Close to the Edge by Sujatha Fernandes

Author:Sujatha Fernandes [Fernandes, Sujatha]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
Publisher: New South
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 3

Blackfulla Blackfulla

My odyssey around the globe had begun on Sydney's West Side in August 1995, when I saw the ad from Death Defying Theatre that announced a multimedia project with workshops in rapping, graffiti, and b-boying. Three months of workshops were to culminate in a large-scale performance known as Hip Hopera. After several years of full-time political activism in Sydney, I was starting to wonder why left-wing radicals and progressives were so confined to the downtown vegetarian-hippie-café-latte-drinking set while never reaching the vast working classes in the west of the city. The problem was that the left was culturally isolated. Its idea of a radical cultural night was lentil curries and folk songs on the guitar. Meanwhile, Aboriginal, Arabic, Pacific Islander, and white working-class youth out in western Sydney were embracing hip hop culture and becoming angry and inspired. I saw the Hip Hopera workshops as a way to connect with this nascent hip hop movement and to understand how hip hop might be the key to political expression and voice for a new generation of excluded youth.

Just as hip hop reached urban American minority populations in places like Chicago at a point of desperation after years of deindustrialization and urban decay, so the culture hit home for Aboriginal and immigrant youth in Australia at a time of intensifying poverty, unemployment, and despair. It was a generation that had grown up seeing marches in the streets, sit-ins, and community organizing. But now this generation faced a vacuum—of leadership, of politics, of direction. Could hip hop fill that void?

Aboriginal people in particular had a history of connecting to a Pan-African diaspora through music. When Bob Marley performed in Adelaide in 1979, his claim that “All Black men are brothers” was taken up as an anthem by indigenous people.1 But could a black American form like hip hop still galvanize protest at a time when there was a dearth of political engagement? And could Marley's black men expand into Bambaataa's “Planet Rock” to incorporate the poor whites and immigrants who, along with Aboriginals, populated the fringes of the city? Despite Chicago's being a multiracial city, the segregation there made it harder to forge broader cross-racial alliances. In Sydney an unexpected turn of political events would bring us together across racial and ethnic lines, if briefly, in ways we hadn't thought possible before.

Ikicked around the idea of going to the Hip Hopera workshops with my friend Waiata Telfer, a young Aboriginal woman who hailed from Adelaide. Could we be Australia's new Queen Latifah and MC Lyte? We had our doubts. With our braids and lack of vocal training, we felt more like Milli Vanilli.

I had met Waiata at a community theater workshop in the inner-city neighborhood of Newtown the year before. She was a slender woman with copper-colored skin and closely cropped hair. Although she had been pictured with loose wavy hair falling about her bare shoulders, I recognized her from the oversized billboard with the caption, “They say I'm too pretty to be an Aboriginal.

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