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Diary of A Mad Black Woman Festigoer PDF
Diary of A Mad Black Woman Festigoer PDF
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access to Songs in Black and Lavender
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Is it reasonable to characterize nine thousand
white women as “a bunch”?—eileen m. hayes,
diary entry
chapter 1
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10 chap ter 1
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The Diary
In August 1995 my friend Cindy Spillane and I drove from Maryland to the twen-
tieth anniversary of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. In previous years
I had attended the festival alone; now I was glad to have Spillane’s company.
She and I had met as members of the DC Area Feminist Chorus (Washington,
DC), now called the Bread and Roses Feminist Singers.10 Both of us dropped
out eventually, for different reasons. I grew weary of being “the only one”—the
sistahs know what I mean. Spillane felt strongly that the chorus’s engagement
with feminist praxis and music had, in her words, “petrified at about 1975.”
“How much Holly Near arranged for four-part women’s voices can one take?”
she would ask. I didn’t begrudge the second-wave radical feminism sound track
that the chorus’s Near-Williamson-Christian repertoire evoked. Indeed, my own
feminist resolve had been fortified by the music of women’s music founders
during the years of my young adulthood, and though those years were decid-
edly over, women’s music was my music, too. Yet despite attempts to “multi-
culturalize” (is that a word?) the chorus’ repertoire with the occasional song
by Sweet Honey in the Rock, Spillane and I concluded independently that the
group’s raison d’etre was better fulfilled as a voluntary association for social
networking than as a choir.
Our bond with each other was as feminist activists in the Washington, DC,
area. Spillane, a white lesbian, frequently led workshops in the women’s com-
munity on antiracism; she was also a fat women’s activist—that is, a fat, fat-issues
activist. My feminist organizing had been predominantly with other black women
and women of color in reproductive rights advocacy and anti-sterilization abuse.
I had been trained by lesbian feminists in the early 1980s and in part was still
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city on a hill
Though I had attended several women’s music festivals previously, including
Michigan, Spillane looked forward to her first one. She had wanted to be pre-
pared, so before the trip she talked with me and her other friends about what
she could expect. I am not sure if, once we arrived, she got what she came for or
not. The Michigan ideal is that women will replicate an entire outdoor city—less
Athens and more a poor people’s tent city à la 1960s Washington, DC—into
which some semipermanent structures, such as stages and commissaries, are
introduced. Michigan is about long queues for food, open-air showers, ice cream,
infrequent portions of meat, and a public transportation system comprised of
flatbed trucks. These vehicles take festigoers from the registration site to camp-
ing areas, from the main stage concert area to the special constituency tents
at which workshops are held. Each August, those who are familiar with the
experience harbor a hope that is familiar to attendees at all residential music
festivals, if not participants in utopian projects. “If we build it, they will come,”
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women only
In contrast to other women’s (lesbian-oriented) music festivals, Michigan is a
women-only gathering; men are not allowed. Indeed, at other festivals, men
are now invited to participate both as audience members and sometimes as
sidemen, though not as instrumental or vocal leads during performances. Ad-
dressing, in the course of Spillane’s preparation for the festival, the various
inconsistencies in festival inclusion policies that have arisen over time and
location would have been too complicated.
Michigan welcomes women-born women of all ages and ethnicities and
male children under the age of eleven. During the day, male youngsters go to
the Brother Sun Boys Camp; the counterpart to the festival’s day programming
for girls is the Gaia Girls Camp.14 The camps are age- and sex-specific. Brother
Sun is for young boys ages five through ten; additionally, families with boys
agree to reside in the Brother Sun camp for the entire week. The girls camp
provides a range of activities and oversight for young females five and older.
These accommodations for children are a festival offering that has evolved over
the years—and not without debate by festival planners and attendees. Michigan
also offers the Sprouts Family Campground for mothers and all children four
years of age and under. I am afraid that given my “single woman with no chil-
dren or nieces or nephews” centricity, I never sought to visit the boys or girls
camp and don’t know if it is possible for nonparents to do so.
