Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to our HER Living Room. Today we are going behind the poetry.
Amena Brown:
I feel like I need to create something that has a wonderful echo right there. Don't worry. My wonderful producer and I will work on this for you all. I'm excited to talk about what we're going to do today, going behind the poetry, because we're going to be talking about my poem, Letter to my Hair, which is, I guess it's hard to say. I was about to say it's one of my favorites, but it's really hard to say. I have a lot of poems that are my favorites. But I think the story around this piece actually has been really emotional to me to think through. So I'm excited for you all to hear the piece and then to share with you some of the behind the scenes of how this poem got written.
Amena Brown:
The recording that you're about to hear is from one of my last live show recordings. This recording did not become an album necessarily, but we did take a lot of the wonderful footage that we got from this. Shout out to Fischbowl Productions and Eddie's Attic. I was recording this at Eddie's Attic. This recording was after my book, How to Fix a Broken Record, was released. So I was sort of bringing together the poems that were inherently a part of the book and telling some of the stories from the book in between the poems. So you are hearing me introduce this poem and you are hearing how today I would normally perform this piece, Letter to my Hair. Check it out.
Amena Brown:
I'm going to read y'all this poem. And a fun fact, last time I was here at Eddie's, I was recording my last album, Amena Brown Live. And this is the one poem that did not make the set that night because it's not really like a performance piece. It's more of a piece to read, but I can do what I want this evening. So I'm going to read this to y'all and there's going to be a couple of moments that I have to stop and give some historical context. So please follow along as well.
Amena Brown:
I first noticed you when I was about three. My friend's mom carved and twisted you into rows punctuated with tinfoil and beads. That was the first time I learned you could swing. I loved you then. Until grandma tried to get me pretty for church and you would not cooperate. I got to stop and make a note right here. First of all, my grandma's in this building. So I want to give some shout outs. My mama and my grandma are here. Y'all wave to the people. They are here. But because they're here and I'm up here, I'm telling. I want y'all to know that my grandma, when she would do your hair, she would say a thing. Some of y'all had a grandma or auntie say to you that your were tender headed. I'm now an adult who want to go back and question, am I tender headed or are you hard handed? Let's just ask the right questions. I'm trying to find out. I don't know.
Amena Brown:
So my grandma's trying to comb my hair, get it ready for church. And I'm crying and ouch, everything. She says to me, "You listen here. We going to get you pretty for church here because I done see many a little boy, a little girl cry. Your tears don't mean nothing to me." Yeah. That's a real grandma quote right there. Now, for those of you who are oldest kids, let me tell you how a younger sibling works. Okay? Here comes my sister 10 years later, grandma combing her hair. She there, ouch, crying. My grandma turn to my mom, "Jeanne, I just can't stand to see Keda cry." But I thought you have seen so many children cry. What is the difference in 10 years? I don't understand. Let's go back to the poem.
Amena Brown:
Until grandma tried to get me pretty for church and you would not cooperate so we greased you up. Branded you with a hot iron comb, you fought and hissed and finally submitted. You laid down, you let us have our way with you, decided to bend and curl like we instructed you and I felt sorry for you, maybe you felt sorry for me too. For tips of ears and back of necks sacrificed... Let me stop and make a note right here just so you have some historical context for this.
Amena Brown:
If you didn't get a perm, what you had was called a press and curl. If you wore your hair straight as a Black girl and you didn't get a perm, it was called a press and curl. Let me explain to you the situation. Somebody's going to be like, "This is real?" Yes. The comb is made of iron. This is an iron apparatus now, follow me. If your momma or your grandma or your auntie did your hair, they put that iron comb on the stove. Heated it up like you would a pot.
Amena Brown:
They put enough grease on you to make you slide down the street. And then they commenced to taking that iron thing and straightening your hair with it. Even these little ones, these ones right here, they would pick them up like this and run the comb through it. Now, my grandma's hairstylist was called Ms. Martha. I'm telling it. Ms. Martha be like, "Baby, that's just steam. Is it?" Because since I've been an adult, they have these things called a steam room, go with me. And when you in the steam room, it's relaxing. It like helps your breathing and everything. It's like a diffuser. "When did the steam burn you though, Ms. Martha? And how did this steam leave a mark? What!"
Amena Brown:
And then on top of that, when they're trying to get these little hairs, what do they tell you? "Hold your hair down baby." What! So, just imagine. You are sitting in the chair holding down one of the most vulnerable parts on your face while somebody brings an iron apparatus that they heat it up in an oven, put it this close to your skin. Continue.
Amena Brown:
For tips of ears and back of necks sacrificed, for innocent hairs singed, for pain tolerance learned, for curling iron forehead scars, for holding down my ear for the fear that I'd be burned, school started. And I began to resent you. See, back then, high side ponytails were in. I wanted you to behave the same as the strands of Tiffany or Debbie Gibson. But I realized I was neither brunette nor blonde, that you had no intentions of going along with this. I was angry with you.
Amena Brown:
Forced you against your will, pinning you down, holding you tight, tying you up until it hurt both of us and I cried because I was pretty sure I hated you. It seemed you were never what I wanted you to be. You would not lay, only stand. You would not blow in the wind, only lean against it. So I decided to get you fixed. For 20 years, I subjected you to concoctions that I hoped would teach you not to be yourself. To convince you for the rest of my life to just be like someone else. I hoped it would teach you that to be yourself isn't okay, isn't enough, that there was a norm and you need to conform, so you did.
