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The Ecosystem of Refusal
Menopause and the Power of Maroon Space

Charting Pathways from the Margins to the Menopausal Multiverse
From Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause by Omisade Burney-Scott
Margins are maps in disguise, coded with ancestral memory, ecological wisdom, and stories too bold for the center. The margins—the spaces where the stories, experiences, and wisdom of human beings deemed “other” have been relegated—are not places we chose. They were deliberately constructed by a dominant culture intent on controlling not just the narrative of menopause but the narratives of race, gender, sexuality, class, and power itself. For those of us who live at the intersections of these identities, the current menopause landscape could be considered inhospitable terrain, one that mirrors the broader societal patterns of erasure, exclusion, and pathologizing difference.
But what if these margins were sacred spaces instead of sites of exile? What if the margins were ecosystems of resistance, transformation, and care? They could be places where people create culture, conjure safety, and practice sovereignty. Margins are not the edge of the story—they are the origin of new ones.
The margins of menopause—once peripheral spaces of silence and invisibility—are being reclaimed and reimagined as intentional, intergenerational menopause maroon communities and a direct pathway to the Menopausal Multiverse.
A Word About Maroons
Throughout the Americas and the Caribbean, maroon communities were formed by formerly enslaved people who refused the terms of their captivity. These communities, often hidden deep in forests, swamps, or mountains, were rooted in self-liberation, sovereignty, and cultural preservation. They integrated themselves into natural landscapes, allowing them to live, organize, and thrive in plain sight.
In the American South, the Great Dismal Swamp became a haven for those who had self-liberated from enslavement. Historical records and oral histories document that from the 1600s through the Civil War, thousands of Black people sought refuge in the swamp’s dense forests and wetlands, forming maroon settlements that lasted for generations. Despite the harsh terrain, these communities developed intricate systems of agriculture, bartering, kinship, and resistance. The swamp became not only a physical sanctuary but also a site of Black ingenuity, perseverance, and refusal.
In Jamaica, Queen Nanny of the Maroons is celebrated as one of the most formidable leaders of resistance against British colonial rule. Born in what is now Ghana, she was brought to Jamaica as an enslaved African and escaped into the Blue Mountains, where she became a leader of the Windward Maroons in the early 18th century. Nanny led successful guerrilla warfare campaigns against the British, outwitting colonial forces and negotiating a peace treaty in 1739 that secured land and a degree of autonomy for her people. Beyond her military prowess, Queen Nanny was a spiritual leader and herbalist whose knowledge of African traditions, healing, and community governance shaped maroon society. Her leadership embodied the power of post-menopausal Black womanhood—rooted in clarity, strategy, protection, and vision.
These maroon societies were not utopias, but they were declarations of self-determination in a world that denied their humanity. Many were led by elder post-menopausal Black women—women who wielded their wisdom, pragmatism, and power to build sovereign spaces of care, resistance, and renewal. Their stories offer not only a historical blueprint but also a spiritual map for how we might reimagine our own liberation.
The Menopausal Maroon and the Margins We Did Not Create
At Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, we recognize that people of the global majority did not create the margins of the current menopause landscape, but we are reclaiming them. These margins were built by systems that failed to see us: the medical industrial complex that pathologized our bodies, the wellness industry that commodifies our pain, and media and research landscapes that often render our experiences invisible unless they can be exploited for profit.
Yet within these margins, we are creating something different. Through storytelling, oral histories, intergenerational knowledge exchange, and embodied cultural practices, we are illuminating what has always been here: a rich and diverse ecosystem of menopausal wisdom. We are not hiding in plain sight. We are illuminating the margins as a sacred space of safe passage—a waystation between erasure and freedom, between isolation and multiverse.
Our divestment from the mainstream menopause landscape is not about abandonment, it is about realignment. It’s about redirecting our labor, attention, and partnerships toward the world we want to live in. And in doing so, we are transforming the margins into a map with a series of questions born out of 6 years of excavation from the margins:
-
What might a divestment strategy look like if it begins with a question of sovereignty? What would it mean to build structures that refuse exploitation and instead center our stories, truths, experiences, power, and cultural wisdom?
-
What would it mean for genderqueer, nonbinary, and trans people to divest from narratives that flatten or erase their embodied experiences, and instead claim space as knowledge holders, visionaries, and healers?
