Glennon Doyle Melton has two God-given gifts: storytelling and shamelessness. Or so she declares early in her memoir, “Carry On, Warrior: Thoughts on Life Unarmed.”
“I decided that’s what God wanted me to do,” she writes. “He wanted me to walk around telling people the truth. No mask, no hiding, no pretending. That was going to be my thing. I was going to make people feel better about their insides by showing them mine.”
She then spends the rest of the book’s 266 pages putting her imperfections on display for our edification. We learn that she can’t cook and in fact has no pans. She’s inept at laundry, vacuuming and lunch packing. She’s done time and is recovering from years of drug and alcohol abuse and bulimia. Her criminal record gets her summarily rejected by adoption agencies and volunteer organizations worldwide. And her husband, worn out by such scrutiny and rebuffs, sometimes wonders if the children they already have might one day be taken from them.
Some of these revelations are hilarious. Others are disturbing. The result is a disjointed, uneven reading experience in which the texture and complexity of a life is addressed but not defined, and mined but not illuminated.
This memoir, which brings new meaning to the phrase “keeping it real,” is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Regular readers of Melton’s Momastery.com blog will no doubt take her frankness in stride. But as a new reader, it was jarring to see the intimate details of other people’s lives brought into her “reckless truth telling” crusade. I was distracted by concerns about how her writing was affecting those she wrote about. The breadth of her disclosures related to her family—her sister’s divorce, her young son’s sexuality, her husband’s infidelity—was too much for me.
Personal stories undoubtedly have public relevance and every woman should feel empowered to speak her truth. Yet too much of this book skirted lines a memoir shouldn’t cross: Exhibitionism for exhibitionism’s sake, moralizing, self-absorption and DIY therapy.
While Melton’s blog-adapted writing style and self-deprecating sense of humor can be charming in moderation, “Carry On, Warrior” missed an opportunity to distinguish itself as a book. As assembled, the chapters (a combination of blog post reprints and new essays) carried too much of the web’s informality into print, and the freshness of the blog posts paled on the page. The solidity of the book form begged for deeper contemplation, sharper perspective and some connective tissue.
I hesitated to write out these criticisms, influenced by the book’s relentlessly nonjudgmental stance. But then I recalled this wise passage: “Humility is how I survive praise and criticism of my writing, ideas, and beliefs,” Melton writes. “Because I remember that neither praise nor criticism is really about me. We are all just trying to find the truth. So I try to see different points of view not as reasons to step back further into my corner, but as opportunities to take baby steps toward the middle of the ring–if for no other reason than to see my opponent a little closer. That perspective change is usually all it takes to remember that I have no opponents other than my pride.”
Given that sentiment, I now can think of myself as less a hater than a perspective changer. I can crown myself a truth teller, too.
Readers of yesterday’s Q&A with Katherine Wintsch, founder and CEO of The Mom Complex, clamored for more of her wise counsel and insights. As an encore, today I offer some of her thoughts on overcoming self-doubt and judgment, the topic of her WomanKind 2014 workshop on February 8.
Continue reading “Katherine Wintsch on Ending the Internal Mommy Wars”Patience Salgado is known as Kindness Girl to the many readers of her popular blog, which launches “kindness missions” designed to spur generosity and community. But her first role is “mom” to her four children ages 5, 8, 11 and 13.
Salgado says that incorporating the two is an important goal for her. “I don’t want my kids to grow up and think, ‘Kindness ruined my life; My mom was never accessible.’”
Continue reading “Kindness Starts at Home: A Chat with Patience Salgado of KindnessGirl.com”Fact: Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women and is more deadly than all forms of cancer.
Continue reading “Go Red: Your Life Depends on It”Every American has something to learn from “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America,” which spans from the elaborate hairstyles of the 15th century Wolof, Mende, Mandingo and Yoruba to the fades, weaves, locs and twist-outs of today. And the lesson is that the hair we grow and the styles we wear it in say something significant about who we are, where we’ve come from and where we hope to go.
Its studied exploration of prickly hair politics is astute and revelatory, delivering deep insight to novices and enthusiasts alike. Even as a longtime student of black history and culture, I found new detail and understanding on each page.
My personal takeaway was that rather than judging others’ choices in hair styles—natural or not—we need to bring a spirit of openness and inquiry to the looks instead. That is, we need to earn our opinions on hair in the same way that we should earn our opinions on politics or religion, through careful study, contemplation and more than a little compassion.