Amena Brown:
Until I noticed you trying to push past who I'd made you into and for the first time in a long time I remembered you were beautiful. I realized I had wronged you. That maybe it was time to let you be, so I cut you loose. I let you grow. I learned your frequency. You didn't want to be branded, burned, subjected. You just wanted to be free. You wanted to teach me how to love because learning to love my curls would help me to love my bare face, brown skin, round curves, would help me to heal the kind of hurt that a grown woman carries from being a little girl. Loving you is teaching me to love that little girl and the grown woman she grew up to be. I am watching you grow, and as you grow, I do too. You remind me every day that we are both beautiful.
Amena Brown:
I don't often love watching footage of myself or listening to recordings of my own voice. If you're interested in watching the video of this, the link will be included in the show notes. But I actually watched the video of this to make sure I remembered what exactly I was doing before we posted the recording inside of this episode. This is one of my favorite ways to perform this piece. I love it so very much, so let's get into it. What is behind the poetry as it relates to my poem, Letter to my Hair? What made me write Letter to my Hair or the real life story behind writing Letter to my Hair, which is kind of interesting actually for me. Sometimes when I'm writing pieces, there could be a poem that I've written that there was a particular something that made me write it, but then the real life story behind the poem, that those two things may not be the same. But in this poem, they are the same.
Amena Brown:
What made me write the poem and my real life story behind it are the same. And that is basically my journey of embracing my natural hair. I went natural basically because I was broke. Since I was a kid, I've been getting perms and relaxers to straighten my hair. I just went broke in my late 20s to where I couldn't afford to get a perm and I had gone so long without getting a perm that my curls were starting to grow back. What would have been called new growth when I was wearing my hair with relaxer. And it was then that I decided I was going to go natural. I actually thought about myself that at some point in my life I would go natural. But that moment came to me sooner than I expected it to.
Amena Brown:
And so there I was, not having a lot of money. I'm trying to think how this gels with other behind the poetry or that time I episodes so far. I'm like I feel like it's gelling somewhere with me talking about the season of having written Here Breathing a little bit because some of the things I talked about in my book were about my natural hair journey. If you were listening to the episode where I talked about that time I quit my job, I think I went natural within maybe a year or two of quitting my job and becoming a full-time artist, which is probably what brought about the brokenness that caused me to realize I wanted to go natural.
Amena Brown:
So I think it was in that episode, that time I quit my job, I talked to you all about I quit my job, things didn't go great, I felt like this failure because I went through a breakup and went broke at the same time. And then I was telling you all in that episode that I went back to working a customer service job. And so that customer service job brought me enough money to now be able to get my hair done. And I decided, I think I'm just going to go natural now. Like I've already been through this really tough season, might as well get my waiting to exhale on, do a Bernadette and just go ahead and chop off this hair.
Amena Brown:
I found a salon here in Atlanta that specialized in curly hair or natural hair. Made an appointment there. I was assigned to a stylist. So I didn't pick the stylist. This was before Instagram. That's wild I think. I've been natural 12 years this year. This was before there was Instagram. Whereas now if you were looking for a stylist, that's how I found my current stylist that I have now. I found her because of Instagram. I find nail artists on Instagram. You get a chance to see what they're doing. But at this time there really wasn't that sort of place where you could go outside of maybe Yelp. And then Yelp was really about the salon itself.
Amena Brown:
I was assigned this wonderful and beautiful black woman named Giselle to style my hair that day. I should preface this by saying my hair before going natural was in more of like a Halle Berry shortcut, that shortcut that Halle Berry was so famous for in really the late '90s and maybe early 2000s. That was the kind of cut I had. And then over the years it would kind of progress to something that I could sort of throw. I don't know if y'all remember these from back in the day, they used to have these products called Bedhead and it was kind of like goopy the way the product felt, but you'd put it on your fingers and kind of spike your hair.
Amena Brown:
I could spike my hair, I could curl it, I could wear it slipped down, I had all the options. And so when I started to grow my hair out, the back of my hair basically went natural first because it was the shortest. And then I had these little strands of relaxed hair still sort of hanging on in the beginning. So I went to Giselle's chair on this day and she did an assessment on my hair and she was like, "Okay, here's the deal. Either you have to cut your relaxer off today and you're going to walk out of here with just your natural hair. Or," she was like, "I recommend that maybe you get braids or get a weave or some other protective style and let your hair grow out a little bit longer so that your hair is longer when you cut it." And I'm just, my scalp has never had a great relationship with braids. And so the thought of that just didn't feel like the right thing at the time. And so I told her I'm ready.
Amena Brown:
Now, I didn't know that this was called a big chop at the time. I didn't know a lot of the terminologies that are prevalent now in the natural hair community. And so she cut my hair and my hair was probably an inch long all around. I had the Teeny Weeny Afro, TWA as we call it in the natural hair community now, even though I didn't know that then. She dyed my hair a firecracker red. I'd never had my hair dyed before either. I walked out and I really felt free because I had felt so saddled to having a relaxer because that meant every six weeks or eight weeks, depending on how my hair grew, I was constantly having to go back to get my hair relaxed. And that was a lot of times something of a painful experience because my skin was sensitive or whatever. I mean, it's like you experience like a burning kind of product on your hair every couple of months.
