Kwanzaa was a chosen (interracial) family affair

My chosen family. We banded together over time beginning in about 1985 as a potpourri of multiracial families who mostly lived in or near the Powderhorn Park area of Minneapolis. 

Twenty five years later we still connect. Our now adult kids consider each other "cousins" and we adults "auntie," "uncle," "friend." And the grandkids are hatching. Some of them are friends, and even call each other "cousin." Our chosen family is now three generations strong. 

We still camp together once a year on Memorial weekend - the original parents, now in our fifties and sixties; the "kids," now in their twenties and thirties; and the next generation, who are toddlers, preschoolers, and grade schoolers. We've added new families along the way - the circle is ever expanding, ever welcoming.

But back in the day one of our most important times of celebration was Kwanzaa. We gathered yearly on New Year's Day and embraced all of its meaning and all of who we were. I wrote the piece below in the early nineties as a celebration of us, my chosen family.


Happy Kwanzaa! 

~~~~~

Family


It was our interracial families that brought us first together, but it's our history that binds us still. I feel drenched, no quenched, as I watch us at our annual Kwanzaa gathering at Karen's house this New Year's Day. We draw together in ritualistic ways, each year a rhythm of camping, storytelling, of gathering up this chosen family of ten families, our Kwanzaa ritual embedded at the center of the cycle. It's like the Thanksgivings of my childhood family, the cousins, aunts and uncles gathered 'round, each meal the same — turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, a salad with pomegranate seeds, cranberry sauce, two pies for dessert, pumpkin or mince meat, cool whip or ice cream, a comfort to be counted on.


Kwanzaa is an African American celebration, by black people for black people. But we claim it too, all of us, together. It's a refuge really, no one staring, no one glaring at our vibrant messy mix — black, white, Puerto Rican, Mexican, married, single, divorced, widowed, straight, lesbian. Our rowdy children flow among us, a striking swirl of texture, line, shape and hue.


We bring food and gifts to share. Black beans and rice, chicken wings, Pamela's Florida gumbo, my spicy black-eyed peas, sweet potato pie, Kathy's North Dakota double chocolate bars.


The gifts, called zawadis, are songs, games, crafts, stories or poetry. Tonight each zawadi seems a perfect reflection of the giver. Like Katie's, who's a social worker, who loves anything that helps us share our feelings. Tonight she gives each of us a page of mailing labels and a marker. She tells us to write down "people praises" on the labels, then walk around and stick them on each other. Soon our shirts are covered with stupid, corny messages that make us laugh, make me cry.


You're nice.
I like your style.
Your feet are cute.
You dare to be different.
You make me smile.


Even the boys play. Usually they circle around the edges of our gatherings, hanging back, hanging tough, hanging cool. But tonight, Oberika, who is fourteen and obsessed with slasher movies, slides past me and slyly slips his praise on me — Thanks for being nice to me. And from my son Anthony — You're the best mom in the world.


We catch up on our lives and offer up our pain here. The daughter who ran away, the failing marriage, the struggle with MS, the house lost to unpaid debt.


I remember the night I read some of my secret lesbian poetry. Still married, still not out, I chose to break my long silence here.


The Kwanzaa after Karen's husband Donnie died, his best friend Terryl read a poem for him and we all lit candles for him. Then, to honor him, we put on some funky funky funkadelic music and danced and danced for him.


Tonight we're funkified again. We line up for Jr. Walker and the All Stars and as the saxaphone blasts and the beat slams down we clap and shout while each dancer takes a run down the chute. The little kids jump up and down, teenagers do the tootsie roll, and we parents bump and grind the best we can.


The house fills with our noise, every corner, every inch awash in us. It's chaos — too many kids, not enough room, too much motion, but we don't care. I close my eyes and zoom away high into space like a camera for the closing take. I look again and see us still, a little speck of light, sparkling in our corner of the black black night.


January, 1995


(Quilt painting also by me, 1987)

I don't know my Somali neighbors

I live in the Twin Cities, home to the largest Somali population in North America. Specifically, I live in the Seward neighborhood of south Minneapolis, a place many Somali families call home, and next to the West Bank, a neighborhood that is sometimes called, usually in a  disparaging way, "Little Somalia." The majority of black children attending our neighborhood elementary schools are Somali.


But I don't know my neighbors. I know next to nothing about Somali-American culture, the intersections of being Muslim and African, or what it is like to be a Somali immigrant or child of immigrants in this state and country.


I am around enough Somali/East African people to observe some differences in custom and dress but I don't know what the differences mean or why. What determines if one woman dresses American style, wearing whatever's hip with her head uncovered, while another woman wears a hijab and traditional clothing? Is it religious, personal preference, family values, or a combination of each? And what is the difference between public presentation and home life?


