Why We Can't Have Nice Things: A Meditation on Mental Illness and the Hip-Hop Generation

In the aftermath of the shattering death of Chris Lighty, activist Rosa Clemente yesterday broke the silence of her own struggles with bipolar disorder, depression and thoughts of suicide. It takes tremendous courage in our cultures – U.S., hip-hop, African-diasporic – for her to place her mind, body and spirit on the line like that. Especially since not only is she a public figure known for her outspoken voice and uncompromising fire, Clemente was also a Vice Presidential candidate in 2008, half of the first ticket in U.S. history to consist of women of color. (But y’all should know this already.) 

Along with Clemente, Lighty’s suicide has compelled many leaders in the hip-hop community to call for a discussion of depression and other mental illness among communities of color. My hope is not that only will these conversations take place, but that they will include a vigorous examination of some behaviors in our cultures that may actually be dangerous forms of self-medication.

Relentless hustling at the cost of meaningful relationships and substantive rest.

Spending far more on trendy objects with fleeting value than we produce for wages, in culture, and/or with meaning.

Partying too many nights and sleeping away too many days.

Obsessing over the lives of people we will never meet and don’t even admire (this being my personal drug of choice.) 

And the alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana, oh my. My own awareness of the pervasive use of controlled substances by men of color in the hip-hop generation as a possible mask for widespread depression came when Joan Morgan called it in her 1999 seminal work When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down. Tens of thousands of us are committing suicide in slow motion through the daily act of ingesting toxins through our lips, and that impulse to not take seriously the proposition Morgan made twelve years ago is a surefire indicator that we have a pandemic on our hands. In our desire to not be judgmental – understandable given how ready and consistent others are in pathologizing our every action – we overextend to normalize and even celebrate almost ritually our penchants for self-destruction as if our ancestors were never lashed across the back while picking that shit.

And let us seriously consider that this penchant has been deeply implanted and cultivated by a system in which we were never meant to thrive. When I was diagnosed with breast cancer this past January, one of the first memoirs I read was Fred Ho’s Dairy of a Radical Cancer Warrior: Fighting Cancer and Capitalism at the Cellular Level. The self-described Marxist matriarchal Luddite posits that there is no eliminating cancer without fighting capitalism. As a disease with no singular cause, an individual must take holistic measures to overcome cancer. According to Ho, this demands a collective strategy of activism as much as personal approaches to diet, exercise, emotional wellness and spiritual healing. Our economic system creates such powerful and varied toxicity in the physical environment and socio-political culture that we cannot fathom a world without cancer if we are unwilling to participate in global movements for justice for “capitalism creates more problems than it solves.”

I wonder if the same is not true for mental illness in all its forms. There’s a reason we do all these self-destructive things and with such great pride and defensiveness. It’s the American way, yo, and who else is on never-ending mission to prove worthy of our imposed citizenry if not people of African descent? We forget that the American way was not conceived with our success in mind. It’s precisely that we forget we sure as hell act in ways that prove that very point.

It never fails to shock me how the history of our cultural production in this nation often replays the trope of the geeks gone cool only to be undone for attempting to keep a social contract they were forced to make by those who are far more powerful than they are.  We begin at the margins, a necessary but underappreciated strata of the socio-economic structure. The dominant class needs us for its own survival but doesn’t recognize our humanity never mind respect our greatness. Yet we manage decade after decade, generation after generation, era after era, to fashion that marginalization into something phenomenal. We don’t do it with a calculated desire or decision to win over the haters. We do it to remember and assert who we really are in the face of their domination. We do it simply because great is who we are.

Then the haters get wind of our genius and want to be down. They want to capitalize spiritually as well as economically because domination has its psychic limits. (Although most are too busy dominating to be conscious of this otherwise they might evolve to more organic and effective strategies toward abiding fulfillment.) The haters finally see us, and so powerful is their recognition, we develop amnesia. We forget that we did not come to this table of our own will and say, “I want to play!” And like the geeks who finally get invited to the cool kids’ party, we run hard to stay in place. We mimic their present of consumptive excess as if we had their past of unearned privilege. Some of us even take a page from their domination playbook and eat each other.