Amena Brown:
And so the thought of not having to do that was very freeing, but it was also pretty scary to me because I really had never had a hairstyle where I'd had that short amount of hair and seeing that much of my face. And I remember I went to my customer service job that day because I worked at night. I think my shift actually started at 4:00 PM. So I worked 4:00 PM to 1:00 AM. And so I went to work and did not get the reception at my job that I hoped I was going to get. My coworker looked at me like, "What did you do? What's going on with you? Why would you do that to yourself? Why would you do that to your hair?" And I was like, "I'm trying to love myself." It was very emotional.
Amena Brown:
One of my friends, Asha, she's so wonderful. We knew each other from college. So I remember from college that she would have her hair and all these amazing corn row styles and stuff. So I was like, "Okay, she's going to know what to do." And on my work break, I was so freaked out that I called her and told her, "Oh my gosh, I cut my hair to go natural. Did I make the wrong decision?" And she was like, "You didn't make the wrong decision." She was like, "You totally made the right decision, but you're going to have to be patient and learn how to take care of your hair. Be patient while it grows, and different things."
Amena Brown:
Giselle had given me, "Here's the products you need to get." I think I actually left the salon with the products because the salon sold products. And so she gave me some suggestions, told me to buy this Jane Carter, it was a leave-in conditioner. Told me to buy the Jane Carter Leave-in Conditioner. I started out with a diva curl. They had some kind of curl product that I used. She just sent me home with all this stuff, told me what to buy from the salon and I bought it. And then she gave me like, "Here's some additional products you can consider." And I was like, okay.
Amena Brown:
I think by the time I was leaving work and it's like one in the morning, I think I realized that the weekend was coming up and I actually had a social function to go to. I had a party I was trying to go to. And you know how when you're going to an event and you're going to wear whatever your flyest outfit is and you've had your hair a certain way for so long, and so it doesn't occur to you to think about, is that going to look good with my hair? Is that going to look the same or different or better or worse? You don't think about it because in your mind's eye, even if you're not looking at yourself in the mirror, you have a vision of yourself. And that vision of yourself is that hairstyle that you've always had. It's not this new hairstyle, in my case, that I just cut my hair so short.
Amena Brown:
So I remember waking up and being super freaked out. I talked to one of my best friends, Adrienne. And Adrienne said, "Go to YouTube, Amena, and put natural hair in the search on YouTube." She was like, all these videos are going to pull up and that'll give you some suggestions on what to do. And I thought that was the silliest thing she ever told me because I didn't know a lot about YouTube at that time. And so I thought, why would I go to a place that has cat videos to find videos of natural hair stuff? But I did what she said because I woke up in the middle of the night feeling super anxious about this choice I'd made. Pulled up all these amazing videos. I mean, special shout out to all the Black women making natural hair content on YouTube because it really did save me that night.
Amena Brown:
I mean, back then Solange had just cut her hair short. And so she was doing these cool parts and cool like bejeweled accessories. So I was able to see an example of someone whose hair was closer to the length that I had. I was able to see women taking pictures and video of them getting their big chop, taking pictures of their hair growing over time so that I could see like, okay, I'm feeling nervous about this today, but in six months, in a year, I'm going to look at my hair and my hair is going to be even fuller and my Afro is going to be bigger, all these things.
Amena Brown:
And so that was really the beginning of my natural hair journey. I went natural at 29. I went natural a few months before my 30th birthday. I was so freaked out. But in the process of me having to sort of relearn this hair that I haven't seen in 20 years, because at 29 years old, I mean, I think I had just started getting perms when I was 10 or 11. So it had been close to 20 years of not caring for my hair. And I was a little girl then. So the way I would have styled my natural hair as a little girl or wanted my hair styled as a little girl was going to be really different from how I wanted to style it as a grown woman. And of course, when I was a little girl, my hair was much longer versus it being so short.
Amena Brown:
So as I was in this journey of realizing, man, just looking at my natural curl pattern, looking at the way my roots grew in, looking at the different parts of my hair that had different curl patterns even, and realizing that this journey of learning how do I take care of this hair, how do I style this hair, that all of that was also a part of the journey of me learning to love myself and be gentle with myself and be gentle with the process in which I was growing in the same way that I was learning to be gentle with my hair as my hair was growing.
Amena Brown:
So all of that swirling around is really what brought me to want to write Letter to my Hair because I felt like could I have written a poem just sort of talking about this journey in the third person, I could have, but the idea of really personifying my hair and thinking about all the negative thoughts I had about my hair before, the new and loving and positive thoughts I was having about my hair now and in that moment. And so that's the story behind how Letter to my Hair got written.
Amena Brown:
And originally, I had started writing Letter to my Hair and it wasn't finished. I got an opportunity to do a video project that never saw the light of day. And in order for me to do Letter to my Hair for that project, it required that the end of the poem was going to have to be according to the company or the organization that was asking me to do the video. And so when the whole video project tanked and it never saw the light of day, and I went back to revisit Letter to my Hair, which was really wonderful because then I got to decide what was the best ending for the piece actually. Not just what kind of branding needed to be in it, but what was really going to be the best way to end the story of the poem.