The Politics of Appearance
While many realize that when it comes to black hair, there is much, much more historical and cultural significance than meets the eye. It takes a deep study like this one, however, to reveal just how much more there is.
“Hair Story” meticulously details a centuries-long assault on black hair. It begins by offering a moving account of what exactly was lost when slaveholders shaved off the elaborate hairstyles of their captives. Signifiers of age, religion, marital status, ethnic identity, wealth and rank fell to the ground. Distinctive humanity was shorn into anonymous chattel.
The book presents a vexing picture of what happened when the evolutionary genius of dense, tightly coiled hair (perfect for insulating heads from intense sun) was taken out of context in the New World. In the skin-shade, hair-texture hierarchy of interracial antebellum America, straight hair often afforded substantial economic and social advantage. Less backbreaking work on plantations and in some cases an “opportunity” to pass for white altogether could be won if hair passed muster.
In such a divided and dysfunctional world, the obsessive pursuit of unnaturally straight hair among black people became, well, natural, the authors explain. Inventive enslaved people turned cornmeal and kerosene into shampoo, and bacon grease and butter into conditioner. Butter knives became crude curling irons and grown men slicked axle grease made for wagon wheels onto their heads as dual hair dye and straightener. Lye and potatoes, a mix potent enough to burn the skin off a person’s head, became a hair straightener of choice.
Years later the echoes of these black hair-taming offensives reverberate in contemporary press-and-curls, Jheri curls, relaxers and weaves, the authors reveal.
Avoiding the Hair Police Trap
Importantly, Byrd and Tharps explore these issues of hair, identity and social acceptability without plotting styles along a facile continuum, from supposedly self-hate-inspired relaxers to empowered naturals. In today’s black hair free-for-all—where a black first lady’s bangs and a black gold-medal gymnast’s ponytail edges send the media atwitter—things are much too complicated and contested for that.
The authors are especially adept at walking the fine line between critique and condemnation. I was shocked to discover through their account the extent to which hair styles are still thought to both signify and confer economic and social status. They smartly observe a host of contradictions and fissures within the black community that merit discussion, but they contextualize them fairly, prompting reflection versus mere reaction.
They also infuse historical voices and searing details into their narrative that keep it lively and personal. I won’t soon forget their description of a fine-toothed comb dangling outside a church to signal that only those with hair silky enough to pass through it were welcome to worship. I shivered as I read about hair product companies named Curl-I-Cure, Kinkilla and KKK (Knocks Kinks Krazy). I lamented the irony of black newspapers that wrote about racial pride on pages overrun with advertisements for skin whiteners and hair straighteners.
I loved this book and recommend it highly to anyone seeking insight into black culture in America–our hair speaks volumes.
Quibbles
In fact, I have only a few grumbles about it: the artwork, the less nuanced present-day perspective and a few too many mentions of one Nat Mathis, who by some editing glitch was introduced in four different chapters. With a nickname like “The Bush Doctor” he stood out, in a jarring way.
As the book’s narrative inches closer to 2014, the authors don’t provide the same depth of context and insight that they do from slavery to the 60s. We get a good picture of “what” is going on with hair styles and hair debates, but the analysis is missing a bit of the “why” that we got in earlier chapters, which chronicled slavery through the Black Power Movement.
Perhaps the authors assume that the reader brings sufficient personal knowledge of the social and cultural context in which new hairstyles and hair attitudes are emerging. Maybe the reasons behind the profusion of styles we see today are too hard to pinpoint given the increasingly diverse social, economic and cultural lives of black people in America. After all, today we are mass incarcerated in jail cells, own television networks and occupy the White House, a range of black experience never before witnessed.
Still, I wanted more of the Byrd’s and Tharp’s distillation of hair stories in relation to large-scale social trends affecting contemporary black people in recent decades. What exactly was going on with black people in the 70s and 80s that made a Jheri-curl (wet mess that it was) seem attractive? How are contemporary trends like failing public schools, growing wealth inequality and a black First Family expressed in hair? (Basically, I’m lobbying for an illustrated Hair Story II so that we can all hear more from these fantastic authors.)
In Living Color
Additionally, better paper stock and photography would have taken this book from great to exceptional. While several photos are featured within the book, the fuzzy reproductions just don’t do the styles or the author’s analysis justice. I wanted to really see the drip off of the ‘80s curly perms on page 109 and the kinks and curls throughout the book.
Until my dream of a fully illustrated edition of this book comes true, I recommend “Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present” as a companion to “Hair Story.” “Posing Beauty” features gorgeous duo-tone and full color photographs of everyday folks and celebrities rocking the naps and conks and perms and twists that Byrd and Tharps contextualize so well.
