This Far
On Sade, more Sade, and mustaches.
I have written before how Sade is my favorite singer, and perhaps now my favorite artist in any genre. As a teenager, I was deeply insecure about love and romance. Sade’s cool singing and reflections taught me that while relationships could be a battlefield, they ought not to be. Her romantic wisdom gave me hope as I fumbled through crushes and relationships and dating that there was something of worth at the end of it all — “the light of Heaven’s eye,” as she sang in The Safest Place.
Sade recently announced that she was releasing This Far, her entire discography remasted on vinyl. And there have been persistent, exciting rumors since 2018 of the band working on a new album. I hold out hope I will get to see her live before she retires or becomes an ancestor, and am happy even with whispers of Sade Adu still in the studio.
Because an active Sade means that my muse can add more to my writing. Earlier this year, before my son was born, I woke up early and listened to her entire catalog. For months, I got up at dawn and studied her lyrics. I hunted down old interviews from magazines. On June 6th, I published my findings on Established in 1865. In committing to understanding how Sade told the story of her Black personhood in her music, I also inadvertently stumbled upon my “writer’s question.” In writing criticism about her art, Sade pulled out my primary literary question:
“How do we live and love in the West, a civilization that did not have us living and loving each other in mind when it created itself through the Triangle Trade and slavery?”
All of my writing — all the stories I tell and shall tell — are in response to the question Sade exposed within me.
What I’m Writing
The Dignified Child: In Her Music, Sade Answers the Great Question of the West. I will forever consider this story my breakout piece, where I finally settled on the project that is Established in 1865. Anyone who wants to understand what I am trying to accomplish in exploring Black personhood should read this piece.
The Claim: Sade’s Early Years and her Complicated, Conflicted Blackness. This was an earlier piece I wrote on Sade and among the final stories I posted on my WordPress blog before migrating over to Medium. It differs from “The Dignified Child” because of how I condensed my research (keeping it contained to her first year where Sade dropped “Diamond Life” and “Promise”). My key takeaway is how the music industry, while acknowledging her Blackness, also sought to distance her from her other Black peers:
So — why did it occur? The music industry was so adamant about Sade’s cleaving from her Black contemporaries that Billboard put Diamond Life and Promise in their Traditional Jazz Album category. While her first two albums are jazz driven, their lyrical nature should have precluded them from being on the list. Her placement on the lists of what is considered the most artistic music Black personhood has produced only served as an elevation to estrange her from her peers.
What I’m Reading
Strength to Love by Martin Luther King Jr. I finished the book late last night over a La Flor Dominicana cigar and a glass of wine. My central takeaway is that King felt segregation was a manifestation of the conflict of science and religion. This conflict is a central theme throughout the writing; as we have physically advanced via materialism, we have stayed dormant as spiritual beings. “It appears to me that your moral progress lags behind your scientific progress, your mentality outdistances your morality, and your civilization outshines your culture. How much of your modern life can be summarized in the words of your poet Thoreau: ‘Improved means to an unimproved end’” he writes.
He also preached the endurance of non-violence and moral agitation, as he believed “evil cannot permanently organize itself.” I love that line.
Though King fought for Black liberation and civil rights, the book is rife with thoughts from white thinkers. Black studies had not been established as a field yet. It would be six more years until James Cone published Black Theology and Black Power. Still, I wonder about what King’s preponderance of white thinkers says about his audience. Was he trying to make the intellectual case to his white readers that their own thinkers, writers, and academics had produced research against segregation?
The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart by Alicia Garza. I started this book late last night over a La Flor Dominicana cigar and a second glass of wine. Garza is one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. I’m only twenty pages in. Yet she accomplished a lot. Within a few pages, she summarizes the creation of the right-wing movement that ended with a Trump presidency and highlights the truth nearly all non-Black pundits missed in the 2016 election:
And the secret engine of their movement has always been race.
My Mustache, My Self by Wesley Morris. A fascinating portrait of the themes that define Black personhood — racism, identity, ancestorhood — through a meditation on facial hair:
This is why I’ve kept mine. It’s me squeezing my way into a parallel heritage. In this small sense, the work I do caring for it feels connected to a legacy of people who did and do the work chipping at and thinking with this nation. The good work.
