Friends, my name is Cara Hagan welcome to “Back and Forth,” a podcast about pop culture and the kinetic lives of Black girls. “Back and Forth,” is affectionately named for the song, Back and Forth by the one and only teenage R&B legend, Aliyah. Rest in peace. The word kinetic, which means “relating to or resulting from motion,” feels like a good word to use to describe not only bodily movement, but the movement we experience in life in everything from social interaction to initiatives we might describe as socio-political movements.
I grew up a mixed-race Black girl in the 1980s and 90s in Central New York and learning to exist in and move through a world that both excluded me and offered me countless cultural gems was, for me, largely informed by my interactions with popular culture. My life was full of cues as to how girlhood could look from a commercial standpoint, and how it looked in my own experience. There was a palpable tension between what I understood to be acceptable from a societal standpoint, what seemed to be acceptable from the viewpoint of my family, and what I actually liked, and how I viewed myself. I often felt like a walking dichotomy: Limited to kitten tees on my torso and Adidas clam shells on my feet. Missy Elliot and Gwen Stephani on the same mixtape. Hiding my changing body under baggy clothes by day and watching myself in a mirror wearing nothing but a leotard and tights in a dance studio by night. At times I was totally confused as to how I, a Black girl, was supposed to be in the world given the prominence of imagery and messaging that diminished or erased my reality. At other times, I simply couldn’t suppress my natural tendencies toward quirkiness, experimentation, and my growing creative voice and I was happy to feel like I had my own take on things. As an adult, I look back and can see more clearly, how all the pieces of my identity fit together, and how the influences of my childhood are still playing a part in my formation of self.
Given the opportunity to explore Black girlhood and pop culture more deeply, I am curious as to how others who experienced Black girlhood understand the things they watched, heard, read, and wore, to have influenced their lives. I want to know if those who are currently experiencing their girlhood are aware of how media is working on them, for them, or against them. Over the course of six episodes, I have conversations with a wide range of people, from tweens to those with decades of experience on the planet; dancers, professors, parents, and aspiring citizens, to find out what pop culture and the kinetic lives of Black girls is all about. Along the way, I share a few more of my own experiences as a way of making connections and building bridges for myself and you all, our listeners. With that, I want to welcome you to Back and Forth.
On this first episode of Back and Forth, I have the pleasure of speaking to Author and Professor Dr. DaMaris B. Hill, about her book, Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood. The book is a collection of poetic reflections on Black Girlhood through the lens of the Author’s own experiences. Many of those reflections reference popular culture and encounters with embodiment as a way of providing sensorial insight into what it feels like and what it means to grow up a Black girl in America. It is a visceral work that invites the reader to consider their own experiences in sound and movement. I first met Dr. Hill at the National Women’s Studies Association conference in November of 2022, where I served as a critic for the book on an “Authors meet Critics panel.” The National Women’s Studies Association is a long-standing feminist, academic organization where it is not uncommon to see people like Angela Davis and Erica Huggins roaming the halls of the conference venue. The late bell hooks was a consistent fixture at the conference until her death in 2021. DaMaris shares the distinction of being a Kentucky writer along with hooks, who is an influence of hers. At the time of this recording, Dr. Hill is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and African American Studies at the University of Kentucky and a Visiting Faculty Fellow at Brown University.
DaMaris B Hill. I'm so excited to have you here with me today. Welcome.
DAMARIS B. HILL: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
CARA HAGAN: Dr. Hill, you wrote this Rockstar book called Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood. And I read it and was like blown away by it because you take on the subject of black girlhood and put it into poetry and prose in the most beautiful way. And so many times when I was reading the book, I was underlining words and circling phrases, dog earing pages. It really spoke to me. And so I'm anybody who's listening to this, you just go read the book, that's all. Go read the book. But also something that sticks out to me is that in the description of the book, you say that you hoist your, your childhood self onto your shoulders. And I would love for you to talk to me about what that means when you hoist your childhood self onto your shoulders.