“Hair Story” talks about the brief moment in time when singer James Brown abandoned his press-and-curl for a short ‘fro and sang “I’m Black and I’m Proud” with such charisma that it became an anthem. But you need a copy of “Posing Beauty” to see the sharp-as-a-tack, unstraightened style on him after a concert where the “Black is Beautiful” slogan was introduced.
The Hair Craft Project
Locals who share my interest in black hair and styles can explore the topic further this month at 1708 Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. The gallery is hosting The Hair Craft Project, an exhibition led by artist Sonya Clark, which explores hairdressing as the primordial textile art form—the earliest manipulation of fiber toward an aesthetic and functional purpose. Artists from VCU’s Craft and Material Studies program will prepare canvases hand stitched with threads to simulate hair growth. Local hairstylists will each be given a stitched canvas and the opportunity to braid it as skillfully as possible. Photographs of stylists’ creations on Clark’s head will be shown in conjunction with the canvases. The project aims to break down barriers by crossing boundaries between hair salons and art galleries as sites of aesthetics, craft, skill, improvisation, and commerce. Click here for more details.
FEBRUARY 14- MARCH 8, 2014
People’s Choice Award: Vote for your favorite artworks and hairstyles
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 2014, 5:30 PM
Gallery talk with Bill Gaskins and juror A’Lelia Bundles
THURSDAY, MARCH 6, 2014, 5:30 PM
Gallery talk with Henry Drewel, Ruti Talmor, and juror Lowery Stokes Sims
The featured stylists include Kamala Bhagat, Dionne James Eggleston, Marsha Johnson, Chaunda King, Anita Hill Moses, Nasirah Muhammad, Jameika Pollard, Ingrid Riley, Ife Robinson, Natasha Superville, and Jamilah Williams.
Today I had the pleasure of taping a public service announcement that encourages Richmond-area parents to register their children for kindergarten on April 10.
I’ll post the video once it launches. In the mean time, check out these behind-the-scenes photos from my trip to the Community Idea Stations on Sesame Street. Also, scroll down to read some notes from Smart Beginnings on the importance of kindergarten readiness. (If you saw this Throwback Thursday post, you know I’m serious about kindergarten.)
Continue reading “Behind The Scenes: Kindergarten Registration PSA Filming”
Taiye Selasi’s “Ghana Must Go” is exactly the kind of debut novel I love—ambitious in scope and distinctive in performance. Free of strict chronology and structure, and master of story and emotion.
In it, warring cultures breed tragedy of personal and global proportions. A husband and wife’s scarred pasts, unspoken even to one another, unsettle their union. An unjust professional failure precipitates an unnecessary familial one. A father’s absence leads to a son’s distance. A mother’s choice steals her twins’ innocence. An insecure daughter falters in the long shadow of her siblings’ gifts. All set against backdrops as far-flung as Accra and New England, Lagos and New York.
Selasi’s precision in describing the physical, spiritual and psychological terrain of six members of the Sai family and several supporting characters is a marvel of both imagination and execution. The author’s success in knotting each narrative thread to the others with an air of inevitability is a credit to her congruous vision and technical skill.
After reading the novel from cover to cover, I found myself flipping through its 300 pages and pausing at random to reconnect with the family and their multifaceted immigrant saga. I wanted more of them. Their varied, grasping foibles resonate. Wherever I landed, I found sentences captivating enough to plunge me right back into the heart of a scene, an emotion, a character. Selasi’s writing is that luxuriant.
An Artist’s Touch
Selasi handles punctuation and line breaks like a poet—or perhaps like the novel’s carpenter, Mr. Lamptey, wields his tools—eschewing rigid rules in favor of striking, evocative construction.
His house.
His beautiful, functional, elegant house, which appeared to him whole, the whole ethos, in an instant, like a fertilized zygote spinning inexplicably out of darkness in possession of an entire genetic code. An entire logic. The four quadrants: a nod to symmetry, to his training days, to graph paper, to the compass, perpetual journey/perpetual return, etc., etc., a gray courtyard, not green, polished rock, slabs of slate, treated concrete, a kind of rebuttal to the tropics, to home: so a homeland reimagined, all the lines clean and straight, nothing lush, soft, or verdant. In one instant. All there. Now here. Decades later on a street in Old Adabraka, a crumbling suburb of colonial mansions, whitewashed stucco, stray dogs. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever created—
except Taiwo, he thinks suddenly, a shock of a thought. Whereon Taiwo herself—with black thicket for eyelash and carved rock for cheekbone and gemstone for eyes, her pink lips the same color as the inside of conch shells, impossibly beautiful, an impossible girl—sort of appears there in front of him interrupting his performance of The Considerate Husband, then goes up in smoke. It is the most beautiful thing he has ever created alone, he amends the observation.
