
Photo by Kaya Nati
Hanifah Walidah is a hip hop artist, playwright, actor, music video maker, and filmmaker. Her list of accomplishments goes on and on, literally. Here are just a few of them: Her first LP, “A Headnadda’s Journey to Adidi-Skizm” was released in 1994 under the name Sha-Key. In the early 90s she was co-founder of two poet/performance collectives, The Vibe Khamelons and The Boom Poetic, both recognized as groundbreaking for fusing a hip hop approach to traditional beatnik rhythm. In 2002 she wrote and performed her one-woman show “Straight Black Folks Guide to Black Folks.” In 2006 she was the musical director of “What It Iz,” a hip hop/spoken word adaptation of “The Wiz.”
And thankfully, Hanifah is at it again. Hanifah’s new album, “Once Upon It Is” debuted this month. Check out her new song and music video, “Make a Move” on her website. Or better yet, vote to make it #1 on LOGO’s [LGBT-focused channel] “Click List.” It’s the first video that depicts gay women of color in a positive and celebratory light.
Hanifah will also be releasing an accompanying documentary to the video, U People, this June for Pride. The documentary features behind the scenes discussions on the video and a closer look at the women who make up the video. It will be debuting on LOGO.
You can also catch Hanifah on a European tour this spring. Here’s Hanifah…
Wow, you’ve been really busy. You’ve done a lot of great work over the years.
Yeah, I can only do this. You know what I mean? [Laughs] I figured out early on, “OK, well, I don’t know about a construction worker job.” [Laughs]
It’s a risky business working for yourself.
Yeah, but you have to take the risk factor out of it. People get kind of hung up on the security and the successes and the lack there of. But no one is secure, not in this country anyway. So, I’d rather work for something that I love to do rather than give to someone else who may or may not keep me around. [Laughs]
That’s right. Can you talk about your “Make a Move” music video and how it ties in with your documentary U People?
The music video came about last spring. I decided to make one because there are now venues to air it—LOGO is here. I said, “OK, let me do this.” Then I started thinking of different ideas of what I could do with the music video.
Once I was at a house party here in Brooklyn. That’s what we do, we have house parties. [Laughs] I was at a house party, sitting back, talking to a friend and I said that I much prefer to go to house parties than to clubs. And she said, “You know, we have a long history of this in Brooklyn.” And I said, “You know what, you’re right.” And then the light bulb just kind of went off as far as the visual of the long legacy of house parties, not just within the women’s community, but within the black community in general.
I then kind of went into my artist’s zone and started walking around like a fly on the wall, and really started listening in on conversations and tried to get that as food for thought as far as piecing together a script. Usually when I create a body of work I immediately go into story mode. I have to tell a story, I can’t help myself. I’m a story teller and I use the art to tell the story. I listened to the conversations and eventually made them into a script.
The next step was to find an actual house for the house party. A good friend of mine—who’s not gay, who’s a straight woman, but she’s a part of another community of mine as a musician—she has a huge brownstone that was handed down to her from her grandmother who was the first black woman to own a brownstone in Bedstuy [Bedford-Stuyvesant; Brooklyn neighborhood]. [Her grandmother] was cleaning floors at that. She uses the space as a musician hub where we jam out. I thought it was beautiful because it was now a project where gay women and straight women could work together for something.
I held auditions. Some people I knew were beautiful and could act. Some of the people—like the hair stylists and makeup artists—I met through my community on Myspace. Anyhow, I got the crew and the actors together, and when I looked around, they were all women—black women at that. I really didn’t go into this with that idea, but that’s what winded up happening.
I just didn’t burn any bridges over time and I was able to pull in my resources and find a way to finance it for next to nothing, really. Between discounts, and this and that, and people willing to work for free, it was beautiful.
