Introduction
In the spring of 1969, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started paying attention to a documentary film by Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) titled The New Ark. Baraka had made the film for the National Educational Television’s (NET) Public Broadcasting Laboratory (PBL) and the documentary aired as part of a television special titled “Can This Be America?” in 1968. The FBI’s COINTELPRO listed the film as one of interest to the Bureau’s investigation due to its contribution to the so-called “Black extremist movement in the U.S.” As far as the Bureau was concerned, the documentary was but another example of “the trash which is promulgated in the name of Black art” (Federal Bureau of Investigation 1969; 1970). The Bureau’s position should not come as a surprise. If anything, the film’s documentation in COINTELPRO reveals the subversive power of this rare Black documentary film, which, according to the FBI, constituted a threat. The New Ark stands as an example among many other similar projects of a wave of Black engagement with the medium of documentary film in what can only be described as a Black documentary renaissance that swept through the 1960s. The era gave rise to a revived interest in documentary filmmaking among Black artists, communities, activists, and organisers. This wave of documentary films brought together years of Black intellectual thought, radical tradition, and struggles for freedom onto the screens.1 Nevertheless, the primary and active role Black women played in this wave of films is often forgotten.
The New Ark, focusing entirely on Baraka's community in Newark, New Jersey, was written by Baraka and was co-directed by Larry Neal, while most of the film editing and photography was done by pioneer Black filmmaker and photographer, James Hinton. The film was made for the National Educational Television’s (NET) Public Broadcasting Laboratory (PBL) and was aired on PBL in December of 1968 in an episode titled “Can This Be America?” which featured five short films by various independent American filmmakers. The film had long been forgotten but was unearthed in 2014 as part of the James Hinton Collection at the Harvard Film Archive (HFA). The New Ark features various members of the community, including Baraka’s wife, poet, organiser, and activist, Amina Baraka.
At first, the narrative seems patriarchal, but a closer look at The New Ark reveals a story of Newark’s Black Kawaida nationalist women working hard to break that narrative from within. Within this alternative storyline, Amina Baraka and other women in her community navigate and express a synergy between radicalism and womanhood. I argue that in this sense, Baraka’s camera functions merely as a sheer rather than an opaque layer to the women’s struggles and resistance. Unlike their memory in many public imaginations of the Black Arts Movement and Black Power, fighting from the shadows, Newark’s Kawaida Black nationalist women were never dormant. Building on the work of Joy James and Ashely D. Farmer among others and through a visual and contextual analysis of The New Ark as well as drawing from the written testimonies of Newark’s Kawaida women, this paper offers a unique take on how Black women were “shadowboxing” through their engagement both on– and behind the screen of The New Ark. The aim of this paper is to illustrate how, above all, the women were articulating a quest for radical womanhood (James 1999). This work joins and contributes to a broader scholarly discussion foregrounding the long-forsaken prominence of Black women in the Black freedom struggle throughout the 1960s as primary actors, leaders, grassroots organisers, workers, family members, and much more. While various scholars have presented groundbreaking research on Black (nationalist) women’s activism and engagement with various organisations and community efforts, both in leadership and non-leadership positions, I wish to propose an analysis of how these efforts are translated into documentary film. The aim is therefore twofold: first to reposition Black women’s radical womanhood at the heart of Black radicalism and, at the same time, to reposition an understudied medium when it comes to Black women’s activism, namely the medium of documentary film, at the heart of radical womanhood. At the crossroads of politics and culture, the fight for radical womanhood in the 1960s takes place in the arena of documentary film as much as anywhere else.
"Peaches"
Following the 1963 bombing of Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which resulted in the killing of four young Black girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, Nina Simone wrote the song “Four Women.” The four women in the song, Aunt Sarah, Saphronia, Sweet Thing, and Peaches, represent four tropes prominent in the public imagination about Black women. From the religious home keeper ‘mammy’ [sic] to the ‘mulatto’ [sic] activist and the prostitute, the song portrays the pain and suffering that all of these women endure, but also their strength. Simone repeats the phrase “what do they call me” in every stanza after describing each woman to emphasize the projection of these definitions and names on the women. Simone pauses before describing the fourth woman, Peaches. She is, as Patricia Hill Collins notes in Black Feminist Thought, “an especially powerful figure” mainly because of her anger; her lines read “my life has been rough, I am awfully bitter these days” (Hill Collins, 2000). Simone channels this anger by singing “angrily” while forcefully pressing the piano keys in most of her performances of the song. Peaches is a Black woman who has mastered the art of “self-definition” because, as Simone argues, she “got her ass together” and is not someone to be messed with. For Simone, “when any black woman hears that song, she either starts crying or she wants to go out and kill somebody” because it is an honest and tough “affirmation of the self.” In her reflection on the meaning of the song, Malcolm X’s eldest daughter, Attallah Shabazz, argues: “Four Women was an opportunity for Black women to do an internal look at how we co-exist.”
