“They tried to bury us, they didn’t know we were seeds.”
-Dinos Christianopoulos
“I'm tired of hearin' 'bout who you checkin' for now
Just give it time, we'll see who's still around a decade from now”
-Drake
I often ponder what the world would look like had colonialism never existed. If the nations of the world had been allowed to grow into the modern era in their own way, what would they look like? What languages would be heard on the world stage that have now gone extinct? What clothes would we see the leaders of nations wearing at global summits? Would there even be such a thing as a ‘nation’ or would some of the peoples of the world opt out of this particular social contract? I think about all of this, but often what captures my imagination more than anything is the idea of fine art, architecture, fashion, food, and design; what would excellence look like—in our time—from the perspective of many peoples throughout the world who had their identity and resources stolen from them?
What names come to mind when thinking of luxury? When thinking of peak excellence? Loro Piano, Patek Phillippe, Tom Ford, James Pollock, Bugatti, Noma, The Ritz Carlton, Hermès, Alain Ducasse, Rolls Royce, Opus One, Picasso, The French Laundry. The implication is obvious. Excellence is white and its heritage is European. When excellence is found outside of this small corner of the world, what do we call it? Exotic. Excellence found outside of European cultures is afforded little prestige. Our cultures are seen as something to ‘experience’, rather than embrace. Frozen in time, rather than timeless. A weekend trip, rather than a place to settle. But, perhaps the greatest tragedy, our cultures are seen as something that can be appropriated at will “read: stolen”, without consent, to be watered down “read: ravaged”, and then sold at a premium.
The reality is that beauty, excellence, opulence, intellect, achievement, and heritage are not the property of this narrow amalgam of histories. Histories, I'll add, that have cleverly hidden the ugliness undergirding many of their grandest triumphs. The aforementioned are human values, essential to our nature, that have been and continue to be expressed in every form that the human being is constructed in.
Today, we, the children and grandchildren of these beautiful, wounded cultures, are picking up the broken pieces, mending, healing and rediscovering who we are... who we’ve always been; inheritors of excellence. We’re creating, and creating, and creating, in myriad forms, things new, majestic, and exquisite. We are breathing new life into our ancestral forms; patterns, fabrics, wisdom, scents, colors, spices, and injecting them, unapologetically, into the zeitgeist. With excellence and provenance—connected through centuries, by golden chains, to the originators of these forms and under their twinkling gaze—we're creating and building.
When film writer/director and fellow Bay Area native, Ryan Coogler, was on his press tour for Black Panther he regularly stated that he wanted the film to explore, for him, what it meant to be African. Not African American, mind you, but African. This, to my understanding, very much comes from the same impulse I’m discussing here. Wakanda, as Ryan Coogler constructed it, is an imagined version of Africa and numerous African cultures. Each realized in an advanced society based on the modern world, in a future that cannot exist with colonialism and slavery while simultaneously a present, constrained by, colonialism and slavery.
I've included in this post a photo of one of my favorite writers and artists of all time, the inimitable, legendary Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones, better known as Nasty Nas. In this photo, he's wearing a jacket created by one of my favorite fashion designers in the world, and someone I'm honored to call a friend, Mr. Ikiré Jones. I encourage anyone reading this blog to visit his website and follow him on Instagram. His work and his philosophy illustrate everything I've attempted to communicate in this post and in a much more profound way than I have the ability to. You may recognize his work from Black Panther in the scene at the end of the film when T'challa is addressing the United Nations. In that scene, T'challa wearing a scarf from Ikiré.
Ikiré's designs and Ryan's film thrust images of this world we dream of into the minds of the masses. And particularly, people of color. Many, including me, following the release of Black Panther, said the exact same thing; Wakanda is here, Wakanda is now, let's build Wakanda together.
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