Amena Brown:
I finished the piece and then it becomes maybe summertime of 2016. I had already by this time gotten a book deal for How to Fix a Broken Record, but we knew that How to Fix a Broken Record wasn't going to come out until the fall of 2017. And so at that time I got the advice that I needed to put out something because it had been a long time since I put out a spoken word album and the book wasn't coming out for another year, year and a half. And so that was when the idea came up maybe I could do a live spoken word album.
Amena Brown:
If you didn't know, because I know I'm bad at telling this to you all, but I have somewhere between five and six, I may have lost some count there, spoken word albums. Most of them, prior to Amena Brown Live, were all done with music. My first album that I ever released, Live At Java Monkey, is me in front of a crowd at Java Monkey, which was a spoken word venue here. And then my husband and I got married. And my husband, as you know, is producing this very podcast that you're listening to, but also produced all of the music on all of my albums in between these two live ones.
Amena Brown:
After producing so many albums together that were poetry and music, I was really developing what my sets were going to look like even when my husband and I weren't performing together because not only was he making the music and I was writing the poetry, but we were also traveling together, performing shows together, which if you've been listening to the podcast, you may have heard me talking about this. And right around 2015, 2016, I was like, "I think I want to start trying out, what does it look like if I do a set of 30 minutes by myself or a set of an hour by myself? What would I be doing there? The Amena Brown Live was my first try at that. It is one of my favorite albums because I felt so much like myself and I felt so much like I was getting a chance to really choose what I wanted to be on the album, but getting to also interact with the audience, which y'all know I love.
Amena Brown:
So around this time I'm prepping for Amena Brown Live, which was released in November of 2016. Let me make a note right here. If you are a performing artist, just don't release projects near the election. This album got released near what was going to become one of the most contested and divided elections ever. And so I don't even know if the album really got the attention that it deserves, but we will include links to that in the show notes so that you can check out this album if you haven't already, because I'm really, really very proud of it. My husband's still did the production on that as well. So yes, you should check that out because it's one of my favorite things.
Amena Brown:
But I was in prep for Amena Brown Live, which meant I was looking through my poems, trying to think I didn't want there to be too many poems on Amena Brown Live that I'd already recorded. I really wanted to make it mostly new work or even if it wasn't new work, work that I, for whatever reason, hadn't recorded. I had Letter to my Hair on my list because I just loved the poem. It was very connected to my present world that I had wanted to share and for some reason... Well, I was about to say for some reason I never recorded it, but I know why, because I was mostly doing poetry in church settings at the time. And so in the types of settings we were in, there really wouldn't have been a good place for me to just break out doing Letter to my Hair. So I had mostly been holding it. I hadn't really been performing it a lot.
Amena Brown:
I started taking all the poems that I really hadn't had a chance to try out on stage and take them on stage to see which ones were actually going to make the album. And when I took Letter to my Hair to the open mic, it did fine, but I could tell it wasn't a showpiece. And that was actually kind of disappointing to me to be honest because I don't know what I expected, but when I went to read it, I don't know, my work that are my show pieces, like if you've been listening to this podcast and you've heard the Behind the Poetry on the Key of G, you've heard them Behind the Poetry on Dear TV Sitcoms, you've heard that Behind the Poetry on Margaret, those are show pieces in the sense of how they are all rated, how they're performed, how the rhythm is even inside the piece.
Amena Brown:
All of those things play a big role in what becomes a showpiece and what doesn't, and Letter to my Hair was a beautiful piece, but I wondered if it almost, I don't know, worked better on the page than it did on a stage. So I was disappointed, but oh well. So we moved ahead going ahead to record Amena Brown Live live at Eddie's Attic and went through all the production stuff, released that. And then somewhere around that time, it occurred to me that my husband and I had been wanting to make a video for Letter to my Hair. And I think I was going to try to do that in connection to the album when I thought it was going to be on the album.
Amena Brown:
And so we had filmed this B roll and the B roll was me walking into our guest bathroom, standing there in the mirror, my hair sectioned off with butterfly clips like I would normally do on wash day, and twisting my hair into two strand twists. And then coming back, I think we came back like the next day or a couple of days later and filmed a second set of B roll where I was untwisting my hair and sort of styling it to what I would wear out to hang out with friends or go on a date night with my husband or something. So we shot all that. And then I think the goal was for us to put other footage with it of me performing the piece. I can't remember where we would then go on that storytelling.
Amena Brown:
And then once all this stuff happened with Amena Brown Live and I realized this poem is not going to make the album, then I started to think, what if we just use the B roll? What if the B roll is the video? And so I went to my husband and said, what if I go in the booth and record a voiceover of this poem and we just put the voiceover over this B roll footage that you already filmed? And I want to give a special shout out to my husband because in the amount of time not only that we've been romantically together, but we were friends for a couple of years before we started dating, so we've been collaborating creatively a long time. And there are a few times during that that I have said an idea that I can tell he's looking back at me like, "Hmm, I'm not too sure, but I'm going to go with it. I'm going to go with it and we're just going to see what happens." And this was one of those moments.
