Stills from "Brujas," directed by Destiny Frasqueri
When I feel defeated by the darkness of this world, I watch a video of Destiny Frasqueri aka Princess Nokia throwing soup at a white supremacist on the subway. I suspect I share this ritual with a lot of people. Frasqueri is a uniquely inspiring, life-giving artist.
Her single, “Brujas” from her mixtape 1992, and the stunning music video for it she directed herself continues her project of uplifting women of color and alternate forms of knowledge and ways of living and healing. In her latest mixtape, Frasqueri is interested in exploring the joy of the 90s, but without slipping into unexamined nostalgia, as she corrects against the whitewashing of the decade. I praise the way in this music video she makes reference to The Craft, a movie that no doubt inspired many a young witch and bruja, but in casting herself and her friends, addresses the way whiteness attempted to overwrite the history of yoruba and hoodoo and other spiritual practices labeled witchcraft, transforming that history of resistance into a non-threatening hobby for white ladies. Witchcraft, for Frasqueri, offers a way to survive in a world where few are meant to, and also a different way to seek and know truth, and to create a different world. This music video, with over three million views on YouTube, reminds me of Ashleigh Greene Wade’s argument in “‘New Genres of Being Human’: World Making through Viral Blackness,” where she writes, “uncovering and privileging these subjugated epistemologies as components of being human, the virtual-physical assemblage displaces Man as the gatekeeper of knowledge, thereby inspiring people to desire something other than the status quo” (41). To be a bruja for Frasqueri is to desire more, to inspire others to desire more, and to know how to achieve those desires.
Her single, “Brujas” from her mixtape 1992, and the stunning music video for it she directed herself continues her project of uplifting women of color and alternate forms of knowledge and ways of living and healing. In her latest mixtape, Frasqueri is interested in exploring the joy of the 90s, but without slipping into unexamined nostalgia, as she corrects against the whitewashing of the decade. I praise the way in this music video she makes reference to The Craft, a movie that no doubt inspired many a young witch and bruja, but in casting herself and her friends, addresses the way whiteness attempted to overwrite the history of yoruba and hoodoo and other spiritual practices labeled witchcraft, transforming that history of resistance into a non-threatening hobby for white ladies. Witchcraft, for Frasqueri, offers a way to survive in a world where few are meant to, and also a different way to seek and know truth, and to create a different world. This music video, with over three million views on YouTube, reminds me of Ashleigh Greene Wade’s argument in “‘New Genres of Being Human’: World Making through Viral Blackness,” where she writes, “uncovering and privileging these subjugated epistemologies as components of being human, the virtual-physical assemblage displaces Man as the gatekeeper of knowledge, thereby inspiring people to desire something other than the status quo” (41). To be a bruja for Frasqueri is to desire more, to inspire others to desire more, and to know how to achieve those desires.
This effort to both create and uncover more meaning and beauty reminds me of a brilliant poem by Angel Nafis, "Woo Woo Roll Deep," where she writes:
… Gerloni
keeps a frothy pot of black eyed peas boiling
on News Years day. Marlee staves off the yeast
with a garlic clove in her puss. You can’t tell us
shit. We always down for the miracle.
The regular-as-fuck dawn making brand new
the farm of our hearts…
keeps a frothy pot of black eyed peas boiling
on News Years day. Marlee staves off the yeast
with a garlic clove in her puss. You can’t tell us
shit. We always down for the miracle.
The regular-as-fuck dawn making brand new
the farm of our hearts…
This miracle is not a matter of “magical thinking” in the way people reach for that phrase to criticize Black Girl Magic; it is an understanding that what is true and real is not something that is limited by the laws of white supremacist universal reason. Just because a source of power that has been devalued does not mean it has been lost. That power has been there all along, beyond the edge of time and reason, creating new ways of knowing and being, and it will be the thing that ends this world and brings another, wielded by the Black Feminist Poets who will lead the way.
Works Cited:
- Nafis, Angel. "Woo Woo Roll Deep." Buzzfeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/angelnafis/poem-woo-woo-roll-deep?utm_term=.xcGb9JRYV#.duABJ8g4j. Accessed December 2017.
- Wade, Ashleigh Greene. “‘New Genres of Being Human’: World Making through Viral Blackness,” The Black Scholar, vol. 47, no. 3, 107, pp. 33-44.
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