DAMARIS B. HILL: Well, I think a normative coming of age and America is an education in assimilating to a white supremacist hetero-patriarchal, capitalist structure. And in the process, you learn to undervalue your Black girlhood self. But upon reflection, I realized that it was my little Black girl self that had not only the courage to get me to adulthood, but also had the strategic planning, the vivaciousness, the adaptation, stood in warrior stances for me in situations that I might not have otherwise been successful in, even if she was standing alone. And I want to praise the girlhood self, and the girlhoods in others that have defended us as we became women, even in the process of us becoming women and sometimes undervaluing her.
CARA HAGAN: Hmmm beautiful and important. So, in this book, you reference music again and again and again, and movement and embodiment and embodied experiences, visceral experiences. So, this feels like a really physical book to me. And so, I'd love for you to explain a little bit more about how you came to the decision to look at girlhood through this lens of embodiment.
DAMARIS B. HILL: Right, I think, I think I think girlhood in itself is is is so much about the body. But also, in childhood and particularly in Black girlhoods, our culture is passed to us in like very controlled micro-cultures of maybe, you know, five or less girls if we're lucky ten or less girls in a very specific three or four year age window. And that window is also marked by development. By physical development. It is marked by hairstyle, it is marked by popular culture in terms of music and song, it's also marked in popular culture by dance. But even in those microcosms of our very strategic brain, brain-trust cultures, we are creating cultural movement out of a space where it is devalued. We are creating music and song that would otherwise be devalued in the popular culture. And so, it's important to talk about all the ways that as we're maturing in this culture that's trying to make us devalue Black girlhood because of age, the intersections of age, gender, class, race and sexuality, that that is the exact nurturing nitrogen rich soil that allows us to become women in this culture. And I wanted to just kind of reflect and capture a little bit of that, and see if I could share just a little bit of that treasure with others. Like a glimpse, like poof, you can see that, but you can't see all of me, but I'll let you see that.
CARA HAGAN: Mm hmm yes. And so, speaking of embodiment, leading up to the publishing of this piece, you spend some time with the Urban Bush Women For those of you who don't know, it is this amazing dance company. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. And this, they also have this wonderful institute that you went to - workshop. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
DAMARIS B. HILL: Number one, it was the most transformative and informative experiences of my life. Of my life. I am a writer and an artist that believes that you should try to push the boundaries of the art and be new every day. That is why I applied to the space and I'm also anti-racist. And I'm also a fan. But that's why I applied. So, there were about five writers there. But in the embodiment of our praxis, every day, I one, was reconnected with the bodied-self, in conversation with the intellectual self, which is not something that happens often for writers and even less for academics. And a part again, of this maturing is like putting that away. So that was an ignition period. I was ignited there, to remember that knowing, to honor that knowing, to preserve that knowing and to preserve those values of that community, which did not seek to be exclusive, but sought to be inclusive. And taught and sought to nurture the group by learning one another mind, body, and spirit. That's what the Urban Bush Women did for me.
CARA HAGAN: Yeah. And they do that for so many people in so many different ways. And amazing that it was such an inclusive community that of course, people who don't necessarily identify as dancers are invited into that workshop space with them. And it's always amazing. And so, I'd love for you at this point to read some of the work. There are a couple of short poems that stood out to me and one of them is Beloved Weirdo a little bit about the poem. Read it feel free.