Amena Brown:
So I went in the booth, recorded the vocal for a Letter to my Hair. He put music to the vocal and we added it to the video and we both sat there to watch it after he'd finished the edit. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is it. This is beautiful. I love it very much. Let's do it." Oh, actually, you know what y'all, I just remembered what one of our ideas originally was going to be is I think the original video for Letter to my Hair, it was going to feature young Black girls because so much of the piece, as you all have heard already, was talking about my young Black girl journey. And so I think I was about to reach out to different friends we knew that had young, Black daughters that would be interested in being featured in the video. I think we had a wonderful idea there but decided to go away from that and do this instead.
Amena Brown:
And then we put it up on Facebook and it was getting views like gang busters more than anything I'd ever posted. I could not believe it y'all, could not believe it. The video got posted four years ago and I think there are like 80,000 views or something. And comparatively to what it can mean for a video to go viral, 80,000 may not be a lot of use, but for me in what my videos were normally getting, that was the equivalent of having gone viral for me. And every now and then still someone will discover it and then they'll kind of do another round and there'll end up being some other people that get a chance to see it. So performing the piece for the first time ended up being disappointing because I discovered what the piece wasn't going to be on stage, but at the same time it led my husband and I to making this wonderful piece of art that really resonated with folks about their own journey with their natural hair, which I loved.
Amena Brown:
How do I feel about the poem today? What's interesting is even though Letter to my Hair did not turn out to be a showpiece, I think as I was discovering my stage voice of once my husband and I weren't performing together as much because he had other creative things he was working on and I was getting to a point with my work where I was like, I kind of want to try what it's like for me performing by myself without music, just me and the mic and the audience. And so what I learned about Letter to my Hair is that in the story of me telling what leads me to go natural and kind of setting up the poem, that in my sets, the stories I tell are just as important as the poems and that's not true for every poet. Some poets don't really tell stories in between. They mostly focus on the poetry.
Amena Brown:
I can equally do the storytelling and the poetry as far as time in my set. And honestly, sometimes I spend most of the set telling stories anchored by a few poems. Like in an hour, I could do six poems, but I have these stories to tell in between. And the story of Letter to my Hair is a wonderful story to tell. And as you heard in this rendition of the recording from Eddie's Attic, I love about this poem that I can stop the poem and do storytelling in the middle of it. And I only have one other poem that's like that, which is Margaret.
Amena Brown:
And if you listen to that episode, I don't know if I did this in the original recording, but when I perform Margaret now, Margaret has this section where I talk about MASH and I stop the poem and I check in the audience to see who in the audience actually played MASH and knows what the letter stand for. And we go through a whole interactive thing. And then I jump back into the poem. There's something so fun and so cool about doing that. And so Letter to my Hair and Margaret are the only poems that I do that with.
Amena Brown:
I'll tell you another thing that brings me joy about bringing Letter to my Hair to stage. Even though I still read it, I've never memorized it. It's not a poem that's very easy to memorize. But I still read it and I love doing that poem because Letter to my Hair, first of all, I wrote it for myself. And once I took it to stage, I know that poem is for Black women. And sometimes I'm in a crowd where it's mostly Black women and sometimes I'm in a crowd where it's mostly white and there are a small number of Black women. But if I choose to do Letter to my Hair, I am doing Letter to my Hair for the Black women in the room always. And that's a lot of fun because there are certain parts of Letter to my Hair, even in this recording that you all just heard, you hear me explaining certain things. But there are other things I don't explain.
Amena Brown:
I know that there are certain terms I'm using or certain little nuggets and Easter eggs that are in the poem and in the stories I'm telling that whenever I'm in a crowd, I can look at the Black women and see their eyes going, "Yes." Like they know exactly what I'm talking about. And that's been a beautiful thing about this poem that it is a connection between me and other Black women and the journey that we have had about our hair and the different things that over the centuries America has had to say about the hair of Black women and the power of us being able to let our hair, as it naturally grows, grow out and take up space and be big and be unruly if it wants to, finding the freedom in that.
Amena Brown:
But I will say this, the more I started doing Letter to my Hair on stage, and I would kind of go into a natural hair section of my set and I would catch the eyes sometimes of Black women in the crowd and I could see them kind of getting there. Sometimes it would be a little tense feeling of them wondering where am I about to go as it relates to natural hair. And sometimes natural hair can be like veganism in the sense that there are some times that people who are natural can sort of take it on, like they have to become natural hair evangelists. And some of you may have come across folks who are vegan and they feel like they have to become vegan evangelists, which basically to them means if they go vegan, then the whole world should be vegan and there are no options for anyone else. Everyone should be vegan. And natural hair can be like that sometimes where people feel like, well, I've gone natural and natural is the best for everybody in, whatever that means.
Amena Brown:
But one of the things that occurred to me as I was trying this poem out on stage and the storytelling to go with it and realizing like there's tension there sometimes, I was watching it on the faces of Black women and them feeling like, well, I don't wear my hair natural or I don't want to wear my hair natural. Will I be judged for that? Or what is she about to say. Is that going to sort of cut me out of this moment or cut me out of this conversation?