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the crush
Working around food makes me hungry. At Michigan, the predominantly volun-
teer kitchen staff serves meals for five thousand or more. By kitchen staff I refer
not to the professionals paid by the festival, but rather to the supervisory person-
nel who provide instruction during the orientation sessions (that is, proper cut-
ting of broccoli, efficient corn-husking, pan-scrubbing procedures). Competence
in the kitchen, traditionally the domain of women, is highly regarded, especially
by festival attendees, many of whom are participants in or spectators of outdoor
mass meal production for the first time. After our breakfast of granola and yo-
gurt the next morning—I know you know the joke: granola is the white lesbian
national food, whatever—anyway, after breakfast the orientation team of which
I was a member received corn-husking instruction from a tall, lithe, butchlike,
levelheaded blonde. She had an attractive and appealing yet distant and unat-
tainable look, similar to that of the lesbian-appropriated heroine of the television
adventure series Xena: Warrior Princess.17 I found myself getting a crush on a
staff member, just like so many others. The uncompensated physical labor of my
African American ancestors notwithstanding, I remember thinking that under
our instructor’s supervision, I could husk corn for the rest of my life.
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doing research
What the fortune teller said is private. Afterward, I retrieved the clipboard and
pen from my backpack; it was time to begin my interviews with black festigoers.
After establishing a bit of rapport, I would ask the interviewee to tell me her
favorite black women-identified musicians so that we could talk about them.
“Women-identified” is the name proponents eventually used to refer to the
genre; just one reason is that the term women’s music seemed to invoke white,
middle-class norms and inspired raised eyebrows. Responses I received initially
included mainstream artists such as Janet Jackson and Tina Turner. “Oh, no,” I
said to Spillane later. “The women are giving me the wrong answers.” Although
we went on to have interesting exchanges, I had really wanted festigoers to talk
about artists associated with the women’s music circuit. “Maybe you should
change your research design and write a book on Tina Turner,” Spillane said, ref-
erencing the rock star we had loved since the days when Ike was a nice guy.19
imagine my surprise
Imagine my surprise—that was also the name of my favorite Holly Near song—
when Spillane and another woman, blonde and “well-kept for her age,” trudged
in my direction.20 The searing heat would make anybody wilt. Though she was
fit, Spillane looked beat; her white companion, on the other hand, chugged
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no shades of gray
At a concert held on the day stage the next afternoon, Spillane and I met some
new festival friends, one white and three black lesbians, the latter of whom
were an engineer, a firefighter, and a naval officer. I learned that only two of
them had known each other before the festival. They were fit, fine—like brown
sugar that wouldn’t melt—in a word, cute. The engineer mentioned the cost of
traveling to the festival: “Michigan is expensive. Every year you spend a couple
hundred bucks on the ticket . . . then about eight hundred dollars to get here
and be comfortable.” The naval officer from Virginia asked if I were a “porcelain
girl.” She continued, “I just mean, do you like to camp? You either like to camp
or you don’t.” Her question about my camping affinities—one that left no room
for a middle ground—sparked the thought that I had met few, if any, black fes-
tigoers, or musicians for that matter, who identified as bisexual. Sure, a good
portion of women had been attached to men at some point in their lives—their
children were testimony to that—but no one intimated that such women were
bisexual rather than lesbian.21 The naval officer continued, “You either are the
type who brings your TV and porcelain dishes to Michigan, or you rough it like
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language matters
I found the PortaJane—but so had two hundred others. Lines moved pretty
fast. The festival lexicon as we know it is a legacy of 1970s cultural feminism,
when language was used as a tool to raise consciousness.22 For feminist and
lesbian participants in the women-identified music network, for example, the
respelling of “women” as “womyn” or “wimmin” (omitting the root “man”)
was a marker of sexuality as well as of gender. I say “was” because people seem
to apply the spellings with a greater sense of irony now. Maybe it’s a sign that
time is passing.
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white looks
Spillane learned that over the years, many white women have yearned for their
own space at the festival, similar to that occupied by the Women of Color tent.