So, I basically spent two days in this brownstone in BedStuy. I had two of my friends have two separate cameras and roam around and capture what was happening those two days. I really didn’t direct them. I just gave them these general guidelines and let them sort of direct themselves. And I just stopped thinking about it and focused on directing the video. The footage that they got was amazing because just the chemistry in the house was amazing. All these women together. Even the straight women who are part of the theater, they’re so used to working with men, just to have the opportunity to work in an all-women environment—they were as happy as all could get out. [Laughs] They adapted. And they were affirmed in a way that they’re not normally affirmed because they’re not used to being in a women’s community.
There were a lot of candid conversations; really emotional conversations about everything from politics to mother-daughter relationships to race relationships. And there were many aspects of the house where people could just find little cubby holes and find mini-worlds within the larger world of the brownstone.
After watching this footage I knew people had to see this. People have to know that this exists. It’s not like some of this reality TV where they can set people up to say things and it’s kind of fake. We censor each other around each other all the time. When we’re in an environment where we don’t feel completely safe we’re going to censor ourselves. If you’re white, you’re not going to hear everything that black people say. If you’re a trans person or a gay person, you’re not going to hear everything that straight people say. So, a lot of that; all those walls just came tumbling down. That’s what I wanted to show.
So, what I decided to do is instead of showing this raw footage [as a documentary], I wanted people to be introduced to some of the women in the video and then introduced within the context of the brownstone. The footage that we’re shooting now is a lot of separate interviews to bring these stories alive. For instance, there’s one sista, Deepa Soul, who’s really prominent throughout the documentary, but she has a really sensitive part where she goes into a tirade about her mother. She’s from New Orleans and she has a really bad relationship with her mother. She just went on it and everyone got really silent—you don’t talk about your mother in the black community. [Laughs] So, it was a really awkward and uncomfortable moment. She said, “At the end of the day, my mother, when she can’t take care of herself, I’m the only sibling that’s going to be able to do it.” Her mother was stuck in the house for like five days during the hurricane. So, she went into this tirade. But I didn’t want people to only focus on this tirade. She also lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, one of the most homophobic neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and she is so well respected in her neighborhood. She’s a maternal figure. She’s a no-joke figure. She works with at-risk youth, these five young men who are working on becoming rappers. She welcomes them into her home and really guides them through the process of the music industry, and they just look up to her. And of course she’s out to them. These are young black straight men that are like, “You are our God.”
People need to know that. Even within the gay community. They need to know that it’s not about only staying in our own little shelter, our own little bubble. That’s not better than middle class white folks in Middle America. That’s what they do. They stay in their own little bubble. That’s not how to change things, now is it?
[I think this documentary] is going to be a beautiful thing. And I think it’s going to be something that people have never seen before unless they’ve been in these circles.
What particular messages, if any, do you hope to get across in "Make a Move" and U People?
One message is that black lesbians are very, very sexy. I think it’s an old myth that we’re ugly and we have no sense of style. [Laughs] Maybe it was gay men that pushed that stereotype but it’s a real stereotype. [Laughs]
Also, I want the issue of race to come up. Sometimes there’s this idea of this utopian existence when it comes to race issues. Either it is not as discussed, it’s refuted, or it’s explained away. It seems like it should be a secondary thing and that’s not true. We still bring our baggage from being raised in this country into our “utopian existence.” And race is a very real thing.
I like the idea of people getting a peek into our world. In other words, anyone who watches the video will see different things. People have stereotypes of lesbians and people within the gay community. Gay people have stereotypes of black people. And gay white people have stereotypes of gay black people. [Laughs] Gay black women specifically. You get a peak into our world that makes us very human and very beautiful. I wanted to show a world that I know exists. I want to show that and give that to other people.
What more specifically do you think are the particular challenges many gay and trans women of color come across in their everyday lives?
It’s kind of a conflicted world because on one end you have to deal with being black, period. Which is something that came up in the documentary. It’s hard enough being a woman and being black, why do you have to add something else onto it? But then it’s not like we’re a la carte. Where you can just add and subtract. [Laughs]
But then we don’t have to only deal with black racism in general by white people. Within the black community there’s homophobia. There’s a part of us that is raised around, “This is the community I’m comfortable with. I was raised around it.” But a lot of folks don’t have interest in that. So, how to make my life the way that I want it to be? Where is my niche without closing myself off from the world?