-
What would it mean for formerly incarcerated people to reshape the narrative entirely, to reclaim agency in a system that pathologized and punished them, and build a community rooted in care, dignity, healing, and renewal?
-
What would it mean for people under 40 to divest from the idea that menopause only belongs to the old, the straight, or the settled, and instead, see their own early, surgical, or medically induced menopause experiences as valid, powerful, and transformative? What would shift if younger people navigating menopause were affirmed in their identities and offered language, community, and care that honors their transformation as legitimate and deeply wise? What if their stories became maps, guiding others through uncharted terrain with clarity and courage?
Our answer, shaped by the determination of maroon communities and the futuristic vision of the Menopausal Multiverse, is this:
It means building something sovereign and interdependent. It means reclaiming the ecosystems we’ve been told are wastelands. It means listening to our elders, trusting our stories, and creating spaces where all of us, not just some of us, are free.
Lessons from Queen Nanny and the Great Dismal Swamp
As we shape new ways of being and belonging in the Menopausal Multiverse, we activate the memory, strategy, resilience, and creativity of our ancestors—not to replicate the past, but to honor its wisdom while creating something radically new. These lessons from Queen Nanny and the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp remind us that what has been built before can be reimagined, and what was meant to be hidden can now be illuminated.
From Queen Nanny, we learn that leadership can be strategic, emergent, and deeply spiritual all at once. Her legacy teaches us that organizing for freedom demands not only tactical brilliance but also a profound reverence for ancestral knowledge. She reminds us that survival alone is not enough—we must also fight for land, for dignity, and for the sacred right to govern our own lives. In this light, menopause becomes more than a biological transition; it emerges as a threshold into a new kind of leadership, one that is clear-eyed, protective, and unapologetically rooted in community.
From the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, we learn that even the most seemingly inhospitable places can be transformed into havens when shaped by collective will and resistance. The margins, far from being empty, are alive with potential, with memory, and with the blueprint for what is possible. These communities show us that we do not need proximity to power to create safety, culture, or systems of governance that reflect our values. What we need is each other, a deep connection to land, shared commitment, and the courage to build beyond the gaze of the systems that have abandoned or betrayed us.
To build the Menopausal Multiverse is to carry forward these lessons. It is to reconnect with the land, with the community, and with ancestral wisdom. It is to root our future in place, resistance, and self-determination. It is to honor the margins, not as peripheries but as portals. It is to understand that healing justice and reproductive justice begin with remembering who we are and refusing to be forgotten. The Menopausal Maroon is not a metaphor. It is a living practice of reclamation and redesign. And it will lead us home.

The Margins Are a Map
A Meditation from the Menopausal Multiverse
Close your eyes.
Inhale deeply.
Let the breath trace a line—not to the center, but to the edge.
To the margin.
To the place you were told was too much, too complicated, too far.
Now exhale, and imagine this:
The margins are not exile.
They are a beginning.
They are the ground where ancestors whisper,
where stories root,
where liberation takes its first breath.
The margins are maps in disguise—
coded with memory,
lined with resistance,
drawn in the hand of the Maroon, the midwife,
the queer visionary, the freedom-seeker.
They are where those of us othered by our race, ethnicity, gender, religion or access to resource
those who have been cast out have always conjured safety,
crafted beauty,
and practiced sovereignty.
So today,
if you find yourself at the edge—
of a system, of a story, of your own becoming—
know this:
You are not lost.
You are not late.
You are not outside.
You are exactly where the map begins.
This margin,
this wild edge,
is not a boundary.
It is a portal.
It is a place of power.
Breathe into it.
Honor it.
Name it sacred.
And walk forward, not toward the center,
but into the multiverse
where all of you is welcome.