The irony is that it is only the most fortunate of us who survive long enough to experience that psychic cost of domination and privilege. The pain, however, is far more excruciating because our privilege was actually earned and yet resolves nothing. It was never meant to we learn only now that we are so far removed from our natural, effective methods of self-healing as individuals and in community. Because we have lost sight of the joy of creating for its own sake, because we have forgotten the power of caring only what we think of ourselves, because we have internalized forms of medication that don’t even cure its creators, we come to realize perhaps too late that this is the real reason why we can’t have nice things and then feel powerless to do anything about it.

But first things first. Let’s admit to ourselves then one another how deathly afraid we are of being still and sober. Before we attempt to hush, patronize or ignore people who are fighting for lives of meaning despite mental illness, each of us must take inventory of our own behavior and honestly ask ourselves just how healthy are our coping mechanisms of choice despite how commonplace they may be. We must allow each other to confess that the darkness reminds us that we have chosen to play games that we were never intended to win and the occasional prizes we gain along the way may not be worth the struggle. Where anyone of us stands on the issue of whether this game is capable of changing or worthy of playing is irrelevant really. Left, right, center, we all agree that things cannot remain as they are. We might as well agree that self-care is as necessary as breathing, and that the breaths we most desperately need to take must come with words that break the silence over mental illness and its culturally sanctioned masks.

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence,” said Audre Lorde, “it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.”

Pinkin' Ain't Easy

Pinkin’ Ain’t Easy

Big pinkin’, you spendin’ Gs

Ya think you’re backin’ a cause

Meanwhile you spreadin’ disease

You wanna be sure

that your runnin’ for cures

And you're not pinkwashed and pimped like a whore

Rethink pink and not get pimped

You gotta rethink pink don’t get pimped

Before I was diagnosed with breast cancer in January 2012, the pink ribbon inundation secretly irked me. I found the entire phenomenon suspicious and unsettling. But then out of guilt, I would buy the pen, USB drive or whatever trinket being shilled for the cause at the cash register. How could I as a woman not support breast cancer awareness and prevention and quite possibly contribute to research for a cure?

Looking back I realize how little the relentless commercialism did for my own awareness. On the contrary, it made me want to NOT think deeply about breast cancer.  The attempt to dress the illness in a traditional femininity and promote consumerism as the path to its eradication repelled me. 

After my diagnosis I did start to investigate, and being a long-time activist, my research eventually led to the unique politics of breast cancer philanthropy and what is referred to by its critics overall as pink ribbon culture. I am still reflecting where I land along the spectrum between pink ribbon culture and its feminist detractors, and that surely will be the topic of a future post or two. I am clear, however, that what I discovered about the way breast cancer is pimped by corporations in ways that run counter to the stated goal of ending the disease made me actively pursue a distance that I already felt from this juggernaut of which I was supposed to be a beneficiary.

And I certainly did benefit from Susan G. Komen’s successful fundraising efforts. At the time of my diagnosis, I was uninsured so I went to Planned Parenthood for my reproductive health care. If not for PPNYC and the funding it received from SGK, I might not have been able to get a mammogram, detect the invasive ductal carcinoma in my left breast or even secure insurance and therefore treatment through the the Medicaid Cancer Treatment Program. 

Then SKG lost is mind and temporarily defunded Planned Parenthood on the advice of its former senior VP for public policy who was intent on imbuing the organization with her pro-life politics. That Handel chick was slick, I’ll give her that. Nice tactic to suggest that the impetus to not fund organizations that provided abortions was to stay remain within federal funding policy. Close but no cigar even if it has a pink ribbon emblazoned on the wrapper.

Hence, my hot little letter to the SKG calling out the fact that their decision to defund PP effectively signaled that they only cared about finding a cure for women who were insured and told the rest of us we could just drop dead. Yeah, I went there. I even wrote, “Neither Planned Parenthood nor cancer asked me what my position on abortion was, and neither should you.”