So, you’re in between a rock and a hard place a lot of the time. But, just within your own niche—for me around other black women—I think this is the best community. [Laughs] Everybody wants to be like us. [Whispers] [Laughs] They won’t admit it! [Laughs]
Was it hard for you to come out as a gay woman?
It was harder to come out gay with a woman. [Laughs] I eventually told my mother when I was newly coming out. I was kind of harsh and abrasive. Like just accept it, and not considerate of where she was coming from. She’s come a long way.
With my father I began to understand that it’s not really someone else’s reaction that you’re worried about. You’re really worried about how you’re portraying yourself to yourself, which is what the other person sees. When I came out to my father, I was a lot more relaxed. I was Buddha-like. I was very sure of myself as a person and as a gay woman. In telling him, I was able to give off that kind of energy. And him receiving that, although he might have disagreed with it, he couldn’t fly off the handle because I wasn’t flying off the handle. He’s wasn’t insecure about it because I wasn’t insecure about it. But ultimately, he’s going to have to deal with it on his own terms.
As far as a visceral reaction, or how we imagine the people we love or how our parents are going to react—that’s not going to happen. You’re going to manifest what you want to happen by what you’re putting out there. A lot of people really need to understand that when they attempt to come out. But a lot of it has to deal with fear, I know. [Laughs]
Are your parents supportive of your work now?
My mother is supportive of my work. My father, we still go at it every now and then. He did come to my one-woman play called “Straight Black Folks Guide to Black Folks”; it’s about homophobia within the black community. He loved it. I think what he appreciated about it was my acting and the writing. He really didn’t discuss the content, but I think he was proud to see me on stage. That’s the conflict between him and being a parent and the faith he chose.
Was it difficult for you to come out to male friends?
I’ve always had male friends. When I was in the closet, I had a lot of male friends. When I came out of the closet, I lost some of them. But some of the oldest friends I have are male and they’re from that time, too. I also think it has to do with the kind of woman that I am. One, I’m very comfortable around men, and also attract the type of men that will be comfortable around me. End of story. [Laughs] I have relationships with my male friends, both gay and straight.
Do you ever worry when you’re walking in front of men you don’t know by yourself?
No. I’ve had a few instances with men on the street. I’ve had one in particular that actually gave birth to a really great song. Again, everything lies in my part. Some things come at you that you may attract unwittingly, or some randomness, but how you process it is really the determining factor of the effect of it. You can have someone really fuck up your day, or you can have someone give birth to a new song. It still lies in your lap. Regardless of what comes at you, it’s still yours to own.
That’s reality. That doesn’t negate the fact that I may be fearful at times. Or weary. Or sometimes it does really fuck up my day. At the end of the day, I have to figure out a way to process that so that something beautiful comes out of it or it’s a waste of everyone’s time in life.
What kind of feedback have you received from the video?
Overwhelmingly amazing feedback from across the board. Most of them are from gay women of color. But also from gay men, too, and straight folks. A lot of straight folks are saying this is a good video, and they’re not saying, “Oh, there’s all these lesbians in it.” I think on the black side of things, they were feeling it and the energy it was giving off. They liked the whole script aspect of it. As far as gay women, overwhelming. I get emails every day about how the video inspires. About how people are inspired by my career, period. The way I am as a person. I get emails from places like down South: “How can I escape? How can I get out of here? Can you give me some words of encouragement to get me through the day?” So, I’m online a lot, writing a lot of emails.
The video did what I hoped it would do. I knew that there were no images of us and the song is witty and its appreciative and it doesn’t exotify. Nobody focuses on grown women—late 20s, early 30s—who are pretty clear about what they want to do in life, or are already doing it and having a different outlook on the world.