Amena Brown:
And so I started adding this Black woman hair PSA whenever I would go into this natural hair section and I would say, "Just for the record, Black women can wear their hair however they want to. I chose to wear my hair natural and I love it, but a Black woman can have no hair. She can have a wig, a weave. She can have braids. She can have a fade. She can have an Afro. She can have locks. She can literally do with her hair whatever she wants to," because as Black women, there are so many people and things and institutions that are trying to tell us how to be Black women. And sometimes that includes our hair. Trying to tell us, well, in order to be, air quotes, a true Black woman or a real Black woman or whatever that is, you need to wear your hair like this. You need to speak like this. You need to dress like this. You need to act like this.
Amena Brown:
And so I wanted to make this PSA to say, "Hey, I'm sharing this story about my natural hair because it was a beautiful journey for me and it's the best thing for me and it's the best thing for my hair. But what I want for all Black women is freedom and liberation for us. And even in the things as it relates to our hair, I want us to be free where we can wear whatever we want to. We can do whatever we want to do with our hair. We don't have to answer to anybody about it."
Amena Brown:
So I would do this Black woman PSA and I would close it with the phrase, "And this is why you never tell a Black girl how to Black girl, because there are so ways to be a Black girl," which I really do believe is true. And as a side note, that is what led to one of my latest poems, Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl, which is available on my Instagram and Facebook as well. So you will get the links to that in the show notes. So don't forget to check that out.
Amena Brown:
Here is how I learned to incorporate Letter to my Hair on stage. But let me tell you another amazing thing that came from Letter to my Hair. Letter to my Hair video comes out in 2016. You've heard me talking on this podcast, if you've been listening for a while, about a lot of the tensions I experienced having worked in white evangelical space, which was a very, very conservative space to work in. And so when 2019 came in and I think I was talking about this during the Here Breathing episode, 2019 came in, it was like I realized I needed to leave white evangelical space and go where? I think that was the part I was like, I don't know where I go. I know I need to leave there because my work is getting broader than the spaces where I will really be given full freedom to really share there.
Amena Brown:
So I was feeling kind of stuck in 2019. I just knew I needed to get out, but I didn't know what that meant or where to go next. And maybe I was talking about some of this in my 40 AF episode as well, which if you haven't checked that out, I hope you do because I was telling like all the business. But I think I talked about this in that episode too, that I was 38, about to turn 39 in 2019. I was thinking to myself, I'm about to make a whole career change, how do I know I will even be well received or how do I know there's a future for me outside of the space that I've been in.
Amena Brown:
Here's what gets fascinating. I get an email in my inbox from my website. Someone had gone to my website, filled out the contact form and then it comes to me in an email and it basically said, "Hi, we're looking to get in touch with Amena. We are working with a Black celebrity client." It was from a creative agency. "We're working with a Black celebrity client. We're wanting a poetic voiceover and we want to see if Amena would be interested in writing it." I immediately thought it was a scam. Immediately thought it was a scam.
Amena Brown:
And I want to say, if you are a freelancer, an entrepreneur, a creative, an artist, in any way if you fall in any of those categories, I almost want you to pause this episode right now and go check and make sure that when you fill out the form on your website, that the emails actually come to you because you wouldn't believe how many creatives have websites up, have cute little forms where the links are broken or it's going to some spam and you're missing all sorts of opportunities. So if you need to pause this and go do that, or just keep listening and go check on it, go check on it right now because you don't want some money or some amazing opportunities to be sitting in some spam box somewhere and you need it. Okay. Continue.
Amena Brown:
I don't even have a manager at this point. I have my assistant, Leigh, just she and I. But I did have someone that was consulting me trying to help me sort of get my career to this next level. She was an artist manager, but she hadn't agreed to manage me. She's totally my manager now though. And so I reached out to her and said, "Can you be my manager for 20 minutes and find out if this is legit?" She was like, "I got it. Let me check into it." She writes me back and she was like, "This is definitely legitimate." And she was like, "They're asking for writing samples from you."
Amena Brown:
And so I do not submit Letter to my Hair for some reason. I don't think I did. I submitted three pieces that to me were showpieces because I still wasn't sure what this whole thing was going to turn out to be about or if it was actually going to be real. And I wasn't sure if it was going to be a thing where they're going to want me to write a voiceover or where they might want me to also be on camera too. So I submit three poems to them, the text of the pieces. And I also submit the links because I'm still kind of questioning if this is legit or not.
Amena Brown:
And I think I felt like if I choose three poems that the videos are already out and then I turn around and see on a commercial somewhere some snippets of something that I wrote, then I'll... I'm sure if you're a lawyer listening that you're like, no, that's not how that works. But in my mind it felt like this is protecting me in some way. So I submit those things and Celeste forwarded them on to the creative agency and then we waited. We didn't hear back for awhile. And so I was like, man, they probably went another direction. I'm thinking maybe they're getting the writing samples from me and six other poets, who knows.
Amena Brown:
A couple of days later, I know you're all like, a couple of days isn't a long time. But when you're waiting to hear back, a couple of days feels like forever. So a couple of days later, Celeste hits me back and she's like, "Hey, I'm emailing you this NDA," which if you're not familiar, an NDA is a non-disclosure agreement. When you sign an NDA, you're basically saying you're agreeing to keep this project, the names involved, the details involved, you're agreeing to keep all this under wraps until we tell you you can talk about it. And so she was like, "I need you to sign this NDA because the Black celebrity client wants to talk to you on the phone. But they can't talk to you on the phone and they can't tell us who the client is until you sign this NDA."