In her verses, Simone encapsulates the silencing of Black womanhood that is central to this study. The silencing in this instance takes the form of “shadowing” Black women within the American public imagination, evident in policy, media, film and television, scholarship, and intellectual spaces, at national and local levels. Here, I draw on Joy James’ definition of “shadowing” in her seminal work Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics. James argues: “as interposed opaque bodies, black females partially emerge from double-paned obscurity because of their ‘reflections’ of others – generally whites or black males. […] Projecting inferiority, dormant maternal domesticity, or animalistic hostility, American culture inscribes upon black females their appearance as shadows, marking them as imperfect imitations of feminised Europeans or masculinised Africans. These projections haunt the public and private lives of black females” (James 1999). Much like Simone’s verses, James comments on the shadowing of the Black woman, her body and psyche, as a process in which she exists only as an incomplete image of whiteness and masculinised blackness, trapped in tropes and fetishisations about her body and mind. Within this shadowing, Black womanhood occupies a strained space of obscurity that silences not only its independence but also its complexity, divergence, and agency.
Simone’s last verse in “Four Women” also offers a glimpse into the subversive power of Black womanhood. Aware of the shadowing and silencing imposed on their womanhood, many Black women “shadowbox.” In the words of James, they are “fighters who battle as outsiders” who battle on multiple fronts. They fight publicly and privately against their vilification, marginalisation, and confinement. They also battle internally within their own groups over different strategies and ideologies and within themselves over their opinions and self-reflections. For the women of The New Ark, their battles were not solely against white and Black patriarchy, white women and white feminism, but were equally concerned with a more structural level, that is to say, the state and/or institutional level. They saw their shadowing and silencing as embedded in the economic and cultural fabric of America stemming from the intersections of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy (James 1999). From here emerges the case for radical womanhood, which will be explored throughout this paper.2
Many of the Black women mentioned above had embraced and enriched Black radicalism as much as others leading up to the 1960s. The June 1951 edition of Freedom newspaper, for which Vicki Garvin served on the editorial board, featured a piece on Chicago labour and civil rights leader, Octavia Hawkins. The article describes her as a “radical” and adds: “but she is no radical without a rudder. She knows where she’s going and what it takes to get there.” Hawkins also describes her own activism in the piece: “Everything I do is absolutely necessary for my own existence. The history of my race, the history of my economic class, my personal experiences as a woman give me but one choice. […] The struggles for world peace, the fight for labour’s emancipation, the fight for Negro [sic] rights and women’s rights cannot be separated. The future belongs to those who see this clearly” (‘Modern Harriet’1951; Dada 2022). Hawkins is among the long list of Black radical women who paved the way for the countless Black women succeeding them in the 1960s.
Various scholarly studies have tried to shed light on the lives and works of these women. Crucial to such analyses and examinations is the repositioning of their struggles within the Black radical tradition, in other words, presenting a more realistic account of “the national and international aspects of their activism” and “their intellectual and philosophical contributions to black radicalism” (Gore 2011). The goal of these scholarly endeavors has been to deconstruct Black women’s association with radicalism in the 1960s as simply, “the iconic gun-slinging, baby-toting, Afro-coifed Amazon warrior” and other associations that focus on so-called radical physical appearances, objectification, and ultimately what Joy James has coined as the “commodification” and “iconography” of radical Black women in popular culture, especially those active in the Black Panther Party and other Black nationalist women, as the Black “femme fatales” (James 1999).
My examination of Black women’s radicalism starts first and foremost from the women’s own understanding of racism, sexism, and capitalism, as structural issues that demand radical change. There is thus a recognition of these systems of oppression but a refusal to merely “make ‘men’ or ‘whites’ or ‘heterosexuals’ the problem in lieu of confronting corporate power, state authority, and policing” (James 1999). Within this framework, radicalism has to do with the very definition of womanhood. Radicalising Black womanhood means releasing it from “controlling images” and instead realigning it with one’s “lived experiences” and “existence.” As Patricia Hill Collins argues, it is after all the self, “including work and family experiences” that “create the conditions whereby the contradictions between everyday experiences and the controlling images of Black womanhood become visible.” Womanhood itself thus becomes a radical self-defined space, dictated by women’s quest for realigning their womanhood with their “personal lives […] fundamentally shaped by intersecting oppressions of race, gender, sexuality, and class” (Hill Collins 2000).