This is also not to say that there aren’t things about so-called pink ribbon culture that don’t resonate with me. But this branding of the cause that raises so much money for anything BUT the cure? No, ma’am, don’t expect me to register for your race any time soon.

Here’s the ironic thing about the color pink; its choice was probably one of the few things SGK did right. As I learned from watching the documentary Pink Ribbons, Inc. which is based on the book of the same name by Dr. Samantha King, the original breast cancer awareness ribbon was salmon. When the woman who created it refused to get into bed with the foundation, SKG actually asked women with breast cancer what color the ribbon should be. They chose pink – with all its cultural loading. That choice shouldn’t surprise us regardless of how we feel about the color, especially if the members of that focus group were the typical face of breast cancer – White, heterosexual, middle-class women of a certain age. Call me cynical, but when I envision that focus group taking place, I don’t see women of color, queer women or even Goth girls at that table. The cultural loading of the color pink is precisely why the breast cancer survivors in that focus group chose it, and we can’t fault SKG for that.

We can fault SKG, however, for not more actively asking its primary constituency what we want about more substantive things — like where the money goes. Then again, I’m presuming that women in the throes of a BC journey are the foundation’s primary constituency. With all the emphasis on early prevention as opposed to a cure, we may not be. One can have Carte Blanche Healthcare, and cancer treatment still strain finances so perhaps SKG believes that those who have or have had breast cancer don’t have the disposable income as those who have not. Hence, we’re not a lucrative market for handguns and chicken.

All this said, I do pink.  I pink within limits. Like my BC madrina Jenny L. Saldaña, I wear the pink ribbon – usually on some funky attire that’s true to my personality – to identify myself as part of a tribe. To give the illness a different face than what people might be accustomed to.  I find that within certain communities, residual stigma still remains around breast cancer so I wear the pink ribbon to combat that among my own people. Most importantly I realized early in my own cancer journey that my own return to wholeness required that I be visible with both my strength and vulnerability.

That said, I won’t be walking, running, kayaking, skydiving, none of that for the Susan G. Komen Foundation for the Cure any time soon. I never say never though. When I have a say in where the money I raise goes, I will eagerly sign up, solicit donations and walk my brown ass off for SGK.  Until then I’ll make my donations directly to the breast cancer organizations whose work are aligned with my own values, priorities and politics.

Resources:

The Business of Breast Cancer Awareness by Eileen Z. Fuentes

Breast Cancer Action and the Think Before You Pink Toolkit

Breast Cancer Prevention Means Eliminating Toxics

Is My Favorite Beauty Product is Safe? Search for It in the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Database

  

20 Most Dangerous Cosmetic Toxins (Print This List When You Shop for Makeup)

Watch the documentary PINK RIBBONS, INC

Arguing with Audre: On My Impending Mastectomy and Reconstruction

As a strident feminist of color, of course, I would read Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals now that I myself was diagnosed with breast cancer. In addition to reading practical books with strategies for beating the illness, I also wanted food for the soul that would enable me as a spiritual being and political animal to draw meaning from the experience. What better to read than the memoirs of radical cultural activists such as Fred Ho and Audre Lorde?

I had long been an admirer of Mother Lorde's work, but I had never had the courage to read the work she produced during her battle with first breast and then later liver cancer. That's how much fear the mere word instilled in me. I was oblivious to just how prevalent this illness is even when my best friend was diagnosed with and survived ovarian cancer in 2003 and my own grandmother succumbed to colon cancer in 2005.

Fear is hereditary it seems. My own mother is a 12-year breast cancer survivor and did not even know she had it. Neither did my father. I remember back in 1993 when they found a lump in her right breast. My only image is of my mother crying quietly as they wheeled her into surgery. Having never been in the hospital her entire life except to birth her three children, Ma was frightened. I remember several hours later the doctor telling us, “It was nothing.”