Amena Brown:
At the time y'all, I had a gig in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and my family is from North Carolina. My mom and grandma are with me on the trip. So even though it is a gig of mine that is causing us to travel, my grandma is really the star and I am really her road manager because everyone is excited that we're driving to North Carolina, they're going to get to see her. She has two sons and their wives and kids and everything. Plus other extended family. Like my grandma is the matriarch of our family.
Amena Brown:
So it's the three of us in the car. I have to pull over to a Starbucks and sign the NDA. And then after I sign the NDA, Celeste calls me and she says, "Do you want to know who it is?" And I said, "I do." And she was like, "Do you have a guess?" And I was like, "Is it Oprah?" She was like, "No." I was like, "Is it Beyonce?" She was like, "It's not." I was like, "Is it Michelle Obama." And she was like, "It's not." And I was like, "Okay." She was like, "It is Tracee Ellis Ross." And y'all, I'm not going to lie. My mom and grandma in the car, I shut the car door and I literally ran around the front of Starbucks and I'm pretty sure I yelled a cuss word like my mom and my grandma couldn't hear it in the car.
Amena Brown:
I'm so excited because I'm just, like many people are, a big fan of Tracee Ellis Ross, a big fan of her work, everything. Then by the time we get into Winston-Salem, and I get in the bed and realize tomorrow I'm supposed to get on a phone call and talk to Tracee Ellis Ross. So I get on the phone the next day. I get on the phone in my car because other members of our family had come to visit my grandma and I'm under an NDA now so I can't just be in the hotel room where we were staying talking willy nilly. I take the call in the car, get on the phone with Tracee and some members of the creative agency's team, as well as members of Tracee's team too.
Amena Brown:
We all got on the call and start talking about what I can now tell you is Pattern Beauty. Hearing from Tracee, just her vision for Pattern and hearing from her how this had been germinating in her for so long and that she wanted a part of the brand to have beautiful language around the story of our hair, the story of Black hair and all of that. And so we talked about the logistics of that and talked about what my normal process is when I do this type of work. We had all those conversations. And then she said, "Can you come to New York?" And I just said yes, because why would I not say yes? And then she told the other people on the phone, she was like, "Okay, everybody, can you help me figure out when in my schedule Amena and I can meet. If she can meet me in New York, when we can meet."
Amena Brown:
Right at the end of the call, Tracee says, "Amena, I should've started with this." But she said, "Your work is truthful, it's soulful, it's full of joy and it's full of lightness and that is why I wanted to work with you on this project." And I'm sure we said some other words y'all, I'm sure we said some other things and pleasantries and hung up the phone, but I wrote those words on a post-it that I still have up in my office because Tracee had no idea how much my creative person needed to hear her say those words. Because I think as I grew as a performing artist, as I was finding my voice as a poetry performer, as a storyteller, I was realizing that in this space where I was, which was in white Christian spaces, there really wasn't a place for somebody like me doing what I was trying to do.
Amena Brown:
Most of the events were really centered around a time for preaching and a time for singing about God. Anything in between those two things, you were either considered to be a novelty or you needed to find a way to sort of be like those two things in whatever art you were doing. So if you were doing rap music, then you needed to figure out either how to be preaching in your rap or you needed to figure out how to do worship singing stuff, content in your raps. And it was the same for me as a poet. But the more I was discovering that I loved to make people laugh on stage, that I loved for it to be entertaining, that entertaining wasn't a bad thing.
Amena Brown:
Some of you who may have grown up in religious environments have grown up being taught that entertainment is sort of a bad thing, that that's not a spiritual thing. But I believe to have joy, to be able to laugh or even to be able to do a piece of art where people can feel like their pain or their hard times of life are understood or are heard or known, I mean, that is so powerful too. And so I was starting to just feel like I don't know if my work has a place here and where does my work have a place? And when Tracee said those words to me, I just thought to myself, that's what I want my work to be doing. Here is this creative artist person that I look up to whose work I love and respect who is saying to me that she can see that my work is doing the thing that I have always been hoping it would do.
Amena Brown:
And it was like even though those words were coming from Tracee, for me they were also coming from God as this reminder that it's not that you are too much or that you are wrong for wanting to really... I can only describe it to y'all as if as a creative person or just maybe even general as a person, it's like if we imagine ourselves with wings, it's like you want to be in environments where you can spread to your full wingspan, where you're not sort of keeping your wings in this cage in a way. And her words to me were also God's reminder to me that if you are a bird who flies, you have a whole sky out here for you. That you're not having to contain yourself to anyone else's boxes or cages or whatever.
Amena Brown:
A few weeks after this call, I go to New York and I take all these words from different calls at this point that Tracee and I had had, and she had sort of given me her vision for Pattern. The wording around that that she'd been working on. And then she left it to me to say, "Okay, now you go and write and tell me what comes out of it. We'll meet in New York." So I finish up, I meet with her, we sit down and she has a copy of it and I have a copy of it. I asked her, "Do you want to read it? Should I read it? Do you want to just read it to ourselves?" And she was like, "You read it and then let me read it." I read it out loud and she looked at me and she was like, "This is amazing." She was like, "This is so good." And then she read it and we worked through it and collaborated and just chiseled at the piece.