DAMARIS B. HILL: Sure.Beloved Weirdo is one of my favorite pieces, because I'm talking about one of the books that really informs what we know about Black women historically. And that's incidents of a slave girl by Harriet Jacobs. And so, what I was doing in that space, and in other spaces is I was thinking about these writers and what their childhood experiences must have been like, and for Beloved Weirdo. Um, what sent me into this poem is very early in the book, Harriet Jacobs says she did not know that she was a slave until she was six. And in my mind, I'm like, some six-year-olds don't know body parts. They don't know their mother's first name. They may not know their last name. There's so much unknowing in being six years old. How could you do definitively know your social position as a slave? What must have been that education? And the result is Beloved Weirdo. And of course, as a part of this book, I try to start with the self. Beloved Weirdo: You are not digging this book about a slave girl in her incidents. The pages read about her early knowing of all things. Meanwhile, you ain't got a stitch of sense. If you did, you would have put that book down and hit that boy asking you if your name is Beloved. And if you are going to be like Suther, and kill the newborn baby he wants to put in you. Is he the weirdo watching in on you and your bestie leaving the woman's clinic? You wish you would have gone wild as the wind on him for prying. Instead you go deaf and dumb thinking on it. Your mind wanders into a book you think on asking Ms. Harriet Jacobs, how does a girl learn to be a slave? Does a snake bite you and leek venom until you fall crippled and spasm zombie you into a slave? If no, then you got to swallow a butterfly and let it flutter your throat. Smother your words until you become a slave. Do you let the butterfly kick you way up into your tonsils? This might make your eyes rummage the floor for cracks. And force you to be humble. Can a slave be made from a butterfly that avoids the windows? Avoids light? Does that butterfly become a bat? Under the girl's collar? Or do you crawl under the hoof of a horse named Andrew Jackson and become a slave? The horse galloping and neighing at your earlobes, dirt in with the blood to be a slave, would you have to take your ribs and fashion Andrew Jackson's hooves with ivory shoes, with the overseers use your teeth to tether and hold Andrew Jackson shoes in like nails, in the cradle of your Black ringing neck. Do you offer the nag a pedestal and curtsy at your mares’ master? Just curious, not dying to know.
CARA HAGAN: Thank you for that beautiful and so many images just like everything in this book. It's super visceral, like everything's coming to mind as you read it. And that's one of the parts about it that I love about this book so much is that there really is so much space for kinesthetic empathy. And if you're listening and you don't know what kinesthetic empathy is, it's what happens when humans either witness, hear, encounter other humans in ways that elicit some sort of physiological emotional response.
Speaking of empathetic responses, I mentioned earlier in the episode that I had an opportunity to respond to the work as a critic on the Authors Meet Critics Panel at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference in November of 2022. Instead of a written response, it felt more appropriate to respond aesthetically. I created three responses. One is a structured dance improvisation to the poem, Continuous fire. Another is a collage in response to the vibrant, sonic undercurrent of the book. You can view both of those responses on the podcast website. My final response is a vocal response to a line in the poem, Dear Christians of Alabama. It’s one of the longer poems in the book, spanning 10 pages, that speaks to the challenges of girlhood against the backdrop of the civil rights movement where girls are compromised on both sides of the struggle.
[Cara Hagan hums and sings: Wait a minute, wait and minute, wait a minute… I have something to say. Well, go on then, yeah, let’s hear it… Bein’ born again ain’t easy. That’s right, mmhm. Ok, come on and sing with me. Bein’ born again ain’t easy. Bein’ born again ain’t easy. Bein’ born again ain’t easy. Bein’ born again ain’t easy.]
One more short poem that I would love for you to read is Never Grow Old, for Aretha Franklin.