Once the shock of my own diagnosis had passed and I entered warrior mode, my mother and I shared scars. I showed her the fine needle marks of the two spots where my left breast had been biopsied, and she showed me where she received radiation. “Radiation?” My reaction surprised her. She reminded me of the time that I accompanied her and my father to the hospital for her daily radiation treatment. But they don’t give radiation to people who don’t have cancer, do they? After all, radiation can cause cancer.

She told me she still had her records, and I asked her to find them. Sure enough, in 2000 my mother had been diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ, underwent a lumpectomy and had twenty rounds of radiation. It never registered to either of my parents that she was being treated for breast cancer. They just did as the doctors told them and then moved on with their lives.

This discovery left me with a variety of thoughts and emotions. First was the angry thought. What the fuck kind of medical care do we have in this country that a 69-year old woman can be treated for breast cancer and never know it? Then I imagined all the times I sat in waiting rooms over the years, completing family histories across a wooden clipboard with a chained pen and checking No in the box next to cancer. Had I known that my mother had breast cancer, I certainly would have been more vigilant in minding the health of my breasts. I finally settled on the positive. Given her personality, it’s probably best that Ma did not know she had breast cancer, and all that matters now is that she blazed the survivor trail, and I could follow in her footsteps.

Of course, being my own woman, I have to pack different tools for my journey to survivorship. My mother, for example, would rather I not read so much. I had been reading Straight from the Hope: Letters of Hope and Inspiration from Survivors of Breast Cancer and that, coupled with the counseling I had been undergoing (which I began several months before I was diagnosed), helped spurred a healing crisis. As much as the letters delivered on the promise of hope and inspiration, they also triggered long-denied and deeply suppressed loneliness over my challenge in finding a life partner. So many of the women wrote about the men who loved them and stood by them as they faced breast cancer despite all the prices it exacts, from the lost of breasts to the threat of death. I call this a healing crisis because this despair needed to be excavated, felt and cleared if I was going to not only defeat cancer but truly become holistically well. Perhaps it’s because it is difficult for them to watch me sob over things that seem unrelated to my immediate circumstances, but my parents wish I would just focus on getting well. My father in particular understands why a cancer diagnosis would compel me to evaluate my life, but if he had his way, I’d cut it all this painful introspection. I have to remind my parents that my tears are a sign that I am getting well because I am going to the root of my dis-ease.

And I do moderate my cancer-related reading. I read enough to satisfy whatever desire I have in the moment for information or inspiration, and just when I brush against the edge of overwhelm, I stop. This is not typical for me who loves to read and can research incessantly once I become taken with a subject. I recognize that each person who embarks on the cancer journey must do whatever she feels is right for her, and I respect my own choices. Some people like my mother want to entrust themselves to their doctors and, to the best of their ability, focus on other aspects of their lives. Others choose to make confronting the illness their full-time job.

Knowing myself fairly well, I knew from the start that the best thing for me fell somewhere between the two extremes. The kind of person that I am, I cannot beat cancer by becoming a full-time patient. For someone like me, that’s giving the disease too much power. (That is the same reason why, when I begin chemotherapy, I will cut and donate my hair, shave my head and use it as an excuse to stock up on the hats, scarves and earrings I love so much.) By the same token, I cannot wait for my doctors to treat me but rather proactively take actions – change my diet, return to my meditation practice, become a client of You Can Thrive where I receive complementary treatments such as Reiki and acupuncture etc. – to heal myself. (It also means excising things from life – habits, beliefs and people – that do not serve me.) I continue to finish working toward my MFA in writing and producing for television, pursue my interest in burlesque with Pink Light Burlesque, and otherwise live my life – the life I find worth fighting for – on my terms.

Perhaps this is why I find myself becoming angry with Mother Lorde when I read the following passage in her cancer journals:

I would lie if I did not also speak of loss. Any amputation is a physical and psychic reality that must be integrated in a new sense of self. The absence of my breast is a recurrent sadness, but certainly not one that dominates my life. I miss it, sometimes piercingly. When other one-breasted women hide behind the mask of prosthesis or the dangerous fantasy of reconstruction, I find little support in the broader female environment for my rejection of what I feel is cosmetic sham. But I believe that socially sanctioned prosthesis is merely another way of keeping women with breast cancer silent and separate from each other. For instance, what would happen if an army of one-breasted women descended on Congress and demanded that the use of carcinogenic fat-stored hormones in beef-feed be outlawed?