Amena Brown:
She gave me some suggestions to write. I went home and wrote some more, well, home in New York, actually at my friend's place that I was staying with. Went back to meet with Tracee a second time with the changes and revisions, suggestions that she'd given me. She was like, "This is it. The piece is finished." And that piece was the manifesta for Pattern, the Pattern Manifesta, which was the poetic piece that got released when Pattern first launched in the fall of 2019.
Amena Brown:
At the end of that meeting, that second meeting after Tracee looked at me and said, "I don't have any more changes. This is beautiful. I want it just like it is. This is great." I looked at her and I said my mushy words. I told her I was going to say my mushy words, that this opportunity had meant more to me than I could really express to her, that I appreciated her just taking the chance to give me this opportunity when she didn't know me, she hadn't heard of me from anything.
Amena Brown:
So many of my friends, they knew I was having this meeting, they knew the project was out there. They did not know it was Tracee Ellis Ross and they did not know it was Pattern Beauty at the time. But they had been saying to me, "Hey, before you leave, ask whoever this person is that you won't tell us who it is." They were like, "Ask them how they found you, how did they choose you?" And I forgot to ask Tracee before we ended our last meeting because that day she was having back-to-back meetings with so many folks that were working on the launch for Pattern. So as I was coming in to meet with her, she was ending one meeting. And as I was leaving, she was meeting with someone else.
Amena Brown:
And so I remember walking out to the lobby of the creative agency's office where we were meeting and a woman who was actually my initial contact, the one who initially emailed into my website, she was there to walk me out and I asked her, I said, "Hey, I never did ask you, how did y'all find me? What made you choose me?" And she said, "Oh, we were looking on YouTube." There was a particular phrase regarding natural hair that they were searching. She said, "When we searched it, it was your video that came up." She looked at me and she said, "It was supposed to be you."
Amena Brown:
Y'all know I grew up in church and y'all know I grew up Pentecostal church. So you talking about somebody ugly crying like Sofia from The Color Purple walking through New York. After thinking about so many things y'all, thinking about how I felt so insecure about my YouTube channel because the views were so low and I thought to myself, even though I didn't send a Letter to my Hair to them, apparently they had already seen that. I sent them some other videos. And when I sent them and I looked at the views, I thought, if they're looking at me next to other poets, they're never going to choose me for this opportunity based on my YouTube channel views being so low.
Amena Brown:
And thinking about how lost I was feeling career-wise at that moment and not being sure of what was next for me, not being sure of if there was a place for me, and this moment with Pattern being such a great encouragement to me that there was a place for the work that I was doing, that there was a big world out here, a big sky for my wings, a big place for me to take flight, that there were a lot of opportunities to come, that I didn't have to be stuck in a space that really was not going to give me the kind of freedom I wanted for myself.
Amena Brown:
All of that comes full circle because I don't know that I would have gotten that opportunity if I had never written a Letter to my Hair, if my husband and I had never filmed the B roll in our guest bathroom. Like when y'all go back to watch this video, yes, that is in our real house in our guest bathroom we're filming that. And that this video we filmed in our house not only encouraged a lot of people who watched it but also brought me other amazing opportunities like this one. I'm still a Poetic Partner for Pattern today and have had the chance to collaborate with Tracee and collaborate with the Pattern team on so many other poetic pieces that we've worked on together over the past couple of years.
Amena Brown:
So, I just want to give a shout out to, first of all, anyone here that is on your natural hair journey if you're listening. Wherever you are on the journey, it can be a really beautiful one and it can be an opportunity to continue to love your hair, continue to love yourself. And for all my Black women listening, wear your hair however you want to. Take up all the space you want to take up, wear it big, wear it long, wear different wigs, every day make it a different color if you want. There are so many ways to Black girl, which means the way that you Black girl is beautiful too, the way that I Black girl is beautiful too.
Amena Brown:
And I also wanted to just give a special shout out for the moments where we're going through a time in life where we do feel lost or we do feel like we don't know what the direction is. The direction can come from some really unexpected places. But if that's you and you're listening now, I am wanting and hoping for that direction for you and for you to be able to be open-handed even if that direction arrives to you from a very, very unexpected place.
Amena Brown:
For this week's edition of Give Her A Crown, I want to shout out Felicia Leatherwood. There are many, many, many amazing natural hairstylists and Felicia is one of my favorites. She's best known for styling Issa Rae's natural hair, as well as many of the cast of the HBO TV show Insecure. She is also the inventor of the Felicia Leatherwood Detangler Brush, which is one of my favorite natural hair tools to use y'all. When Felicia first started styling Issa's hair, Issa's hair was short and Felicia came up with so many inventive styles that gave me hope for my little Afro after I started my natural hair journey with my own big chop. Felicia Leatherwood, thank you for your creativity, your inventiveness for caring about style, for caring about health, for caring about Black hair. Felicia Leatherwood, give her a crown.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network, in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.