This is love

For about three weeks this spring my 10-disk changer refused to read or even acknowledge any CD other than Meshell Ndegeocello's most recent space-based love project, Comfort Woman. (Yeah, it took me that long to realize that I need to clean the lens on my CD player.) Anyway, I took it as a sign. Arguably her sweetest, coolest, deepest most beautiful album yet, Meshell's soulful rhythms and phrasings - not to mention her sexy cornrows and glitter on the album cover - make me want to do a lot of things. The ridiculous state of the world - most pressingly the crazy marriage amendment proposal and the Patriot Act - keep pulling me out of the fly mood that Meshell's orchestrations set in my bedroom and into the streets. These absurd and repressive policies and this proto-fascist leadership make me want to stowaway on Meshell's spaceship and move to outer space.

Tricia Rose, a brilliant badass black feminist scholar on the West Coast, has been imagining and strategizing for something that turns me on almost as much as Meshell's bass. She calls it "intimate justice." I want it, in my life and on my planet. How can we apply Meshell Ndegeocello's design of a universe ruled by love to the hateful, state-sponsored terror we are living in?

The way I see it, Meshell uses the infinite possibility of outer space to envision an ideal love, and then uses that standard of love to rigorously critique life on this planet. On Track 3 - the one that made me run out and buy the CD when I heard the single on my college radio station - is a liberatory proposal to a lover. In "Andromeda and the Milky Way," Meshell intones, "I want to get free with you." Over and over again, and then toward the end of the song, she proposes a model for "this love ... written in the stars..." Later, in "love song #2," she hints at the existence of an ideal world through which to contextualize her love for this (so so so lucky) individual. Meshell frames herself as an alien who has come to take this loved one outside of her earthly context, explaining, "I come from a world made of love. I want to take you there."

By the end of the album Meshell is not only using this gesture at a "world made of love" to seduce all of us, but she also uses this vision to argue for a concrete, earth-based utopia. Don't be fooled in the logic of this album. Meshell by no means suggests that some outer space fantasy can replace or make up for real systems of relations in the limited world we know. In the second to last track, titled "Fellowship," by offering a critique of use of religion to justify human beings' dehumanization of one another, she explicitly warns that keeping your head to the sky is not enough. I really bet Marx wishes he could have bumped this at meetings instead of passing out copies of "On the Critique of Right in Hegel."

Meshell is so smooth. In three simple steps she calls us to task, calls us out on our cop-outs and redirects our gaze. Meshell opens with the question, "Would you walk a righteous path without the promise of heaven, paradise, streets paved in gold?"

immediately making a distinction between our earthly actions and the sets of moral and religious illusions that trick us into not being present on earth. (And if this far along in the album anyone can even consider saying "no" to Meshell, I'm scared of you.) Continuing on this trajectory, in "Fellowship" Meshell reveals as absurd human displacement of power onto an external, impersonal God, saying, "You believe great god gon come from the sky, take away everything and make everybody feel high..." Once we agree that this is indeed unbelievable, she brings us back to the temporal plane, "but if you know what life is worth, you'll look for yours here on earth. It's at hand." Hmm... Jesus said "the kingdom of God is at hand" once too, at a pretty scary time and with rather revolutionary results as the story goes.

Meshell isn't the first visionary to use music and heaven or outer space to point out and demand some radical changes on the home planet. At the peak of the Vietnam War the Staple Singers wanted to "take you there." In the aftermath of the Vietnam War Hendrix wanted our parents to join an electrified church. During the hell of civil rights backlash Sun Ra and George Clinton thought space was the place, and as recently as the era of Reaganomics, Afrika Bambaata tried to get us to go to or indeed realize "Planet Rock" on the dance floor. Even now Andre 3000 uses a family of aliens with Technovision to advance a love based "prototype" on MTV.

So Meshell prophesies that as far as global human rights are concerned at this moment, the end is near. Meshell uses her electric guitar, among other things, to encourage us to cause something other than the limitations of terror and irrational global hate to emerge. By entitling her album Comfort Woman, she automatically juxtaposes the ideal love that she is proposing against a racialized condition of forced servitude, violation and captivity (that of the tradition of forced, lifelong prostitution referenced by the term) that flies in the face of intimate justice. I want to apply this juxtaposition especially to those in our country who have been explicitly pushed into another kind of "outer space," that of (il)legal marginalization and deprivation of rights.

Right now at least 5,000 legal aliens and foreign nationals - especially of Arab origin or even appearance - are being held without habeas corpus due to the war on terror. According to civil rights lawyer David Cole, an additional 200,000 racially profiled individuals have been stopped and registered at the U.S. border and another 80,000 have been forced to register themselves with the CIA. David Cole says that not one of these people has been convicted of a crime related to terrorism. There seems then to be no correlation to the harassment and detainment of these individuals and decreasing terror. In fact, for me the entire idea of this is terrifying. But since foreign nationals and aliens are not guaranteed the rights of citizens, legally they and their rights may as well not exist.

Right now our central government is seriously considering changing the Constitution to define marriage in a way that permanently excludes a large percentage of the love going on in the general population. Such a proposed amendment not only invalidates a large number of couples who intend to commit to each other for life. It also normalizes and codifies what should be an arbitrary life choice, marking everyone who doesn't fit into that limited paradigm a legally nonexistent "other." In other words, if your vision of yourself does not fit into a straight marriage, your love legally does not exist.
At the same time, welfare reform is trying to limit and punish so called "welfare queens" for designing their families the way they want to, women in prison are threatened with losing access to their children and prisoners in general are being denied the right to vote in large numbers. Add the patriot act to this, which makes it infinitely easier for our terrifying government to criminalize each of us, and yeah, we are all at once aliens and comfort women. We are marked as "others" or outcasts and our most intimate lives are taken out of our control.

Moving on all of these issues - and realizing that these are just different faces of the same issue - requires us as activists and artists to give up the stability of the places where we usually stand and require a similar vulnerability to the one that Meshell whispers of on Comfort Woman. "If you believe your God is better than another man," she sings in "Fellowship," "how you gon end all your suffering?" And appropriate to these times and to the work we do is her admission in "Good Intentions" that "I lose my faith sometimes."

So I think what we should do is - to bump Meshell in daylong sessions - and:

a) Use whatever random privileges , including the right to vote, we have as multiply oppressed but also multiply privileged individuals to stand for the rights and well being of those who don't get to speak when we do.

b) Design our organizations and projects in a way that allows us/inspires us to embrace one another, in a way that builds powerful alliances and encourages us to be self critical in a way that does not stop short of true love.