Dear Sir,
“Power name that baby.”
My uncle was President of the Inmate Council in Milan, a federal penitentiary located in the state of Michigan, to which he was sentenced fifteen years for bank robbery. He earned the most votes from his peers and thus became the prisoners’ advocate for food, medical attention, visitation, and recreation. Arrested in 1972, on his father’s front lawn, by Cleveland police officers, he was later cross-examined by agents of the FBI, who garnered an involuntary, signed confession. Two years later, this uncle penned a letter from Milan, offering up a name for the baby girl inside his younger sister’s belly — Malika. The Arabic translation of this name is queen. Thus, whenever my uncle and I meet face-to-face, I am greeted, “Hello, Queen Malik”.
In SIR, visual artist and writer Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle, speculates on acts of naming within her own family lineage and across the African diaspora. Will the names in which we fit our children serve as shields? Bullet-proof vests? Or rather, as thrones — Black motherhood’s sly hand, demanding pomp and circumstance, instead of pipelines to prisons.
“SIR: Somebody whose blood is lined with royalty. Somebody who is entitled to have a title.”
“Hinkle’s mother named her brother Sir so that everybody would have to address him with a title of respect regardless of the power relations he would encounter as a Black man living in a turbulent and racially liminal Kentucky.” — SIR
The author’s mother, Delia Reneese Hinkle, selected the name Kenyatta, for her daughter, “because she had read Donald Goines’ books…out loud…during the pregnancy.” This fictional Kenyatta hijacks airplanes while escaping the ‘pigs', hides out in agricultural landscapes to train militants, and remains stealth on Detroit's streets, tracking down drug dealers who endanger their communities.
“Just imagine me swimming in her womb weaving tales of community activists, living in the ghetto as a 6ft tall bald black man carrying a power name…slapping pimps, blowing up liquor stores and racist corporations…” — Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
Imagination is a thematic pool through which SIR, the book, wades. To whom is imagination permitted? Whites only? Or Colored too? In which direction does dammed creativity flow? “What happens to a dream deferred?” inquires the poet, Langston Hughes. Does it spill over into the next generation?
Hinkle’s mother “was an artist who never got to be one because her racist art teachers would fail her and crumple up her drawings.” As an art professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Hinkle herself is teacher now, opening the floodgates for future architects of cultural possibilities. Her drawings, paintings, performances, and poetry have been viewed, heard, and seen across the world’s oceans — a group exhibition in Cape Town, South Africa, a Fulbright Fellowship in Lagos, Nigeria, inside the Somerset House in London, and throughout the United States from The Studio Museum in Harlem to San Francisco’s Modern Art Museum in California
“Jefferson schools again ordered to desegregate.”
Sir is layered with archival news clippings detailing the history of segregation in the artist’s birthplace of Louisville, Kentucky. Those of us all-too-familiar with American Jim Crow tales may not be moved by the facts and figures alone, however the clippings come alive through the conjoined family narratives. The breath of the artist’s mother, Delia, can be felt suspended on the yellow school bus awaiting the removal of Kentucky Klan members by the National Guard. This is 1975. Those black and white photos synonymous with desegregation are now in Kodachrome color. Grown men, in not-so-white robes, jowls salivating like hounds, hoping to tear into Black girl flesh. Over twenty-one years after Brown vs the Board of Education, Delia’s sleeping head is yanked up off her desk, through her head of hair, by the hand of her teacher. Institutional violence making its marks. Institutional violence blistering childhood memories.
“African bootyscratcher.”
Black mamas aren’t the only ones engaged in the act of naming. Black children get to do it too. Every time I learn of some other woman, who in girlhood, was offered the honorific, “African Booty Scratcher”, I squeal in delight! It’s an elite club, by my own estimation, of brilliant girls with dark skin or high foreheads, or too-skinny legs, who donned an other worldly appearance and were called out for it. For Hinkle, this name calling “still hurts sometimes.” For me, her reader, it’s a secret handshake, a sacred sisterhood, a calling — circa 1982 I was African Booty Scratcher, circa 1992 she was African Booty Scratcher.
“What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.”
Sir, the man, is not invested in a book about his self being named. Sometimes, Sir, the man, is not invested in his name being Sir. His birth certificate, opens the book, and declares that shortly after entering the world he shall be called Sir Antany Marquis Lavonne Hinkle. “Antany” is typed over a striked “Anthony”, all of this laid out on the official record. The nurse didn’t want to type his name as dictated. His mother had to insist several times. That familiar and troubling pattern of medical professionals, too often, not hearing Black women. When Kenyatta asks her brother, “Sir, has anyone every refused to call you sir?”
He answers back, “People have to call me whatever I tell them to call me.”
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SIR is published by Litmus Press and is available on Amazon and through Small Press Distribution
Visit the link to see more works by artist Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle
Book Review written by Malika Ali Harding
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