Let me preface this by saying…
Below is the preface to my ethnographic memoir, East of Flatbush, North of Love: An Ethnography of Home. The words still feel relevant today.
Preface
Wind up the tango-box: “My foot, the wise one, this time said: ‘Could you please try to decolonize yourself?’” The tango-box winds down. I wonder, why would you follow me through these pages? I know you did not expect me to address you like this. What kind of introduction is this? I can already sense some restlessness. I lower my voice and answer slowly: i’m … trying … to … decolonize … myself. I am tempted to apologize, to erase the whole thing and start all over again. Sorry for putting you in the spot, in my point, in the dot, in these stains. An introduction should go like this…
—Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion1
In 2014, after having spent the better part of twelve years in academia, I quietly resigned my position as an Assistant Professor of Music History and Cultures at Syracuse University. I had been living in Syracuse for two years, and the city did not seem conducive to the psychological well-being of a young black woman with no familial ties to the place. My dissatisfaction with the city was perhaps only surpassed by my dissatisfaction with my academic field—ethnomusicology—in particular and, to a certain extent, academia as a whole. The musicological canon was still overly Eurocentric, even in my field where “non-Western” people historically have been overrepresented as subjects (and objects) of study. And perhaps worse, these subjects have been overwhelmingly researched and represented by researchers from outside of their culture. As a minority researcher, I saw little that validated my forms of knowledge, my experiences, my ways of being. I had become disillusioned with the system, and I could feel fatigue setting in. Academia had become a game that I no longer wanted to play, at least not under the current terms. It was time for me to go.
And so, I moved to New Orleans and started a small publishing and production company called My People Tell Stories, LLC. After all, my most significant education had come through the stories that I had learned growing up. And I noticed that in my classes students most connected with material that had a personal component to it—one that allowed them to think about the world of another and simultaneously reflect on their own. Consequently, for the company’s first publication, I set out to write a retelling of my dissertation research on parang music in Trinidad. However, the book had other ideas.
“Follow the yellow brick road” was my mother’s suggestion to me when I told her that the book kept morphing. I heeded her advice and decided to see where this literary journey would take me. Then, on a rather unassuming day, while visiting home and running errands with my mom in Brooklyn, I thought to myself, “Ethnographic memoir—that’s the type of story that I’m writing.” However, this was not the kind of ethnographic memoir that involved “non-native” researchers writing reflexive pieces about their fieldwork in a culturally foreign land. As stated in the book’s title, this was an “ethnography of home,” a story written from a place of familiarity, about places that were crucial to my development during my formative years.
As I began doing some research on ethnographic memoirs, I came across a scholar by the name of Sw. Anand Prahlad, who wrote an article in the Journal of American Folklore about his pending project Getting Happy: An Ethnographic Memoir. Although it appears that the book was never completed, much of what Prahlad states in his article resonated with me. Prahlad’s decision to write an ethnographic memoir was “driven by personal crises arising from the schizophrenia so common among first-generation and minority academicians.”2
As many have noted, this fragmentation of self results from spending so many waking hours in an environment hostile to one’s most authentic being: an environment in which the Eurocentric, imperialist Mind stands guard over the bees of the hive with a cruel intensity equal to that of plantation overseers. In this case, though, control is enforced through polite, intellectual means rather than through the physical, a kind of control in which the class, race, and personal aesthetics and sensibilities of the institution clash so profoundly with one’s own that a resulting psychological quandary is inevitable. This project reflects an effort to recover the parts of myself scattered about like bloody bodies on a field of war after a battle, to nourish them back to health, and to reintegrate them into a whole based not on imperatives handed down by societal institutions, but on that disclaimed shadow that haunts the halls of Western power—the inner, spiritual voice.3
In relatively few words, Prahlad aptly captures the reasons for my departure from academia and my decision to write an ethnographic memoir. To say that writing this book served as a sort of therapy for me would be an understatement. Yet, it was not the kind of project that allowed me to effortlessly abandon the norms of the discipline in which I had been enmeshed for several years. I fought myself the entire way. I was (and still am) fighting an ideology of colonialism and imperialism that is so entrenched in our culture (and really, across the globe) that it is not easily discarded. At times, one has to be hyper-vigilant to detect its presence. Through this project, I was trying to retrieve myself from years of Western education that threatened to promote cultural amnesia. I was trying to decolonize myself before there was nothing left to colonize. There was an urgency to complete this project that was rooted in a certain terror that one feels when one’s very existence is threatened. I had to prove (to myself) that I exist, and not because someone else had given me permission to exist.
East of Flatbush, North of Love is a labor of love, an ode to my family and to my culture. My story is neither highly theoretical, nor groundbreaking. It is a simple story of growing up in the West Indian enclave of East Flatbush, Brooklyn. This is not to say that there isn’t a serious element that runs throughout. For all its simplicity, it is nonetheless a form of protest. By rejecting conventional ways of writing, I seek to reject conventional ways of thinking. The book calls into question how knowledge is produced and whose knowledge is privileged. Most importantly, it is a way to acknowledge that my people’s stories are just as valid as the stories that others tell about us. This is a project about reclaiming power, dignity, and humanity.
I wrote this book not only for myself, but also for young people and adults who, like me, want to see their reflections in the pages that they read, and who are looking to learn a bit more about themselves and their heritage. I also wrote this book for people who know very little about West Indian culture, and, as a result, my teacher persona has guided much of this writing. I have done my best to deliver a story that I hope will foster critical thinking and not merely the absorption of information. And I hope too that my experiences will be used as a safe avenue to talk about topics that make many of us feel uncomfortable, e.g., colonialism, racism, colorism, etc. I share my story because I whole-heartedly believe that unless we exchange our own personal stories, we cannot see where our personal understandings are perhaps shortsighted, unevolved, too localized, or just plain wrong.
As I was writing this book, the deeply rooted racial anxieties and mistrust that had been long simmering just beneath the surface of the American consciousness seemed to have boiled over. And so fostering cross-cultural understanding took on a new urgency. This one book is not meant to transform the world. However, through it I am taking responsibility for myself and doing what my spirit tells me needs to be done. I don’t expect to topple the whole system of injustices with this book, but I will remove my support beam, or at least a portion of it.
—Danielle Brown
New Orleans, LA
August 13, 2015
Notes:
1 Marta Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 1.
2 Sw. Anand Prahlad, “Getting Happy: An Ethnographic Memoir,” Journal of American Folklore 118, no. 467 (2005): 21.
3 Ibid.
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