Dear Viewer,
About a decade and a half ago, I saw some women in Dakar, Senegal arguing over which black candidate would become president. And I could not understand.
Growing up in the US, I had never seen such a thing. I had a glass ceiling in my brain, because there was a glass ceiling in my country. I stood there, and quickly realized I was incapable of understanding how it felt to know that someone who looked like me could be in charge of my country -let alone how it felt to take that knowledge for granted. I was excited that someone else knew. Wanted desperately to be around to see it. To see a whole country full of people take it for granted. And I wanted very badly to be able rock a skirt with a president who looked like me on it, like those women were doing.
Last year, I came across a work of art that sort of speaks to how that glass ceiling was created. It is a series of photos by Carrie Mae Weems entitled “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried,” made in 1995, a little after my trip to Senegal. It is a work of art that I have always understood. My mother also understood it, and if I had had a daughter, by now she too would have learned to understand it.
Not too long after, however, I came across that same fabric from Dakar, in Harlem. But this time, it had my president on it. And for the first time, in as long as anyone on the Afro-American side of my family can remember, that president looked just like us… which is a long, long time, because we’ve been here since the US was barely even a colony, so that’s over 400 years… And I realized that sometimes, even things that we have learned to believe will always be there, like glass ceilings, can change. And that, if we live long enough, they will be so long ago and far away that for once, none of us will understand. Which is a good thing.
I can feel the ceiling lifting more each day. And though it breaks my heart that the many generations of relatives who fought to lift it cannot be here to share in the fruit of their labor, I count it as a blessing that I am here to see it. So I decided to celebrate. And do something to mark the transition. I decided to do what other black women do when they know the president can look just like them. Because now I understand.
So far I have found Obama prints from Lagos, Ghana, Mali, and Tanzania. I rocked my Obama skirt for the first time on July 19, 2009. And even though women overseas usually just do it during election time, I’ll be rocking my Obama print for a year.
Why?
Because you only get one first black president!
xoxo,
Ai