“But the whole festival is white!” I said. In response, the White Women’s Patio
was accepted as a programmed event at the festival.26 The Patio itself consisted
of several chairs in a designated area of grass and dirt several hundred feet from
the Women of Color tent. That year, the Patio sponsored antiracism workshops,
in which activists worked with women on feelings of entitlement that inspired
them—ironically, given the ratio of whites to nonwhites at the event—to yearn
for a white-identified space comparable to that of the Women of Color tent. The
Patio staff also worked as patrollers, encouraging traffic flow around the Women
of Color tent, as visual surveillance by white curiosity seekers was frequently
reported by those inside. Having experienced this type of visual surveillance at
the festival as well as in public venues off-land, I remarked to Spillane that things
were “better this year in part, because of the Patio’s efforts.” We laughed over
the event’s appellation and were smug in our recognition that Patio participants
would be credited for their efforts in diverting the hard and steady gazes of white
festival attendees from the Women of Color tent.
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appropriating africa
Toward the end of the third day, it seemed as though I had walked for miles.
In the late afternoon, I rested near the area reserved for stacks of watermelons.
That simple gesture struck me also as historical, and I was awash in self-con-
sciousness. Momentarily, I observed a trio of black festigoers begin to play a
shekere, cowbell, and calabash—instruments often considered to be African—in
interlocking patterns. Clearly, they were enjoying the interaction. Soon after-
ward, two white women playing African instruments joined them, and before
long, many more white women joined the informal jam session. Some time
passed, and eventually the three black women left the group. The next day, in
the Women of Color tent, I overheard one of them talking about how the white
women always take over. Another woman voiced a version of this sentiment in
expressing her regret about missing a drumming workshop with Ubaka Hill,
ostensibly, she suggested, because of its enormous popularity with white festival
participants. Her question, “How come the white women get Ubaka and we
don’t?” reverberated in my consciousness throughout the festival. Later I learned
that it was precisely the sense of exclusion festigoers described that prompted
festival producers and the Women of Color series to schedule drumming work-
shops for women of color only. The incident revealed that group lessons with
Ubaka Hill, a musician whom many festigoers, black and white, considered a
drumming goddess, was also one of our civil rights.
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lights out
We returned to the campsite on foot rather than wait in line for a truck. As we
stuffed ourselves into our sleeping bags, Spillane reflected on our experiences
leading up to our arrival. “I hope I meet somebody,” Spillane said. “You’ll always
have me, just in case you don’t,” I replied. She continued, as though my words
did not register. “Remember that diner we went to?” I nodded affirmatively,
but really, I was dead tired. “You gotta admit they [the women in the diner]
looked a lot like Bessie Smith,” she said, referring to a narrative, frequently
circulated in women-identified music spheres (by white women), about the
popular black vaudeville blues singer and reports of her lesbian (but, signifi-
cantly, not bisexual) identity. I was too exhausted to explore racialized elements
of thought and feeling, identity politics and music. I squeezed her hand, said
that we would “process” the issue in the morning, and rolled over.
To a certain extent, this book engages in the very project of processing that I
promised Spillane we would get to the next morning—though what I aim to
theorize is a much wider range of issues that emanate from black women’s
participation in the women’s music festival scene. The diary is singular in the
women’s music festival literature in that it privileges the perspective of a black
festigoer as opposed to that of a musician or white festival attendee. In fact, this
book’s underlying theme derives from an understanding I gleaned from black
festigoers in the early years of my research: according to some black women
I interviewed—a triangle that was half black, indicating black racial identity,
and half lavender, indexing lesbian collectivity—was symbolic of their identities
as black lesbians. Lisa Powell, an attorney and black activist I met at the now-
defunct West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festival (California), was one
of the first festigoers to voice this formulation aloud. Powell shared her plans to
reinvigorate with music a weekend retreat for the group she cofounded in 1990,
United Lesbians of African Heritage (ULOAH).27 Speaking of “sisters [black
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26 chap ter 1
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30 chap ter 1
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