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I’m a big-time Mary fan. Yes, I love “What’s the 411″ (was in college when it hit and stole everyone’s eardrums), love “My Life” (when she really came to define what it means to be real, raw, and vulnerable), and the Mary project (which went outside of many fans’ expectations, but proved that she isn’t as predictable as artists driven by formula). All to say… there’s something about seeing an artist mature with the years and experience. Finally a grown people album, by a grown woman. I’m in my mid-30s, so perhaps there’s an empathy i have with how far Mary has come. In an industry where artists take risks by not catering to the beat driven teen/post-teen audience, Mary offers an album delicate in its approach to what it means to show resilience through growing pains, but with a maturity and musical complication not seen on some of the previous projects (where an unchanging beat or sample drives throughout). Many of these will be songs that people remember generations later; they’ll be the songs people are proud to remember because of Mary’s ability and genius to relay universality in the personal. Listening to it, I felt like I’ve been growing up with her all along. “Just Fine”, “Hurt Again”, “Shake Down”, “Till the Morning”, “What Love Is”, “Work In Progress”, “Smoke”… all brilliant works. I did find that the album gets better as it moves along, but that’s not such a bad thing. It “grows” up– if not a strategic move, then perfectly incidental. I don’t think she has produced a better album; and am a bit confused by those who say it’s just another great Mary project. No project she’s done is as beautifully sophisticated, vocally sound, and lyrically rich as “Growing Pains”. Period.

(The following may be considered offensive to those squeamish about the “N” word. You have been warned).

Interesting to return to these ways we come to understand and imbue meaning as we evolve and grow. In my first book, I wrote a piece called “niggapoem”, which is pretty much my stance today. In part, it says:

nigga nigga nigga
some figure we would
no longer be that
if we erased letters
from texts
eliminate
“i”, “g”, “n”, “e”, and “r”
from the alphabet
some figure that it would
hurt less
if the sound betrayed
or alienated
the tongues of bigots
but that can’t be
and I don’t want no part
in that P.C. fiction

as a child
the air never swallowed up
the hate of such injurious
word-thangs
nor their history
so erased from texts
or censored in speech
“nigger” would mock us still
in the white imagination
(when he see
or follow me
what do he see?)
“NIGGER!”
sometime
without saying a word

the poem goes on…. but I more or less question the privileging the racist denotation of the word as having any more veracity than its (re)appropriations. Why must this be the way the word is seen and viewed forever and ever? Do we not have creative agency to understand the complexity of the term WHILE acknowledging its racist deployment, but ALSO its evolutions? Those appropriations, I might add, that WE came to define on our own terms: not a reactionary move, but a ownership of the very thing used to hurt us … differently. Was it really the word nigger or RATHER the spit or noose or beating in the context that is the problem? Would we be less pained by the the word if we got beaten and killed and abused, but no one ever used the word? Let’s talk about the real shit people! We are delusional to think that global white supremacy hangs on the proliferation of a term that could have been “jiggy” with the same actions. Words don’t inherently carry power, we imbue them with power….and some of us suckas buy into that. I won’t raise kids who fall victim to such discursive trickery. They will know who they are and their history enough to see, in spite of the popular denotation of terms, or what happens to be the pejorative terms of the day, that they are special, powerful, strong young men/women. More than this, I’ll show them such through my treatment of them. Hmmm… imagine that. Showing young people that they aren’t “niggas” instead of banning the word. Go figure!?! We call black children “stupid” and “dumb” all the time, and few raise a fuss about that.

If operating as a King, if your work and your values reflect that of someone passionate about loving his people, then no six letter word is gonna diminish that. When our ghettos were being neglected, when bourgie blacks were getting fat of their wealth and upward mobility, while the rest of us were left in the gutter (to avoid crack, gangs, alcoholism, child abuse, etc…), few upstanding blacks cared that we called each other nigga. I grew up in Little Rock’s Highland Court in the 80’s, so don’t tell me different. This resuscitated pride about our people and history when solidarity among black people is a word for show during Black History Months and special dignified occasions, is shameful. I’ve been treated worse than a nigger (in the pejorative sense) by black people than many of my white (or Other raced) counterparts. So this Pride in our heritage by some seems a bit like empty rhetoric.

And now that social neglect boomerangs back vis-a-vis a rather passionate reappropriation of the term disconnected from any history of racism in the U.S., we wish to bury it. We didn’t bury the bodies that bled on city streets when leaders in our community were busy drawing clean lines between “good black folk” and “hoodrats”. We didn’t bury the victims of heroin addiction, but laud Cinematic shows of American Gangstas. We didn’t bury, in dignity, the thousands of black men who died of AIDS because of our shame about their homosexuality. We didn’t come to the forefront for the many women beaten and bruised in domestic violence relationships– the utter trauma internalized by the little black girls and boys who witnessed such acts or who were themselves victims of it. We did want to bury Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple” for the way some felt it shamed and demonized black men. We bury anything that seems to “shame” our community, EXCEPT for the fact that niggas SHAME most of the niggas in our community. And that’s the real shame.

So all I’m saying is… Man the fuck up. Be the Kings you claim to be. Stand up for your peoples….or otherwise shut the hell up. It’s like Method Man said (and i paraphrase) There are words worse than Nigga: Dafur! I’ll add a few more: Katrina, AIDS, Illiteracy, Poverty, Rape, Homicide, Cancer, SickleCell…

I know my history, I know etymology (”nigger” didn’t start in America, but that’s another point for those who care to explore the semiotic dynamism of words….most pejoratives did not start off as such but become hateful), words almost always evolve in their meaning. I just think that when the niggas telling me to stop using the word get off their asses and really start addressing systemic change: poverty, education, HIV/AIDS, sexism, homophobia, etc… then I’ll give a thought or two to respecting them as Kings enough to stop using the word. The demand, from most I hear complaining about it, is pretty damn ridiculous… and I can understand the widespread resistance to stop using it by those whose emotional/spiritual/physical health and well-being, has been so shamelessly ignored. Until then…

and respectfully
(i try to refrain from excessive deployment of the term, especially around those with heightened sensibilities around it)…. there are some in the NAACP who get what I’m saying and I don’t think they’ll respond defensively. They’re out there doing shit.

All the cats sweating and hyperventilating?

Nigga Please!

Tim’m T. West
(Head Nigga In Charge of My Own Destiny and those who I love and go to war for)