Keep reading:
Music is Political:
Sounds that Move Movements
Emel Mathlouthi, Collis Browne
Emel Mathlouthi
{
"article":
{
"title" : "The Ecosystem of Refusal: Menopause and the Power of Maroon Space",
"author" : "Omisade Burney-Scott",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/menopause-maroon-space",
"date" : "2025-06-15 14:26:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/BW_Omi_Eno_M_Nixon_Taplet.jpg",
"excerpt" : "",
"content" : "Charting Pathways from the Margins to the Menopausal MultiverseFrom Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause by Omisade Burney-ScottMargins are maps in disguise, coded with ancestral memory, ecological wisdom, and stories too bold for the center. The margins—the spaces where the stories, experiences, and wisdom of human beings deemed “other” have been relegated—are not places we chose. They were deliberately constructed by a dominant culture intent on controlling not just the narrative of menopause but the narratives of race, gender, sexuality, class, and power itself. For those of us who live at the intersections of these identities, the current menopause landscape could be considered inhospitable terrain, one that mirrors the broader societal patterns of erasure, exclusion, and pathologizing difference.But what if these margins were sacred spaces instead of sites of exile? What if the margins were ecosystems of resistance, transformation, and care? They could be places where people create culture, conjure safety, and practice sovereignty. Margins are not the edge of the story—they are the origin of new ones. The margins of menopause—once peripheral spaces of silence and invisibility—are being reclaimed and reimagined as intentional, intergenerational menopause maroon communities and a direct pathway to the Menopausal Multiverse.A Word About MaroonsThroughout the Americas and the Caribbean, maroon communities were formed by formerly enslaved people who refused the terms of their captivity. These communities, often hidden deep in forests, swamps, or mountains, were rooted in self-liberation, sovereignty, and cultural preservation. They integrated themselves into natural landscapes, allowing them to live, organize, and thrive in plain sight.In the American South, the Great Dismal Swamp became a haven for those who had self-liberated from enslavement. Historical records and oral histories document that from the 1600s through the Civil War, thousands of Black people sought refuge in the swamp’s dense forests and wetlands, forming maroon settlements that lasted for generations. Despite the harsh terrain, these communities developed intricate systems of agriculture, bartering, kinship, and resistance. The swamp became not only a physical sanctuary but also a site of Black ingenuity, perseverance, and refusal.In Jamaica, Queen Nanny of the Maroons is celebrated as one of the most formidable leaders of resistance against British colonial rule. Born in what is now Ghana, she was brought to Jamaica as an enslaved African and escaped into the Blue Mountains, where she became a leader of the Windward Maroons in the early 18th century. Nanny led successful guerrilla warfare campaigns against the British, outwitting colonial forces and negotiating a peace treaty in 1739 that secured land and a degree of autonomy for her people. Beyond her military prowess, Queen Nanny was a spiritual leader and herbalist whose knowledge of African traditions, healing, and community governance shaped maroon society. Her leadership embodied the power of post-menopausal Black womanhood—rooted in clarity, strategy, protection, and vision.These maroon societies were not utopias, but they were declarations of self-determination in a world that denied their humanity. Many were led by elder post-menopausal Black women—women who wielded their wisdom, pragmatism, and power to build sovereign spaces of care, resistance, and renewal. Their stories offer not only a historical blueprint but also a spiritual map for how we might reimagine our own liberation.The Menopausal Maroon and the Margins We Did Not CreateAt Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause, we recognize that people of the global majority did not create the margins of the current menopause landscape, but we are reclaiming them. These margins were built by systems that failed to see us: the medical industrial complex that pathologized our bodies, the wellness industry that commodifies our pain, and media and research landscapes that often render our experiences invisible unless they can be exploited for profit.Yet within these margins, we are creating something different. Through storytelling, oral histories, intergenerational knowledge exchange, and embodied cultural practices, we are illuminating what has always been here: a rich and diverse ecosystem of menopausal wisdom. We are not hiding in plain sight. We are illuminating the margins as a sacred space of safe passage—a waystation between erasure and freedom, between isolation and multiverse.Our divestment from the mainstream menopause landscape is not about abandonment, it is about realignment. It’s about redirecting our labor, attention, and partnerships