“The creators and builders of a new revolutionary way of living”
In a relatively long segment in Amiri Baraka’s The New Ark, a few women sit in a circle and discuss their role in the struggle for “raising” Black consciousness. The women belong to the group Sisters of Black Culture (SBC). One of the women asks: “What makes a Black woman appealing?” One of the women responds that “femininity and submissiveness make a Black woman appealing” while another explains:
The SBC was formed as part of the Black Community for Development and Defense (BCD) in Newark, working closely with Amina Baraka’s United Sisters, a discussion group for women she had created in response to the Second Black Power Conference of 1967. In 1968, the group had merged with Amina Baraka’s United Sisters. The two women-led groups stood alongside the “United Brothers, Spirit House” and the BCD, all forming the larger Committee for Unified Newark (CFUN), an organisation formed as a collaboration between Maulana Karenga and Amiri Baraka as a result of the Second Black Power Conference held in Newark. The conference was a turning point in Baraka and Karenga’s relationship, with Karenga’s teachings of Kawaida growing ever more influential on Baraka and his community (Farmer 2017; Woodard 1991).
The doctrine of Kawaida was developed by Karenga, who had established the US organisation in Los Angeles. The teachings of Kawaida, meaning tradition in Swahili, were an African-centred ideology prioritising Black autonomy and rejecting American and Western-centred “political, cultural, and economic hegemony.” A considerable part of this doctrine extended to the understandings of Black manhood and womanhood, with womanhood being assigned a secondary role in the struggle (Simanga 2015). As Ashley Farmer argues, these conceptions were based on “interpretations of social relationships in ancient African societies. Steeped in idealism and prevailing patriarchy of the day, they originally defined the African woman as an activist who induced Cultural Revolution through child rearing, education, and homemaking. Initially mirroring rather than redefining dominant Eurocentric constructs, cultural nationalists’ gendered ideals had more in common with American values than African ones” (Farmer 2017). The SBC’s statement in Baraka’s film regarding Black women’s submissiveness and “male supremacy” is a direct quotation from Karenga’s principles of Kawaida, and some of these principles would continue to have influence within the Congress of African Peoples (CAP), a community organization that replaced CFUN in 1970. In an interview with Kim McMillion in 2019, Amina Baraka herself also discussed the difficulties she faced having to cope with such statements and how she found herself repeating some of them despite her disagreement and despite being deeply troubled by them (Woodard 1991; Smethurst 2005; Watts 2001; McMillon 2019).4
Fig. 1. Still from SBC’s meeting in The New Ark
The brief historical context sketched above of the environment surrounding Amina Baraka and other Black Nationalist women is the only one often encountered in historiographies of the movement and the role of women in it. Such overviews are only partially accurate. If the male chauvinism, sexism, and patriarchy detailed above sought to deny Black women their equal share in fighting for freedom, such historiographies also deny Black women, and specifically Black nationalist women, an honest and holistic examination of their history, not one of compliance and marginality but one of radical womanhood. At first glance, the possibility of Amina Baraka repeating words such as ‘Black women’s submissiveness’ seems contradictory to her activism, which was known to be targeted towards male chauvinism and sexism within the CFUN and later CAP. The simple solution to this conundrum when analysing the life and work of Black nationalist women is that using such words to define Amina Baraka’s as well as other women’s role in the struggle does not do justice to the complex, ever-changing, and radical character of these women’s intersectional fight for freedom. Multiple scholars have considered this complexity when it comes to Black women of the CFUN, CAP, as well as other organisations. As Joseph Smethurst and Ashley Farmer, among others, argue, the women worked within Black Nationalist and Black Power organisations to change many of the sexist and patriarchal cultures that governed them. Right from the start, women worked hard to “push beyond the limitations” of Kawaida by leading and organising within their organisations and creating new intellectual spaces for Black women theorising about Black womanhood (Simanga 2015; Farmer 2017; Smethurst 2005). They did so in writing, discussions, meetings, conferences, and in art.