The fragments, idiosyncratic line breaks, streams of consciousness captured in type—they all work to punctuate the unfolding drama with rhythm and light and particularity. The writing’s lush bravura elevates the action beyond mere plot and makes quirky individuals of a diverse contingent of first- and second-generation African immigrants—a group too often stereotyped, masked and generalized into obscurity.
Selasi vividly details both people and places, but her real achievement is the interplay between the two—how the places constrain, even define, the people and how the people tint and interpret, but seldom transform or transcend, the places.
Black Like Me?
What I’ll remember most about this book is its variations on the theme of dislocation, cruel breaks that are hard to set right. The Sai children, like the author who created them, have a tenuous relationship with Africa. Their parents are from the continent, but the children were raised in the U.S. with a veil of shame between them and the history that might root them, wherever they may travel.
That’s a heartbreak I can relate to. Thanks to my Kentucky-born mother who goes to Africa every chance she gets, Africa has always been a part of my aesthetic. Art from her recent trip to Ghana adorns walls in my home now, just as drawings and sculpture from her time in Sierra Leone in the ‘60s colored my Ohio childhood.
But Africa has never been a direct part of my experience. Haven’t set foot on its rich soils. Can’t tell you who in my bloodline was last born there, when, or where. I imagine that he or she arrived here by way of the Middle Passage.
Though black, I’m as American as fast food and hip hop. Or, on a good day, as American as jazz—inventive, optimistic, creative in the face of adversity, a charged fusion of folk and pop. And so for me, “Ghana Must Go” expressed a yearning for home that I share and a reverence for Africa that I appreciate. For me, that personal resonance leant extra depth to a book that was already a wonderful read.
I have walked by Barkley Hendricks’s painting “Sisters (Susan and Toni)” in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts more than once. But I never paused long enough to fully consider it … until today.
Its subjects always struck me as cool—fashionable and aloof, but not much more than that. They are two black women, set against a matte black background, in not-quite-life-sized proportions, with only the glimmer of jewelry and some pops of blue and green to draw notice. I saw the women, but I didn’t appreciate their painter’s artistry. That’s the trick of photorealism: the beauty’s in the details.
This evening, I saw the acrylic and oil canvas anew as I read Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” to the painting, museum-goers and the curator who acquired it. I presented Angelou’s work (published in ‘78 a year after “Sisters” was painted) in the gallery as a part of the African American National Read-In. The 25-year-old event is led by the Black Caucus of the National Council of Teachers of English and aims to engage hundreds of thousands of people in the simultaneous celebration of black writers.
Continue reading “National African American Read-In VMFA Style”Sheryl Sandberg’s book, “Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” came out last March, and has won praise and ire ever since. Some love it for its call to ambition. Others take issue with its focus on internal barriers to women’s success rather than institutional ones. And a particularly vocal throng savage Sandberg herself–her privilege, her preternatural stores of energy and her presumption that her rich girl ways are relevant for the rest of us.
“Sheryl Sandberg is hazardous to women,” wrote Andrea Peyser in the New York Post during the book’s launch. “Those who follow Sheryl’s lead are bound to be disappointed–bitter, broke, unemployed, and perpetually single.”
“Sheryl, have you ever stopped to consider that all this ‘leaning in’ is ruining life for the rest of us?,” echoed Rosa Brooks a year later in a Washington Post piece, titled “Recline, don’t ‘Lean In’ (Why I hate Sheryl Sandberg).”
Me? I liked the book at first. I thought its recommendations were practical (if not revolutionary) and its author was clever and well intentioned.
But as the groundswell of haters rose, I gave “Lean In” a second read, and fell in love. Sandberg did what a first-time author should do: She announced a destination, stayed in her lane and arrived there without too many pit stops or detours. She observed a dearth of women in senior leadership in every industry, offered some straightforward explanations of why that’s happened and offered some advice to those who want to take some personal initiative to reverse the trend.
Folks who wanted a memoir, a self-help book or a career-management guide can be disappointed in what she delivered but they can’t claim to have been misled. Within ten pages, she announces that the book’s a “sort of feminist manifesto.” Manifestos are more declaration than detail, so it’s safe to assume that a “sort of” manifesto will be just as vague.
