Ferocious, complicated, brave women. 

Also: resilience, clarity, decisive action.

⅔ into Black History month I figured it’s time to contemplate cultural offerings that embody what’s encapsulated by the terms above. Coincidentally, my friend Catón Lyle posted photographs I had taken of him and his students 8 years ago this week on Facebook, images of people I deeply care about and worked with, now likely strong and resilient young adults either in Highschool or off to college. Institutions where Black history is no longer guaranteed to be taught across the country.

Let’s look at possibilities to learn about Black History outside of the educational settings, then. When it comes to ferocious women, none portrays them better than Viola Davis in her magnum opus, now on Netflix, The Woman King. The actress is a marvel (in everything she touches). Here she was training in her late 50s for a physically demanding role as an African warrior leading an army of women in the State of Dahomey (now Benin) in battle and for the political future of a kingdom contemplating to step away from participating in the slave trade.

The film is an epic mix of action movie, intergenerational, intra- and inter-tribal conflict, serious depiction of slavery, with a hint of romance thrown in, involving a non-African man at the behest of the studio bosses who wanted a White man role for sales points and settled for someone with a White father and a Black mother. Various, really numerous, subplots tug on every emotional register imaginable.

Davis and director Gina Prince-Bythewood together with screenwriter Dana Stevens had to fight for 6 years to get this film made, and only got green light after the success of the Black Panther pointed to the possibility of having this kind of film be a box-office success. It was “the product of a thousand battles.” The obstacles the production team faced when pitching a historical epic centered on strong Black women and a State that celebrated gender equity until the French colonialists crushed it, are at length described in this review in the Smithsonian. The public reaction to the finished product has also been fierce: the extremist Right condemned it for Black women killing White men. Some Black organizations found fault with the depiction of African nations actively participating in the slave trade, which is of course historically correct, and brave to be acknowledged in a Hollywood film that wants to convey history, if you ask me. But the worry remains in the eyes of many, that it partly absolves the Euro-American slavers from their responsibility.

Then there is the complaint that the film’s narrative alters what actually happened, making the Kingdom of Dahomey into a place that abandoned the slave trade, when it actually didn’t. A general complaint regards the fact that a major Blockbuster Movie could have chosen a positive event in Black history, rather than one marred by complexity of historical trade alliances.

The film’s take on history is indeed stretched and to be taken with a grain of salt, or with the understanding that movies need to entertain, and have some lines that help us identify with good or evil. The choice of featuring a female standing army, the historically real Agoodjies with all their strength and complicated lives, though, should be a boost to a current generation of women who are searching for role models in an era that is dead set to roll back both women’s and civil rights (not necessarily in the setting of the military, but fighting everyday challenges.) If you want to learn more details about the actual history of the Agoodijes, there is a smart guideline, The Woman King Syllabus, provided by a group of US-based historians, Ana Lucia Araujo, Vanessa Holden, Jessica Marie Johnson and Alex Gil. 

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When it comes to brave women, do I have a book for you. Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing is a stellar compendium of sources that help us understand the Black radical tradition, from the early 1920s to the late 1980s. If we can, for a moment, put aside our immediate reaction to the term “communist” in the title, still associated with extreme negative reactions, we might particularly benefit from the section that exposes how White supremacists have always successfully used the tool of the communist specter as a weapon in their political crusade. The book, edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, also teaches a lot about the fight against fascism on the one hand, and organizing of labor on the other, both topics of obvious contemporary relevance.

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And last but not least, when we look for resilience and decisive action, there is a new, digitally available, resource that I strongly urge you to sign up for: Hammer and Hope, a magazine of Black Politics and Culture, founded by Jen Parker and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.

Or at least read the poem, Come In, by Ashley M. Jones, the current poet laureate of Alabama, in call and response with an image by photographer and performance artists Carrie Mae Weems, who was born in Portland, OR 69 years ago and is one of our most impactful and famous contemporary artists. It sets the tone and invites all of us to cross a threshold into a community of diverse backgrounds but shared goals.

The name for the new magazine, suggested by Derecka Purnell, a brilliant young lawyer and abolitionist, is a riff on a book, Hammer and Hoe, by Robin D. G. Kelley, a professor of American history at U.C.L.A.

The goals could not be clearer and more decisive:

“….a hammer to smash myths and illusions.”

“And our hope? It is not the false optimism of liberals or the fatalism of armchair revolutionaries or the pessimism of pundits waiting for the end of the world. James Baldwin understood hope as determination in the face of catastrophe: “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.” … victory is never certain but if we don’t fight, we can only lose. Hammer & Hope is here to fight.”

Music today is the soundtrack for the Woman King.