Black History Month

Why do we celebrate Black History Month? Isn’t Black History simply part of History? The short answer is yes. Black History is a part of History. Of course, it is. And we celebrate it this month to have an opportunity to learn more about it. We, as a society, have a desperate need to learn more black peoples’ stories to build more accurate pictures of black people in our heads. And it doesn’t mean erasing any other stories or making them smaller; it’s about making space for something that a Nigerian author Chine Achebe calls “a balance of stories”. We still haven’t reached that balance when it comes to Black History.

I couldn’t shake off the dark parts of our history vividly shown at Arthur Jafa’s exhibition Magnumb at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art last year. The combination of the real-life size photographs of massacred human bodies of African Americans accompanied by the proud faces of the KKK members shows something brutal, scary, and real. Suddenly it hit me. I am not supposed to shake anything off. I am supposed to look. Eyes wide open. I needed to see this part of  history in my size to get it.

Many of us feel uncomfortable when faced with bare facts about the scope of brutality against black people. And it’s ok to feel uncomfortable. In the perfect world, it should make us more empathetic towards those experiences in the long run.

But let’s not hang too long on the dark parts of Black History now. Magnumb exhibition presented Jafa’s immense collection of photographs portraying the history of aggression against black people in the US and his impressive work as a cartoonist and videographer. He has a unique talent to stir emotions with his graphic and video creations. Contrasting the past with the present, violence with love, death with life. Black History, like any history, is a multitude of stories. Stories full of catastrophe, violence and injustice, and stories of pride, strength and victory.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of my favourite writers, in her Talk at TEDGlobal 2009, warns us against the danger of the single story. She brings up many examples from her own life when she experienced the debilitating impact of a single story. Like the influence the Western-culture books had on her first writing: all her characters were white and blue-eyed, ate apples and drank ginger beer. When she was a child, she didn’t think that fictional characters could look like her because she never came across a book telling a story of a young African girl like herself. When she became a published author, a western professor criticised one of her novels for not being authentically African. Because its characters resembled him too much - educated, middle-class man. He was only familiar with different versions of a single story about Africa: “a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner.” A story that comes from the tradition initiated in 1561 by John Lok describing Africans as “beasts with no houses.”

The problem of a single story is that they create stereotypes. And stereotypes are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Show a people as one thing repeatedly - black people as enslaved people, white people as their masters - and this is what they become. But show these same people from different angles, telling many stories about them, bringing the complexity they deserve, and you might succeed in being more authentic in your storytelling.

So, to go back to the initial question about why we celebrate Black History Month, well, we do so that black people get a chance to have their lived experiences acknowledged, show multiple layers of their history, and break the negative narrative around it.

Because, as Adichie says, “stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and malign, but stories can also be used to empower and humanise. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”