I don’t know if this is a quirk all my own, but it’s not easy for me to fight with an ideological titan such as Audre Lorde even in my head, but fight with her I did. It’s not lost on me that she lost her breast at a time when breast cancer treatment was far more limited and reconstruction was only available to the economically privileged. (It is now federal law that for women whose health insurance covers mastectomies, the company must also cover reconstruction. This right includes women covered by Medicaid. In fact, I am insured under a special Medicaid program created specifically for people diagnosed with certain cancers.) I recognize that there is much greater awareness and less stigma of breast cancer in the twenty-two years since she first wrote that passage. I have no doubt that if Mother Lorde were alive today she would have radical critique of pink ribbon culture as well as a thorough analysis of the discrepancies in the prevention and treatment of women of color, queer women and poor and working-class women, and that she would experience and acknowledge a wider acceptance of her desire not to hide her mastectomy if she stuck with that decision.

Still I was angry at Audre. I stewed over that passage and wrote furiously in my journal. I understood and respected her point on an intellectual level. She meant that being able to undergo reconstruction can allow someone to become politically complacent about the institutionalized oppression that perpetuates breast cancer. When Audre wrote about what might happen if an army of single-breasted women descended on the capitol demanding change, I saw it. The image compelled me as an activist and an artist. If I did not have the option of reconstruction, I would step without hesitation into that vision and be part of it.

But as a socially conscious woman, I would be a part of such an action whether or not I underwent reconstruction, and I would like to think that I and my saline implants would not have my integrity questioned. I haven’t finished The Cancer Journals, and so perhaps she undergoes a shift of which I’m not yet aware, but thus far Audre talks about reconstruction without considering the blessings she had that made it easier to forgo one. She had a partner. She had children. She had recognition for the work she did. For what of someone like me who is young, single and hopeful that such love and appreciation is still possible for me, especially if I can transform myself through my journey back to wellness?

The ironic thing about my anger at Mother Lorde is that my own mother wants me to conserve my breast. She would rather I have chemotherapy before surgery in an effort to shrink the tumor with the hope that a lumpectomy will suffice. My breast surgeon would comply with my wishes if this was something I chose to do, but I am following my instinct which is to heed his recommendation: give up my breast. While I don't fool myself that I will sail through this without great emotional pain, I am at peace with my choice. Truth be told, reconstruction makes it much easier even though the method I have chosen means that I will not wake up from surgery with an already reconstructed breast to ease the pain of the natural one I lost.

The fantasy Mother Lorde dismisses is about having a certain quality of life and making a decision to not acquiesce everything the disease attempts to demand. I wrote in my journal:

Must I take on every battle? Is this one not enough? Can I sit out the body image struggle, too? The truth is I can’t. Not for a minute. No amount of reconstruction – no matter how aesthetically pleasing to the Western standard of beauty it may be to the immediate eye – is going to make me forget that my God-given breast is gone, a casualty to this disease.

How does the fantasy of reconstruction favor me, if I am lucky enough to meet a man with whom I want to be intimate with in all ways, when I have to reveal and explain to him all the complexities – physical, emotional, spiritual -- of being a breast cancer survivor? There is nothing about replacing my natural breast with an implant that is going to permit me to lie to myself ever about what I am going through right now. On the contrary, it will be a constant reminder. While my feelings, thoughts and beliefs towards the experience may change and even improve over time, I will never be done with it. I can never forget.

How is that a fantasy when there’s no escape but only reminders?

And as I process my anger at Mother Lorde, I find myself wishing that she was alive so I can argue with her. The existence of my anger reminds me that I am very much alive and well, and had she herself survived cancer, Audre probably would have welcomed a loving yet vigorous debate with a younger feminist of color and fellow cancer warrioress. She remains an inspiration to me, and I embrace her challenge to remain politically vigilant in the ongoing war against cancer. I first must win the personal battle, however, and that means making the unapologetic choices that enable me to keep faith that more joy awaits me no matter what challenges oppression might dish.