Amiri Baraka’s own testament on male chauvinism in their organisations points out the multiple battles the women had to fight within the movement. Soon after introducing the doctrine of Kawaida to Amiri and Amina Baraka, Baraka’s community started diverting from the original teachings of the doctrine, especially in terms of gender roles. Amiri Baraka recounts in his autobiography how “male chauvinism was glorified as a form of African culture” and that Amina had always sought ways to dismantle this “male chauvinism disguised as African traditionalism that disfigured” the movement. As he recalls, she had always “resisted” such practices not only “at all levels of the organization” but also from her own husband. He also states: “what stopped us from getting too far out in Kawaida was my wife, Amina, who not only waged a constant struggle against my personal and organisational male chauvinism, but secretly in her way was constantly undermining Karenga’s influence. […] All the black women in those militant black organisations deserve the highest praise. Not only did they stand with us shoulder to shoulder against black people’s enemies, they also had to go toe to toe with us, battling day after day against our insufferable male chauvinism” (Baraka 1997). What Amiri Baraka points out here is crucial for the understanding of Black women’s shadowboxing within the movement and provides the necessary context for The New Ark.
Viewing the film as an isolated visual text reveals a story of Black men complemented by a few Black women, but situating the film’s visual text within its context reveals a story of Black women who used their radical womanhood to shadowbox on the film screen and in their everyday lives. While a patriarchal interpretation of a Cultural Revolution echoes throughout The New Ark with the opening sequence narrating “we are the new princes of the earth” as a few men exit Spirit House, Black women demand the camera’s attention (The New Ark 1968).5 Early in the film, we are introduced to a few community members performing A Black Mass in front of Spirit House and among the performing group are a few women. This is the first time we see women engage with the camera. Throughout the rest of the film, we see women participating in plays; we see them in political organising, typing, making calls, and campaigning on the streets. We see them active in social organisation in the form of the African Free School, and we see them in the audience listening to speeches, participating in discussions, and expressing themselves through dance and music. At various points in the film, we may feel that there are more women driving the Cultural Revolution than men, despite the film’s patriarchal interpretation of the revolution.
Most notably, the women’s engagement with the camera reflects their belief in the power of art and film in expressing their radical womanhood. Crucial in this aspect is the role Amina played, both by encouraging other women in this regard and by influencing her husband to include the women of the movement. In a conversation with Sandra G. Shannon, Amiri Baraka points to this by asserting that Amina had a great influence on him and his art, especially in terms of representation and recognition of Black women. He adds: “she has been very, very forceful in terms of trying to make me understand that, which I hope I understood” (Shannon 1994). Amina, being herself an artist, dancer, poet, and actress, helped guide many of her husband’s work alongside her own artistic endeavours. Baraka recalls that he had met Amina while filming one of his first film projects, The Death of Malcolm X in 1966, the footage of which has been lost (Baraka 1997). Believing in film, and specifically documentary expressions of the Cultural Revolution, they both worked hard to include their community in such expressions and continued to emphasise the importance of these cultural projects to their people, with Amina focusing on the women. Despite Kawaida’s initial teachings to women that they “have absolutely no business in men’s discussions” and that their “only entrance should be to serve refreshments” the women’s engagement in the film and depiction of their active participation in most aspects of their community proves the opposite (Sisters of Black Culture 1969). The women of CAP and CFUN would later explicitly define their dedication to film and television generally defined by them as “communications” as a tool for bringing about a “socialist revolution” to realise radical structural change to the system of “capitalism and imperialism.” These explicit definitions of their struggle were the focus of The Afrikan Women’s Conference held in Newark in 1974 (‘African Women Unite’ Aug. 1974).
The women of the movement were thus never dormant. They worked relentlessly within the system of their organisations and sometimes did so in secret. As Amiri and Amina Baraka’s group grew further away from Karenga, women started taking the lead in organising for their rights to self-definition as part of a liberation-for-all agenda. Such efforts intensified in 1968 and 1969 and, due to ideological differences between Baraka and Karenga’s group, the CFUN became independent from BCD. It is around this time that PBL commissioned Baraka to make a short film, which would turn out to be The New Ark. The split with BCD gave Amina Baraka and other women the opportunity they had been waiting and working for all along. Amina created a bigger division for women within the CFUN, including women who were part of the United Sisters and women who left BCD “soon growing to be the largest section of CFUN” and continued to play a key role in CAP after its creation in 1970. As Ashley Farmer notes, “women in the Newark chapter of CAP used this position to their advantage, working to reformulate CAP members’ perceptions of gender roles and hierarchies” (2017). They also started establishing institutions within the organisations to serve their struggle and go beyond Newark, aiming at nationwide cooperation and action. Among these was the African Free School portrayed in detail in The New Ark.