toward the world we want to live in. And in doing so, we are transforming the margins into a map with a series of questions born out of 6 years of excavation from the margins: What might a divestment strategy look like if it begins with a question of sovereignty? What would it mean to build structures that refuse exploitation and instead center our stories, truths, experiences, power, and cultural wisdom? What would it mean for genderqueer, nonbinary, and trans people to divest from narratives that flatten or erase their embodied experiences, and instead claim space as knowledge holders, visionaries, and healers? What would it mean for formerly incarcerated people to reshape the narrative entirely, to reclaim agency in a system that pathologized and punished them, and build a community rooted in care, dignity, healing, and renewal? What would it mean for people under 40 to divest from the idea that menopause only belongs to the old, the straight, or the settled, and instead, see their own early, surgical, or medically induced menopause experiences as valid, powerful, and transformative? What would shift if younger people navigating menopause were affirmed in their identities and offered language, community, and care that honors their transformation as legitimate and deeply wise? What if their stories became maps, guiding others through uncharted terrain with clarity and courage? Our answer, shaped by the determination of maroon communities and the futuristic vision of the Menopausal Multiverse, is this: It means building something sovereign and interdependent. It means reclaiming the ecosystems we’ve been told are wastelands. It means listening to our elders, trusting our stories, and creating spaces where all of us, not just some of us, are free.Lessons from Queen Nanny and the Great Dismal SwampAs we shape new ways of being and belonging in the Menopausal Multiverse, we activate the memory, strategy, resilience, and creativity of our ancestors—not to replicate the past, but to honor its wisdom while creating something radically new. These lessons from Queen Nanny and the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp remind us that what has been built before can be reimagined, and what was meant to be hidden can now be illuminated.From Queen Nanny, we learn that leadership can be strategic, emergent, and deeply spiritual all at once. Her legacy teaches us that organizing for freedom demands not only tactical brilliance but also a profound reverence for ancestral knowledge. She reminds us that survival alone is not enough—we must also fight for land, for dignity, and for the sacred right to govern our own lives. In this light, menopause becomes more than a biological transition; it emerges as a threshold into a new kind of leadership, one that is clear-eyed, protective, and unapologetically rooted in community.From the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, we learn that even the most seemingly inhospitable places can be transformed into havens when shaped by collective will and resistance. The margins, far from being empty, are alive with potential, with memory, and with the blueprint for what is possible. These communities show us that we do not need proximity to power to create safety, culture, or systems of governance that reflect our values. What we need is each other, a deep connection to land, shared commitment, and the courage to build beyond the gaze of the systems that have abandoned or betrayed us.To build the Menopausal Multiverse is to carry forward these lessons. It is to reconnect with the land, with the community, and with ancestral wisdom. It is to root our future in place, resistance, and self-determination. It is to honor the margins, not as peripheries but as portals. It is to understand that healing justice and reproductive justice begin with remembering who we are and refusing to be forgotten. The Menopausal Maroon is not a metaphor. It is a living practice of reclamation and redesign. And it will lead us home.The Margins Are a MapA Meditation from the Menopausal MultiverseClose your eyes.Inhale deeply.Let the breath trace a line—not to the center, but to the edge.To the margin.To the place you were told was too much, too complicated, too far.Now exhale, and imagine this:The margins are not exile.They are a beginning.They are the ground where ancestors whisper,where stories root,where liberation takes its first breath.The margins are maps in disguise—coded with memory,lined with resistance,drawn in the hand of the Maroon, the midwife,the queer visionary, the freedom-seeker.They are where those of us othered by our race, ethnicity, gender, religion or access to resourcethose who have been cast out have always conjured safety,crafted beauty,and practiced sovereignty.So today,if you find yourself at the edge—of a system, of a story, of your own becoming—know this:You are not lost.You are not late.You are not outside.You are exactly where the map begins.This margin,this wild edge,is not a boundary.It is a portal.It is a place of power.Breathe into it.Honor it.Name it sacred.And walk forward, not toward the center,but into the multiversewhere all of you is welcome."