All I Still Have

Night Catches Us: A Meditation on Activism, Family and Healing

The best movies provoke thought long after one has left the theater, and the film that did that for me in 2010 was Tanya Hamilton’s Night Catches Us. I saw it when it opened in theaters in December, and it continues to inspire reflection. Some considerations, however, are quite uncomfortable, but those tend to be the ones that have the most to teach.

For those of us actively engaged in social justice movements, Night Catches Us challenges us to examine the personal impact of our political actions. To what extent such actions and their consequences are the inevitable sacrifice we make in the fight against oppression? Is it possible that some of the actions we justify as political resistance are actually rooted in personal wounds, some of which cannot be attributed neatly or wholly to social injustice? And because it may not be possible (if even desirable) to disentangle or reconcile these possibilities, how do we discern the right thing to do? Part of the brilliance of Hamilton’s debut feature is its complex, and therefore, unresolved reflection on this issue.



Set in Philadelphia in 1976, the Night Catches Us opens with the return home of Marcus (Anthony Mackie), a member of the Black Power movement who left four years earlier under questionable circumstances. On the surface, the story is a character-driven mystery: did or did not Marcus inform on a fellow revolutionary and ignite the events that resulted in his assassination in a hail of police fire? But at its essence, the film is about love. Romantic love. Parental love. Revolutionary love. It is an examination of the way those different kinds of love intersect and collide, how they can and cannot be reconciled in ways we can neither control nor predict, and why despite all this messiness, we still feel compelled to get our hands and hearts dirty.

After seeing the film, I was immediately reminded of my 1997 trip to Cuba where I had to opportunity to hear Assata Shakur speak. One sentiment that she shared was that she regretted how little time she and fellow activists spent with their children. Shakur stated that while their children might have been present while they were engaged in political action, they were not involved. Furthermore, she also clarified that she was not speaking merely of politicizing children but rather the larger and more important objective of raising them in community, drawing them emotionally close and otherwise rejecting the expectation that their needs be sacrificed to promote social justice.



Clearly, some activists of the 60s and 70s who gave so much to their people did so at the expense of their own children. And to be sure, some of us are repeating that mistake, inheriting psychic wounds as readily as we do eye color or body type. With all compassion and fairness, I can imagine that the sociopolitical climate in which our elders lived was such that they could not even see never mind manage the contradiction of advocating so vigilantly for other families to the point that they neglected their own.

Yet ironically the sacrifices they made and the gains they achieved actually make it easier for my generation to do just that. Whether we are red diaper babies or political black sheep, as we start our own families and build relationships with the youth in our lives, we seem to be making a more conscientious effort to balance engaging in activism toward creating a better world “out there” and practicing liberation within our own homes. Thus, in many ways, even the errors of the previous generation result in the privileges of ours. So I don’t say this to judge those elders or reify my peers. I only wish to name an unsaid – or more accurately bring whispered conversations to the public discourse – with the intention of promoting communal healing and political effectiveness. My hope is that more of us will watch Night Catches Us and show up courageously to a multigenerational conversation about the questions it raises.



Not that it is a film that should only be seen by people who consider themselves activists. Watching it reminded me of lesson I learned early and painfully in 2010: all any of us needs to do to have a life that matters is heal our family’s history. Depending on what we value, we harbor fantasies of being the next Oprah Winfrey or Malcolm X. There’s nothing wrong with that, but this is not necessary to have a positive and pervasive impact in the world. If all you did was identify the wound that has been passed down in your family from one generation to the next and said, “This stops with me,” you will have paid your rent on this planet. For some of us the family wound is violence. For others it is substance abuse. In my own family it is abandonment, real and perceived. Anything you might do after healing your family history is above and beyond the call of duty, and, hence, there is no need to sacrifice your children.

Life coach Rhonda Britten writes that love is messy. So is movement. It’s that messiness that makes both necessary and worthwhile.