One could therefore argue that the women of CFUN and CAP had always implicitly used and expressed their radical womanhood to shadowbox against the multilayered levels of oppression they were facing in the late 1960s. The early 1970s marked the dawn of an explicit movement that prioritised Black women’s liberation as necessary for the liberation of all Black people (Woodard 1991; Farmer 2017; Federal Bureau of Investigation 1969). The women of CFUN would declare in 1973 that “if Afrikan women cannot possibly conduct their struggle in isolation from the struggle that our people wage for Afrikan liberation, Afrikan freedom, conversely, is not effective unless it brings about the liberation of Afrikan women” (‘The Role of Women’ 1973). This would lead to the establishment of the Black Women’s United Front (BWUF) at the 1974 Afrikan Women’s Conference under the leadership of Amina Baraka. Both the conference and later the BWUF defined the women’s struggle as a continuing radical fight against structural oppression or what they termed as “triple oppression” thus they were “anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist (intrinsically anti-sexist through the struggle against the triple oppression of black women” and they would later add anti-sexist as a fourth separate principle (‘The Black Women’ 1976). Crucial to the understanding of the lives and struggles of the women of The New Ark is the trajectory of their struggle within the complex changes of organisational structures in Newark, sketched above. Although The New Ark does not necessarily capture the subsequent explicit expression of radical womanhood by Kawaida women in the early 1970s, and although the narrative functions mostly within the borders of Kawaida, the women’s presence, gazes, words, and organizing, still speak of an implicit radical womanhood, perhaps not intentionally captured by Baraka’s camera but forced onto the viewer by the women as “the creators and builders of a new revolutionary way of living” (Farmer 2017; ‘The Role of the Black Woman’ 1974).
Mothers and Anti-Capitalists
In their struggle for radical structural transformation, women of The New Ark expressed their womanhood as a radically self-defined space in which the following three elements are central: first, the women see their struggle as part of a larger liberation and structural change needed for all Black people; second, they hint towards the structural layered oppression they are facing also within their own community and in their own homes, and finally, “while remaining committed to Kawaida ideology” they sought to redefine Black womanhood within those parameters in a way that is true to themselves and their community (Farmer 2017). Women’s activism in education as a political tool portrayed in The New Ark sums up the three elements delineated above.
This can be discerned from the film’s depiction of interactions between the women and children of the community. Early on in the film, we see Amina Baraka standing on top of the stairs of Spirit House. She is holding her child in her arms and enthusiastically calls other children of the community to come to the “community black school.” Later we see Amina standing in front of her class. She teaches young boys and girls the Black alphabet and instills in them the understanding that “brothers are kings” and the “sisters are queens.” The scene cuts to Amina standing with the group outside Spirit House clapping for the girls as they are dancing while chanting “Black is Beautiful” (The New Ark 1968).6 Another scene zooms in on two girls dancing in traditional African clothes and Nigerian gele in what seems to be an arts festival. Women stand alongside other children clapping and encouraging the dancing girls.7 These scenes represent all interactions between women and children in the film. They reflect the women’s dedication to educating the youth, seeing them as the future vanguards of the revolution.
The issue of education was central to the women’s redefinition of womanhood within Kawaida. This flows from an attempt by the women to envision their role in the movement as taking action into their own hands in a way that does not revolve around men and to create a sphere in which they can express and embrace their womanhood the way they see fit and in a way that is flexible. Rather than viewing educating the children as a subordinate role because of the “equation of biological differences with social hierarchies” as traditionally dictated by Kawaida, they viewed education as part of social and political organisation and a source of strength. Seeing their children as an extension of themselves and the future of Black struggle, Kawaida women considered education to be a fight for “self-determination” starting from the mother and extending to the children (Farmer 2017; Muminas 1971).