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Ziad Rahbani and the Art of Creative Rebellion",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/ziad-rahbani-creative-rebellion",
"date" : "2025-07-28 07:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_for-EIP-ziad-rahbani.jpg",
"excerpt" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.",
"content" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.Ziad Rahbani’s passing marks more than the end of a brilliant life—it marks the closing of a chapter in the cultural history of our region. His funeral wasn’t just a ceremony, it was a collective reckoning; crowds following his exit from the hospital to the cemetery. The streets knew what many governments tried to forget: that he gave voice to the people’s truths, to our frustrations, our absurdities, our grief, and our undying hope for justice. Yet he died as an unsung hero.Born into a family that shaped the musical soul of Lebanon, Ziad could have taken the easy path of replication. Instead, he shattered the mold. From his early plays like Sahriyye and Nazl el-Surour, he upended the elitism of classical Arabic theatre by placing the working class, the absurdity of war, and the contradictions of society at the center of his work. He spoke like the people spoke. He made art in the language of the taxi driver, the student, the mother waiting for news of her son.In his film work Film Ameriki Tawil, Ziad used satire not only as critique, but as rebellion. He exposed the rot of sectarian politics in Lebanon with surgical precision, never sparing anyone, including the leftist circles he moved in. He saw clearly: that political purity was a myth, and liberation required uncomfortable truths. His work, deeply rooted in class consciousness, refused to glorify any side of a war that tore his country apart.And yet, Ziad Rahbani never lost his clarity on Palestine. While others wavered, diluted their positions, or folded into diplomacy, Ziad remained steadfast. His support for the Palestinian struggle was not an aesthetic position—it was a political and ethical commitment. And he did so not as an outsider or savior, but as someone who understood that our futures are intertwined. That the liberation of Palestine is integral to the liberation of Lebanon. That anti-sectarianism and anti-Zionism are not contradictions, but extensions of each other.He brought jazz into Arabic music not as a novelty, but as a defiant act of cultural fusion—proof that our identities are not fixed, but fluid, diasporic, ever-evolving. He blurred the lines between Western musical forms and Arabic lyricism with intention, not mimicry. His collaborations with his mother, the legendary Fairuz, carried the weight of generational dialogue, but his own voice always broke through—wry, melancholic, grounded in the everyday.Ziad taught us that being a revolutionary doesn’t require a uniform or a slogan. It requires listening. It requires holding complexity, laughing in the face of despair, and making room for joy even when the world is on fire. He reminded us that culture is the deepest infrastructure of any resistance movement. He refused to be sanitized, censored, or simplified.As we mourn him, we also inherit his clarity. For artists, for organizers, for thinkers: Ziad Rahbani gave us a blueprint. Create without permission. Tell the truth. Fight for Palestine without compromising your own roots. And never forget that the people will always hear what is real.He was, and will always be, a compass for creative rebellion."
}
,
{
"title" : "Saul Williams: Nothing is Just a Song",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Collis Browne",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/saul-williams-interview",
"date" : "2025-07-21 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_SaulWilliams_Shot_7_0218.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.",
"content" : "Collis Browne: Is all music and art really political?Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.Even now, we are reading the writings of Palestinian poets in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention those who are part of the diaspora, who are charting their feelings and intimate experiences while living through a genocide. These works of art are all politically charged because they are charged with a reality that is fully suppressed by oppressive networks and powers that control them.Shakespeare’s work was always political. He found a way to speak about power to the face of power, knowing they would be in the audience. But also found a way to play with and talk to the “groundlings,” the common people who were in the audience as well.Collis Browne: Was there a moment when you realized that your music could be used as a tool of resistance?Saul Williams: Yeah, I was in third grade, about eight or nine years old. I had been cast in a play in my elementary school. I loved the process of not only performing, but of sitting around the table and breaking down what the language meant and what the objective and the psychology of the character was, and what that meant during the time it was written. I came home and told my parents that I wanted to be an actor when I grew up. My father had the typical response: “I’ll support you as an actor if you get a law degree.” My mother responded by saying, “You should do your next school report on Paul Robeson, he was an actor and a lawyer.”So I did my next school report on Paul Robeson. And what I discovered was that here was an African American man, born in 1898, who had come to an early realization as an actor that the messages of the films he was being cast in—and he was a huge star—went against his own beliefs, his own anti-colonial and anti-imperial beliefs. In the 1930s, he started talking about why we needed to invest in independent cinema. In 1949, during the McCarthy era, he had his passport taken from him so he could no longer travel outside of the US, because he refused to acknowledge that the enemies of the US were his enemies as well. He felt there was no reason Black people should be signing up to fight for the US Empire when they were going home and getting lynched.In 1951, he presented a mandate to the UN called “We Charge Genocide.” In it he charged the US Government with the genocide of African Americans because of the white mobs who were lynching Black Americans on a regular basis. [Editor’s note: the petition charges the US Government with genocide through the