Clearing the smoke when the smoke doesn’t rise: Revisiting the Performance of Blackness with JustMoe
In my piece How Can I Be Myself when Strangers are Watching? Performing Blackness and Black Joy, I spoke of how a white audience by its very presence transforms performance art by black artists, turning an expression into an exhibition – an execution. It’s a crime for which I have convicted Canadian born and or raised Black artists. But I don’t know what it’s like to grow-up in a place as a minority. So, I asked my friend if I could walk a mile in his shoes.
Moe and I met at YouthWrite, a creative writing camp for youth that takes place at Kamp Kiwanis in the summer. I was hired to be an instructor, while Moe worked as camp super (supervisor). Although these positions are sort of precarious, I think they capture our personalities well, I am uptight and serious…seriously anxious, Moe is laid back, with the demeanor of a human sized teddy bear who yells out “Ayo Sue-Shane!” when he catches my glance or answers my phone calls. While we walk through his neighbourhood of Millwoods in the Southside of Edmonton, we playfully mimic the conversation between African-American men complimenting each other by saying “Na I’m tryna get like you.” We acknowledge our difference and even go so far as to embody the differences we embrace in each other. There is something expressed and exchanged in this performance, even though neither one of us is African-American. In this moment, the performance of blackness is empathetic, an act of solidarity.
Moe’s real name is Mohamed Ahmed, JustMoe is his stage name. Born in Cairo, Egypt to Sudanese parents, Moe calls himself a “child of displacement.” Both Moe and I are “child[ren] of displacement,” albeit in different ways. I moved to Canada at 18 years old for my undergraduate degree, Moe and his family came to Canada as refugees. Despite being born in Egypt, Moe maintains a strong devotion to Sudan; when I ask him what he remembers of Sudan, he answers,
“Everything. It’s dry, hot, and the electricity cuts out. It was dirty, I had to walk around with sandals, the water cuts out too. Everyone knew me and about my family, and I knew absolutely nothing about them, except for the fact they may have held me once as a baby. I loved it all. Especially in hindsight, living through it I remember being so upset and fed up with visiting Sudan, but I look back so fondly on everything. It’s my homeland y’know.”
Zimbabwe, my home country is much further down from the Sahara Desert, but with a high unemployment rate, the droves of people walking aimlessly creates a feeling of suffocation and overwhelming heat, an eternal discomfort with stagnancy. Idleness has a way of unsettling us into pointless activity.
Although I listened to Tupac religiously as a teenager, the cadence and flow of JustMoe’s rapping, with its American roots, and growing Canadian influences sometimes feels alienating. So, when Moe performs a verse from his upcoming project in a park in Millwoods, he challenges me to consider why I am offended by the “performance” of blackness when it is the context in which he came to know of his blackness. I wish I had asked him, “Are you free?” For the formative years of my life my teachers looked like me and the store clerks spoke to me in a language I understood. My family is also indigenous to Southern Africa, with lineages passing through and going beyond the borders of Zimbabwe into South Africa. I developed my artistic practice largely outside of the watchful white gaze. I struggle now in this city, Calgary, to create solely in response to whiteness. I cannot accept that to be black, I must seek to always oppose or contrast whiteness.
I am also beginning to consider the possibility that my fear of being influenced by a primarily white audience still affects how I show up in my art. Moe straddles the balance between two homes, Millwoods, Edmonton and Sudan, much better than I do, while I am afraid that my inability to learn how to be black in North America will render me uninteresting and standoffish.
The question of performance is really asking, is it possible to be two things at once and be an authentic version of both? I am afraid to forget home. I also mostly remember it fondly, so it is worth remembering. Moe speaks about Sudan with sincerity and with clarity, reminding me that home is not a loss easily forgotten and it can be shared completely in fragmented memories. A photograph is a moment in time, but home (Zimbabwe and Sudan) has changed and is changing. When we remember home fondly, with Black joyfulness, maybe inaccurately so, is that a performance? Is it a performance because the difference between memory and reality is also the difference between a primarily white gaze and no gaze at all?
Moe dons a Basquiat-esque hairstyle which fascinates some, and frightens others. Basquiat has been the subject of my criticisms of performative blackness, and I try and reconcile his performance of blackness through his hair and his social life. Basquiat wore Armani suits and despite being “anti-establishment,” refused to be categorized as a black artist, surrounded only by his white contemporaries who provided him shelter from his blackness until he achieved the level of fame previously reserved for white artists. But Moe plans to release his next projects without showing his face, “I think it will make me better. There is a lot to hide behind with the aesthetics of being a ‘rapper’, but I want the art to speak for itself. So, this is sorta a test of that. Can you show up? Idk (I don’t know), can me doing the art itself be enough?” The sentiment of wanting to be seen without being perceived comes to mind. We are caught between a rock and a hard place, while still uncertain of the outcomes of either choice.
I position Moe and I as opposites but that is not at all true. I cannot not walk in his shoes, but I have walked alongside him. Moe and I often argue about the many facets of blackness, but we share many things including a history of loss. He is the grandson of a famous Sudanese poet, and I am the daughter of a lesser-known poet. We are both attempting to evade the trappings of the white gaze. Yvonne Vera’s novel Butterfly Burning, describes the scene of a lynching of seventeen men in Colonial Rhodesia, she says, “Death is as intimate as love.” She describes the living as “equally dying and bewildered.” I still think black performance art is similar to gallows humour, but I am not as consumed by the audience as I am comforted by the intimacy of this experience that still renders me recognizable to others standing beside me on this make-shift wooden stage. Discussing the performance of blackness continues to centre the white gaze even when we think we are resisting it. What appears to be a performance to others is a conversation between friends and comrades, does it really matter who is watching when my friend is talking?
*I use the verb “talking” to emphasize how the act of talking and listening require a presence of mind, and state of being alive.
This conversation was inspired by a conversation with Josh Dalledonne of Arts Commons. By spotlighting Moe, Arts Commons encourages the discovery of young and emerging artists through conversation and performance. Moe embodies the spirit of a community on the edge of discovering itself.