They also understood the radical change needed to tackle the structural issues of education. They would argue at the Afrikan Women’s Conference that while the patriarchal and capitalist reality of the society in which they lived burdened them with the total responsibility of caring for the children, it also structurally removed the support they needed: “in this capitalist society, the youth or the raising of children is viewed as women’s responsibility rather than the people’s responsibility and even though we might be cognizant of this reality, it does not solve the care and education of the youth and it is with that understanding it becomes the present responsibility of the women to seek resolution to the care and education of the youth and demand their critical involvement in the struggle as well” (‘African Women’ 1974). Their argument here echoes Angela Davis’ argument in Women Race & Class, that “unlike white housewives […] Black wives and mothers, usually workers as well, have rarely been offered the time and energy to become experts at domesticity” (Davis 1981). It is for this reason that socializing housework and children care as fought for by women of the CFUN and CAP, “contains one of the radical secrets of women’s liberation.” As Patricia Hill Collins argues, “by seeing the larger community as responsible for children and by giving other mothers and other nonparents ‘rights’ in child rearing, those African-Americans who endorse these values challenge prevailing capitalist property relations” (Hill-Collins 2000).
One of the most telling documents summarising and analysing this endeavour by Kawaida’s Black nationalist women, is a 1976 paper titled “The Woman Question: Black Women and Struggle” written by Amina Baraka in collaboration with several of her colleagues forming a committee of “women comrades.” Amina lists the history of Black radicalism tracing back its roots to slavery and the exploitation of Black women’s labour and bodies. She explains that the women’s radical awakening within CAP came from their realisation of the intersecting oppressions they were facing within a capitalist system supplied by sexism and racism. She argues: “Not having an understanding of Capitalism and its relationship to oppression, nations, workers and the family, we took an idealist position on the woman, relegating women to the role of education, social organization, and inspiration and defining femininity as submissiveness, which turned out to be repressive when men could use that definition to justify everything from polygamy to keeping women in political ignorance.” She goes on to argue, however, that the women of Newark had always been in a long process of fighting against such definitions (Baraka 1976).
But the women never saw their fight as detached from the collective struggle. They “consistently attempted to struggle against” the ideas that assigned the women a secondary role in the struggle and separated the women’s call for liberation from the liberation of all Black people from all forms of oppression they encountered within “Monopoly Capitalism.” As Amina writes, the women “never saw” their “liberation coming separate from that of Black people.” She continues: “Class oppression, national oppression, and oppression because of their sex. Black women’s struggle is inseparable from the struggle of Black people, just as it is inseparable from the struggle of the whole multi-national working class for revolution... the overthrow of Monopoly Capitalism” (Baraka 1976). Educating themselves first and then the youth about the oppressions facing them while at the same time socialising the education of children meant creating a safety net within their community for children and women, allowing women to direct their efforts towards becoming “organized” and being “a critical part of the struggle” (Baraka 1976). They saw it as a political project that would give them the “full participation” they demanded in a collective “revolutionary struggle” (‘African Women’ 1974). The educational initiatives and day-care programs established by the women meant that they eventually had more free time to spend on other political endeavours within the organisations without having to worry about their children. As Amiri Baraka recalls, this was part of Amina’s plan to encourage women to do political work, having women appointed to the departments of “Siasa (politics), Uchumi (economics), Kuumba (arts)” within the organisations (Baraka 1997).
The implicit radical womanhood of the women in The New Ark is further intensified by subtly undermining Kawaida teachings about the ‘proper’ appearance and manners of Black women as also delineated in an SBC pamphlet. Among the ‘improper’ aspects of Black women’s appearance and behaviour were wearing makeup, smoking, wearing pants, straightening their hair, and participating in “men’s discussions” (Sisters of Black Culture 1969). Women in various shots in the film defy these teachings. Some shots focus on women actively participating in the political campaign of Theodore Pinckney and Donald Tucker running for the Newark City Council. The camera zooms in on the women either marching in the streets with campaign stickers and signs or participating in campaign discussions and meetings generally viewed as men’s business (The New Ark 1968). In some shots, the viewer may even get the feeling that there are more women than men driving the political campaigns because of their prominent presence. Another scene features a woman wearing red pants dancing to an African rhythm. The camera slowly follows her movements. As she turns around, her face is revealed, painted with subtle makeup. One shot focuses on a woman smoking in a political campaign office; the camera stays on her for a couple of seconds rather than swiftly passing her by.