I worked at Minneapolis Community and Technical College for a couple of years and had the chance to observe and sometimes connect with the large number of East African-immigrant students who attended school there. I noticed many variations in what the young women wore. Some rocked designer t-shirts, shoes, and scarfs, integrating western fashion into traditional Muslim dress. I saw many young Somali women who were proud Muslims and outspoken leaders, respected by their male peers, shattering my stereotypes of oppressed Muslim women. But mostly I saw hard working students with big plans for their futures.


I've kept in touch with one of those young women, mostly though Facebook and the very occasional face-to-face chat. She is currently applying for grad school, wants to go to Japan, but plans to live in her mother's house until she is married as that is their custom and she would not want to disrespect her mother or family by doing otherwise. That is about the most in-depth relationship I have with someone who is Somali.


The Starbucks near my house is a gathering place for Somali men. I have no idea what they talk about in their loud, intense conversational groups. A Somali cab driver in San Diego told me he had been to that Starbucks and that it's a place where people who hale from various tribes in Somalia get together to talk about the news back home, and to debate different issues. That could be true - or not - I have no idea. They could be talking about the upcoming football season for all I know, or whether or not to replace the storm windows on their homes. Or all of the above.


Last January, a neighborhood grocery store that caters to Somali and other East African neighbors was the scene of a robbery gone horribly bad, resulting in the murders of three innocent people - all East African, as were the shooters. It was all over the news. I soon got a few phone calls from family members and friends who live outside of Minneapolis wondering if my neighborhood was going downhill, if I was safe. Me?! What about the people who were victims of this crime - law abiding, contributing East African immigrants who represent the majority of families living here.


I also know too many people who are afraid to go to the West Bank because of all the "African gangs and crime" there. Yet those same people have little fear of walking downtown late at night, or in neighborhoods with just as much if not more crime than is happening on the West Bank. 


I'm sure you've heard about the young Somali men in Minneapolis that were recruited to go back to Somalia to be part of radical, terrorist organizations. The focus of stories in the media and in some conversations seemed to be more about fear of "home grown" terrorism rather than fear for vulnerable young men at risk to be exploited by a radical fringe. 


That is a new turn on an old song - fear of the other. Racism in a new form. Anti-Muslim furor. Anti-immigrant sentiment. The ugly crap that the conservative right is capitalizing on right now to try and win elections.


I feel complicit with my ignorance. If we don't really know our neighbors, how do we stand as one, united in our commonalities? We don't. We stay divided and fearful - and vulnerable to propaganda and fear mongering from either side of the chasm.


A shining light of exception burned brightly in the aftermath of the Seward grocery store robbery and murders. As neighbors we came together in outrage and concern. We lit candles and held a vigil. We held up signs that said, "Seward Stands Together. No More Violence." Shopkeepers put those signs in windows all over the neighborhood. Some signs are still there.

                    photo via jenniferlarson.wordpress.com

                          photo by Peter Fleck via http://sewardprofile.posterous.com/?page=23


But what did we do with that opportunity to step toward really becoming neighbors? I personally vowed to regularly shop in that grocery store. Since then, I've bought one can of pop there. So much for neighborly progress, at least on my part.


I remember when Somalis and other East Africans first came to Minneapolis in the nineties. Suddenly our public schools had whole new cultures of students to deal with, and it didn't take long until my children were coming home saying "I don't like those Somalis. They smell." This from children who were raised to have a broad and open view of the world, who as multiracial African American young people understood their own sense of otherness, and also had an uncanny ability to cross cultural boundaries and play well with others. How was this particular bigotry and hatred infused so easily into them and their peers that they would dare say such racist nonsense, openly, to me?


A generation later my granddaughter just started kindergarten at one of those neighborhood schools where most of the black kids are Somali. As an African American child she is a minority within a minority. Yet the world is different for her than it was for her mother. Somali and other East African people have been her teachers, classmates, neighbors, and playground friends all of her life. She is less ignorant than me and her worldview is already broader than mine or her mom's. She knows more. But there are no guarantees her generation will bridge this gap. Or if they do, that there won't be a new one to divide us in ways we can't even imagine today.

                          photo by Ann Freeman. "Playground friends"