Aretha Louise Franklin: For your radical spirit, for the heart, whole and broken, in your voice.
Aretha Louise Frankln is at the Kennedy Center to honor Carol King who with her husband Gerry Goffin, wrote you make me feel like a natural woman. We know Aretha is going to sing this as she walks on stage wearing a a full length fur coat that sweeps the floor and her dress is sequinned and she carries a silver purse. She waives to the audience and heads straight to the piano, puts the purse on the piano, adjusts her coat, sits down and the moment she starts to play, we are in church.
Her voice is powerful and mellow, with the strength of overcoming, she is now the maestro of your soul. You hold your breath because you know she is going to get up, ...then .. she takes the micro phone at the word woman in the chorus as she gets up she adjusts seamlessly the tug of her coat. She is in front of the audience who are now in the palm of her hands we know she is taking us on an adventure of her genius and as we wait she decides to riff on the word inside.the word changes and it is the i in inside that takes over. it is the black church, it is jazz, it is the history of black music in this country. She changes "you", to - "he" makes me feel and then goes to I feel like a, I feel like a, and then drops the fur coat on the floor and the audience rises as her voice supersedes the lyrics converting the audience, president Barack Obama and Michelle Obama into her congregation, standing, testifying, clapping and singing.
Community Engagement and Gender Consciousness: Frontline Work in Reinforcing the Principles of Women's Agency
Nesha Z Haniff
The Gender Consciousness Project (GCP) is a grassroots program that builds awareness of the complexities of gender discrimination for young women. By understanding societal and cultural forces, we begin to build their agency to create a foundation for their own struggle against gender-based injustices. This project does not focus on a single disease.It is important to stress that women are oppressed because they are women, because they are biologically female. Consciousness therefore cannot be extricated from women’s bodies and women’s health. Therefore almost all of the work done in the GCP must be seen as centrally located in the bodies, health and lives of women.
Words from One of the Young Women of The Gender Consciousness Project
My Channel
My Channel
GCP Taylor Clip
GCP Nadia Clip
Belleville Spoken Word
Katie's GCP Graduation Speech
The discoveries that myself, Nadia, and Taylor have all made during that journey that we had together, those are things that we will keep in our intellectual arsenals forever... Through this program I have transformed honestly into the most vibrant version of myself. I would very easily say that I was extremely passive in life. I never knew I had the capacity to change people or to inspire change in other people."
Ahmed Kathrada - Committed to the Practice of Liberation
The Pedegogy of Action
Nesha Z Haniff
For the last fourteen years I have taken students to South Africa from the University of Michigan on a program called the Pedagogy of Action. This is a program which is based on an oral methodology I developed to teach low literate populations HIV prevention. It lasts approximately fifteen minutes. The idea is to have local communities develop it into their own languages and teach their own communities. Over the years these community teachers have taught over 20,000 people. In their preparation for South Africa the students must study the culture, politics and history of South Africa. An important text is Madiba’s Long Walk to Freedom, where they meet the important figures who fought for the new South Africa.
You are so Beautiful to Me
Muhammad Ali
Nesha Zahoratul Haniff
I know that there are millions of women in the world whose very perception of themselves shifted because of the great Muhammad Ali. This is the story of my shift as a girl growing up in the Caribbean. I add this female voice in mourning and honoring this man. My evolution as a feminist, politically conscious woman, started with Muhammad Ali in 1965.
When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Marilyn Monroe, she was white and she was beautiful. I was born in Guyana, a country predominantly of East Indian and African descent, we were Muslims, Christians and Hindus. In 1965 my father made us sit around the radio to hear Muhammad Ali’s fight with Liston. He had changed his name and claimed Islam and that was enough for my father. I remember that Ali began to praise Allah after he won the fight and in that moment, just saying the word Allah he moved all Muslims listening to that fight to the center of the world. He gave Islam an uplift in my world, where to be Christian was to be modern, to be named Loretta or Ivy was a sign that you were civilized. We all had Muslim names, I was embarrassed by my middle name Zahoratul and I wished I had a cool name that people could pronounce Like Margaret or Anne. Such was my colonization in 1965.
Pedagogy of Action
Attempting to Transform Ourselves and Our World Through the Process of Teaching a Simple Oral HIV Module
However, it is in the shining moments when a 7th grade student that I had a hand in influencing teaches back the module in Zulu to an entire school, when a woman stands up to announce that she will go home to show love to her HIV positive family, or when I feel tears run down my face while reading a letter how I “cera” have impacted their life that I begin to grasp why my work is in fact so powerful!
Final Dispatch from 2006 POA