Although subtle, these scenes invoke the women’s redefinition of their womanhood within Kawaida by reclaiming the vulnerability that comes from being “highly visible” and thus ironically “rendered invisible” by structures of domination, and being constantly watched and corrected on their behaviours and appearance (Lorde 1984). The women in these scenes defy this judgment and fear by using their vulnerability as a self-defined visibility of cultural and political expression. They express themselves in the cultural and political spaces in the film through their dress, their dance and movements, as well as their skills, behaviour, and thinking. Wearing subtle makeup and dressed in a modern red jumpsuit embellished with African elements, the woman dancing in front of The New Ark’s camera exudes self-confidence. She embodies, through her appearance, as Amina Baraka writes on the power of dress, the “social consciousness […] to determine our own forms of expression in all aspects of our lives” (Baraka Jun. 1973). In the scenes featuring women in political campaigning, whether smoking or wearing their hair natural or straightened, the women’s appearance is directly tied to their political campaigning. They are making calls, typing, discussing, working with their male co-workers, and we see them taking “an active role” in the struggle for liberation. Reflecting Amina Baraka’s writing in a column titled “On Afrikan Women,” the visibility of women in these scenes embodies the women’s quest for “political clarity” as political organisers and thinkers and as the active creators of a “Cultural Revolution” (Baraka Aug. 1973).
Fig. 2: Stills of Black women’s ‘visibility’ in The New Ark
The women thus understood their struggle to be structural, requiring radical methods. They recognised that the shadowing and silencing was an integral part of the economic, political, and cultural fabric of America. “Shadowboxing” against these structures of oppression meant that they were battling on these multiple fronts. Starting with themselves and their own ‘nation’ the women of CFUN and CAP sought to reclaim the spheres of domesticity, motherhood, and propriety that were intended to render them vulnerable and invisible as spheres of radical womanhood through which they would define their own needs and subsequently those of their children. The women of The New Ark reflect the shadowboxing of the women to define themselves and their womanhood within the systems of their own organisations and communities despite their existence in them as “subordinate Others” and “gender” outsiders and to a larger white America as “racial” outsiders. On the other hand, they were also facing their own internal battles; “privately” the women also had to “box with themselves” (James 1999). The confidence, organising, skill, and dedication found in the words and images of the women throughout the film even when internalising and discussing Kawaida’s teachings speaks of a complex search for oneself and one’s womanhood in this radical fight for freedom. Reminiscent of Amina Baraka’s words in Black Journal’s “The Black Woman,” it was a question of getting “yourself together […] the world will relate to us once we can relate to ourselves” (Black Journal 1970). In this sense, finding oneself was imperative for the women as the first step in finding and bringing together their community collectively and playing one’s “necessary role” within that collectiveness.
Summoners of the Past
Part of the re-exploration and redefinition of the self and collectiveness can also be discerned in The New Ark women’s intellectual summoning of the past lives of the “Afrikan Woman” both on the American continent and before that on the African continent (Baraka Aug. 1973). As pointed out by Amiri Baraka, while the initial teachings of Kawaida evoked distorted, male chauvinistic, and sexist understandings of this past, the women of CAP and CFUN helped themselves and others rediscover that past as the root of their strength and commitment to liberation. Throughout the film, women are actively summoning that history. One scene features a woman dancing to an African drumbeat as the camera follows her movements, almost dancing along with her. Her movements are slow, exuding emotion and freedom as she openly waves her hands back and forth. She is dressed in a traditional African dress and a bright red headdress. The scene transitions to two young girls dressed in similar clothing dancing together. Their movements are faster and more energetic. This shift from the older Black woman to a younger generation of women all guided by an African past, symbolises a continuation between the past, the present and the future. A certain understanding by the older women of the past of African womanhood, exuded by the dancing woman, is passed on to the younger generation of girls.
The women’s rediscovering of the “Afrikan Woman” as their ancestor was also marked by their understanding of a history of perseverance, bravery, self-definition, and abundant giving by Black women. This also included a study of radical women thinkers and activists throughout American history. Once again, “The Woman Question” paper offers one of the most telling examples of this endeavour by Kawaida’s Black Nationalist women. Amina lists the history of Black radicalism tracing back its roots to slavery and the exploitation of Black women’s labour and bodies. She writes: “Black Women were used to breed a free and cheap labour force for the Capitalists. They were used to nurse the slave owners’ children while their own children were taken from them and sold into slavery.” She explains the lives of Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Mary Elizabeth Bowser, Rosa Parks, Daisy Bates, Gloria Richardson, Diane Nash Bevel, and Fannie Lou Hamer, before continuing with an explanation of CAP’s women’s work as a continuum of this historical struggle against the exploitation of Black women (Baraka 1976). BWUF women similarly traced their struggle at their conference held in Detroit in 1975 to a tradition of Black women’s radical resistance. They wrote: “This triple oppression of Black women can be seen historically in the labor movement and Black women have a proud history of resistance to it. Slavery, with all of its oppression, could not stop the resistance of such women as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Mary Elizabeth Bowser and Susie King Taylor. These women resisted slave society in their struggle to achieve freedom for themselves and Black people” (Black Women’s United Front 1975).