DAMARIS B. HILL: Absolutely. Aretha Franklin was a part of this book for so many reasons. I'm thinking about her girlhood. As as a daughter of a pastor, like I'm a daughter of a pastor. Thinking of her girlhood kinda on the latter end of the Great Migration. And my father's congregation was also a congregation, even though thirty years later was very much involved, or connected to two different cultures: both North and South. Like for breakfast, they used to sell breakfast in between the two services, and they would have fried chicken and they would have like, fresh cracklin bacon, like butcher chop bacon. And like people from miles around that didn't even attend the church would be like “yo, they’re serving breakfast over there with like grits and everything we're going,” and like, everybody would come to fellowship even in that way, right? And so, and then thinking also about how young Aretha Franklin began to work um and earn money and how her girlhood might have been shaped, influenced, or compromised by by that earning. There are lots of people I think have like that, even if they think it's a blessing. I'm not judging whether it was a blessing to their life or not. I'm just talking about Tisha Campbell, Lauryn Hill, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin and girls that began working so young. You know, and in addition to their maturity being indoctrinated into the capital, or [Hagan: Yeah] or or exploited or, or used or integrated into the capital. So Never Grow Old: [which you know Aretha brought us joy too] For Aretha Franklin: You said never grow old and swore you wouldn't. This disco is a church Happy stirring joy between your knees. Your worries disappear into the bop. They rock steady. Far from your responsibilities. Huck Finn ain't the only one to know fun. Ben Franklin nibbled at what he knew about how to grow better. Meanwhile, your voices caramel lush, wet and warm, star-kissed, sugar around everyone’s soul. Their hearts bear naked as a baby bathing on the dance floor. A piano churns. You coo. Your eyes floating behind the smoke liners. It never grows old.
CARA HAGAN: Beautiful. So my last question to you is now that you've had a little bit of space between the process of writing this piece and it being born, how are you thinking about Black girlhood now? And most especially the visceral kinetic parts of it? What what is the what is the little girl and you saying and what is the adult you saying now that you're on the outside looking into this project?
DAMARIS B. HILL: The little girl is like, it's about time. I've been here rooting for you. Right? She's welcoming back some parts of me because now I'm committed to living seamlessly between my Black girlhood and my womanhood. I bring my Black girlhood everywhere I go. And in some professional spaces, I know she is not welcome. Some of my friends in the professional spaces want me to leave the trickster, joker, Black girl interrogation, instigation and community for private spaces. They really, really want that. And people that really, really love me, really, really want that. Because they think it's in the way of me having a different, probably more visible type of platform. But after this book, I am very much unsure how to suppress her. And very certain that I don't ever want to [Hagan: Hmm] Because all of that is in the way of me writing the best way that I can. How can I be authentic in my work as an artist and deny myself in public? I can't show up on the page in what you say is like a kinetically emotional way, right,
in terms of kinesthetic empathy, right? How can I transfer the tension that a body that is girl, Black, female, non-rich, non-white in this place we call Babylon or America and not be authentic in the way that I negotiate this space? That suppression may become a disconnection. And for me, [Hagan: Mmmm] even though sometimes I very much desire that I can just go back to being respectable. But I started throwing respectable away a long time ago and oooh she just won't come back. She won't come back. And part of me knows that there is something to be gained in respectability, but there's so much that can be lost, including my sanity. And I've seen so many people sacrifice their sanity on the altar of respectability. Meanwhile, white supremacy is undefeated. Patriarchy is undefeated. Currently undefeated.
CARA HAGAN: Yeah, true story.
DAMARIS B. HILL: So good behavior is warranting what? Favor among the oppressor. I'm trying to figure it out. Um, you know, something I asked myself every day.
CARA HAGAN: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, with that, I want to thank you for sharing your work, for sharing your wisdom and your insight. And the part of you that's still nine years old.
DAMARIS B. HILL: Thank you. Thank you so much, Cara. Thank you.
CARA HAGAN: And that, my friends, is DaMaris B. Hill and her book, Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood. On our next episode, I explore what it means to help girls and young women navigate pop culture and the world at large through education and parenthood. See you next time.
OUTRO: How People Move People, is brought to you by The National Center of Choreography at The University of Akron, or NCCAkron. This podcast is produced by Jennifer Edwards, James Sleeman is our editor, theme music by Ellis Rovin, transcription by Arushi Signh, cover art by Micah Kraus. I am Dacquiri Baptiste, Vice President and COO at Orpheum Theatre Group in Memphis TN, and a NCCAkron Board Member. Special thanks to The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for their continued support of NCCAkron programming like this. To learn more about NCCAkron, please visit us at nccakron.org and follow us on Instagram or Facebook @nccakron. We hope you enjoyed this episode and encourage you to subscribe on your favorite podcast streaming platform by searching for How People Move People.