Even those who long for sock-it-to-The-Man invective about the institutional blockades to women’s advancement at work must acknowledge that Sandberg’s not qualified to tell that story (yet). If she came out of the gate with a book of concrete corporate or public policy recommendations for bringing gender parity to corporate America, she would have had about 300 readers and zero credibility.
I like to read books by people who know what they are talking about. Don’t you? Until Sandberg transforms Facebook into a model of diversity, equity and inclusion (which I hope she will), I don’t want to read 200 pages of fairy tales from her on that subject. She’s trying to launch a social movement from a corporate perch, but she’s no dummy. She’s an executive, not a scholar, and has wisely chosen to hammer away at an insidious social problem from a position of strength.
Publishing thoughts on how to thrive as a woman in business amid significant workplace discrimination and inflexibility is well within the billionaire executive’s authority. That’s a book with teeth, written by a master of the disarming corporate-ladder-climbing smile, and many ambitious women would do well to mark her words.
Her central premise is that women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers, and that resonated with me. After reading “Lean In” the first time, I could clearly pinpoint critical junctures when I made choices about my work and my life without fully grasping their long-term consequences. And in many cases without even acknowledging that there was a choice at all.
I’m guilty as charged when it comes to making a slew of career-limiting choices. As soon as I got engaged, I narrowed job searches to cities near my then-fiance. Once married, I settled too quickly into a trailing-spouse mindset. After having a child, I became a maternal gatekeeper at home and hoarded household responsibilities.
Perhaps that’s why I had a positive but not effusive reaction to the book at first. I felt like it was too late for me to benefit from its wisdom. Forewarned is forearmed, but I’m in my 30s and already committed the missteps outlined in the “Don’t Leave Before You Leave” chapter. I had opted out of the traditional workforce so evidently that a local commission seeking my help wasn’t ashamed to list my title as “Shaka Smart’s wife” on its contact list. (Infuriated, I declined that inept invitation to serve.)
But on the second read, I focused less on the symptoms of leaning back and more on the characteristics of leaning in. I realized that though my career path has been far from traditional, it hasn’t exactly been laid back either. I’ve hopped from investment banking to PR, to journalism and entrepreneurship, to wifedom, to motherhood, to volunteering and philanthropy. Through the years, there have been periods of intense focus and great accomplishment despite the absence of a high-profile leadership role.
“Lean In”’s message is that such a jumble of activity is fine if that’s what you want, but if you actually want a top job you’ve got to be extremely intentional in its pursuit. Leading a country or a company (yes, Sandberg urges women to aim high) doesn’t happen by accident, given all of the social, cultural and even biological obstacles to staying fully committed to the workforce.
One personal takeaway is that in order to attain my biggest career dreams, given my particular circumstances, I have to make some tough choices about what I’m not going to do at all, what I’m not going to do well and how I am going to make those choices work for my family. I have to draw the lines. My work, volunteering and family will make endless demands on me, but I have to exert control and make conscious decisions about what I’m going to do, with what intensity and for how long.
Another idea I’ll carry with me is that if a top job is what I crave, I’m not just doing myself a disservice if I don’t go for it. I’m missing a huge opportunity to make the world a better place for women who don’t have the educational and economic opportunities that I have. “While women continue to outpace men in educational achievement, we have ceased making real progress at the top of any industry,” Sandberg noted in a Barnard College commencement address. “This means that when it comes to making the decisions that most affect our world, women’s voices are not heard equally.” I hear you.
The Sandberg haters like Brooks who say the book compels women to play Superwoman at home and at work clearly missed the chapters on “Making Your Partner a Real Partner” and “The Myth of Doing It All.” “Counterintuitively, long-term success at work often depends on not trying to meet every demand placed on us,” Sandberg argues. “The best way to make room for both life and career is to make choices deliberately–to set limits and stick to them.”
In short, each of us has to put our big girl panties on, define what we want and go for it, knowing there must be boundaries and there will be sacrifices. Unlike some disgruntled readers, I don’t expect Sheryl Sandberg (or anyone else for that matter) to write a field guide detailed enough to instruct me in the intricacies of managing my own personal life and career. Yet I appreciate the subjective examples and insights she offers. They reveal something universal about making one’s way in the world. Ultimately, it’s my job to author the details of my particular work and will to lead.
A year after the publication of the book that launched a thousand women’s support groups, a stock photography collection and a screenplay, I got it. I’m leaning in… my way.