This sentiment bears the historical realization that as workers and sometimes “the sole support of their family” Black women have continuously been robbed of their ability to perform their motherhood as they see fit and from being rewarded for their working skills and talents, and of being treated as equals in the struggle for Black liberation as wives, workers, mothers, daughters, organizers, activists, and thinkers (‘United Front’ 1975). Seeing their struggle as a continuum that can be traced back to slavery and the history of Black women’s radical resistance, Kawaida women were inspired by radical women who relentlessly fought against the exploitation of their bodies and labour both in the domestic and public sphere as well as the exploitation of their people at large. In the poem “Soweto Song,” which Amina Baraka wrote in the 1970s, she reflects back on that “ancestralness” and how it impacted and guided her life of activism within CAP and CFUN.8 Her poem documents not only the story of many of the women preceding her but also her own story reflected through their lives. As Opal Palmer Adisa notes in her analysis of the poem, Baraka’s repetition of the decapitalised “i” does not “read as first person singular but rather as a collective ‘we’” (Adisa 2007). She recounts the horrors of oppression and sexual violence against the “Afrikan Woman” through the lines “to stab the savages that sucked my breast, to kill the beast that raped my belly.” Expressed in the line “to stand on my ancestors' shoulders,” is an emphasis on the spirit of strength drawn from the past through which a woman can define herself as a warrior, a shadowboxer, prepared to “fight” her “people’s enemies.” The spirit of womanhood described by Baraka in the poem in many ways resembles the persona of “Peaches” in Nina Simone’s “Four Women” (Baraka 2009).9 Like “Peaches,” Baraka’s poem encapsulates an “Afrikan Woman” who has herself together, relentlessly pushing through the barriers that silence her.
No lines are more reminiscent of Amina Baraka’s implicit mark left on The New Ark’s imagery than “to dance in the hurricane of revolution […] i come painted red in my people’s blood to dance on the wind of the storm to help sing freedom songs.” The various scenes of women and girls dancing, speak of a generational self-definition that has enabled the women to define themselves as cultural and political actors, blending art with political organising. As Baraka argues, they used art as a “weapon” and their political and organisational work continued to be an “inspiration” to their art (McMillon 2019). Art, in which Africa and the ancestors were central, helped give the women in Amina’s community the determination they needed. The women in the film dance, but they are doing so while surrounded by a “storm” because they are battling internally and externally against oppression. As Amina, who herself was also a dancer and a vocalist, asserts in an interview with Kim McMillon: “many times you had to fight the enemy, and you had to fight your partner all at the same time.” To Amina, dancing to the beat of the drum meant sending “messages with the drum” imitating how enslaved people “could tell stories with just the motion of their bodies and the stories that our parents would tell about the south, and memories their family had of ancestors working in the fields” (McMillon 2019). It was all part of Kawaida women’s hard work within their organisations and community to remake Kawaida as a “doctrine in the proud image of the Black woman” (McMillon 2019). Watching The New Ark reveals this implicit remaking of a doctrine with the “Afrikan” Woman at the forefront.
The women’s engagement with film and the camera in The New Ark is, above all, paradoxical; “paradoxically, being treated as an invisible Other” placed Kawaida Black nationalist women in “an outsider-within position that has stimulated creativity in many” (Hill-Collins 2000). Despite The New Ark’s patriarchal outlook that consciously or subconsciously sought to contribute to the shadowing of the women, the women’s presence, gazes, words, and organising, implicitly undermine that outlook from within. It is imperative to understand not only what Baraka’s camera does or does not capture but also the underlying, complex, and implied messages forced onto the viewer by the women. Doing so required a belief by the women not only in themselves but also in other women as well as the subversive power of art and culture. Black nationalist women, who themselves had their internal disagreements and diversity, were thus part of a larger diverse and multifaceted collectiveness in which Black women radically defined their womanhood and expressed that womanhood on- and off-screen. Most importantly, women of The New Ark’s expressions of radical womanhood, exemplify the process of finding oneself, not autonomously, but reflected in the radical lives of others and primarily other Black women, as simply put by Amina Baraka: “I’m inspired by mostly women. Maybe because of my grandmother, and my mother, and the women in my life. Who is that said, ‘I’ve known rivers,’ well, I’ve known women?” (McMillon 2019).