endorsement of both racism and “monopoly capitalism,” without which “the persistent, constant, widespread, institutionalized commission of the crime of genocide would be impossible.”] When Robeson met with President Truman, Truman said, “I’d like to respond, but there’s an election coming up, so I have to be careful.”Paul Robeson sang songs of working-class people, songs that trade unionists sang, songs that miners sang, songs that all types of workers sang across the world. He identified with the workers and with the working class, regardless of his fame. He was ridiculed by the American Government and even had his passport revoked for his activism. At that early age, I learned that you could sing songs that could get you labeled as an enemy of the state.I grew up in Newburgh, New York, which is about an hour upstate from New York City. One of my neighbors would often come sing at my father’s church. At the time, I did not understand why my dad would allow this white guy with his guitar or banjo to come sing at our church when we had an amazing gospel choir. I couldn’t understand why we were singing these school songs with this dude. When I finally asked my parents, they said, “You have to understand that Pete—they were talking about Pete Seeger—is responsible for popularizing some of the songs you sing in school.” He wrote songs like “If I Had a Hammer,” and he too was blacklisted by the US government because of the songs he chose to sing and the people he chose to sing them for, and the people he chose to sing them with. I learned at a very early age that music and art were full of politics. Enough politics to get you labeled as the enemy of the state. Enough politics to get your passport taken, or to be imprisoned.I was also learning about my parents’ peers, artists whom they loved and adored. Artists like Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, all from the Black Arts Movement. Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka made a statement when they started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem that said essentially that all art should serve a function, and that function should be to liberate Black minds.It is from that movement that hip-hop was born. I was lucky enough to witness the birth of hip-hop. At first, it was playful, it was fun, but by the mid to late 1980s, it began finding its voice with groups like Public Enemy, KRS-One, Queen Latifa, Rakim, and the Jungle Brothers. These are groups that started using and expressing Black Liberation politics in the music, which uplifted it, made it sound better, and made it hit harder. The first gangster rap was that… when it was gangster, when it was directly challenging the country it was being born in.As a teenager, I identified as a rapper and an actor. I would argue with school kids who insisted, “It’s not even music. They’re just talking.” I would have to defend hip-hop as music, sometimes even to my parents, who found the language crass. But when I played artists like KRS-One and Public Enemy for my parents, they said, “Oh, I see what they’re doing here.”When Public Enemy rapped, “Elvis was a hero to most, But he never meant shit to me you see, Straight up racist that sucker was, Simple and plain, Motherfuck him and John Wayne, ‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud, I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped, Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” my parents were like Amen. They understood. They understood why I needed to blast that music in my room 24/7. They understood.When the music spoke to me in that way, suddenly I could pull off moves on the dance floor like doing a flip that I couldn’t do before. That’s the power of music. That’s power embedded in music. That’s why Fela Kuti said that music is the weapon of the future. And, of course, there’s Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. What’s Billie Holiday’s most memorable song? “Strange Fruit.” That voice connected, was speaking directly to the times she was living in. It transcended the times, where to this day, when you hear this song and you understand that the “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees are Black people who have been lynched, you understand how the power of the voice, when you connect it to something that is charged with the reality of the times, takes on a greater shape.Collis Browne: Public Enemy broke open so much. I grew up in Toronto, in a mostly white community, but I was into some of the bigger American hip-hop acts who were coming out. Public Enemy rose to a new level. Before them, we were only connecting with punk and hardcore music as the music of rebellion.Saul Williams: Public Enemy laid down the groundwork for what hip-hop is: “the voice of the voiceless.” It was only after Public Enemy that you saw the emergence of huge groups in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt, and across the world. There were big acts before them. Run DMC, for instance, but when Public Enemy came out, marginalized groups heard their music and said, “That’s for us. Yes, that’s for us.” It was immediately understood as music of resistance.Collis Browne: What have you seen or listened to out in the world that has a clear political goal, but has been appropriated and watered down?Saul Williams: We can stay on Public Enemy for that. Under Secretary Blinken, Chuck D became a US Global Music Ambassador during the genocide in Gaza. There are photos of him standing beside Secretary Blinken, accepting that role, while understanding that the US has always used music as a cultural propaganda tool to express soft power. I remember learning about how the US uses this “soft power” when I was working in the mid-2000s with a Swiss composer, who has now passed, named Thomas Kessler. He wrote a symphony based on one of my books, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and we were performing it with the Cologne, Germany symphony orchestra, when I heard from the head of the orchestra that, in fact, their main financier was the US Government through the CIA.During the Cold War, it was crucial for the American Government to put money into the arts throughout Western Europe to try to express this idea of “freedom,” as opposed to what was happening in the Eastern (Communist) Bloc. So it was a long time between when the US Government started enlisting musicians and other artists in their propaganda campaigns and when I encountered this information.There’s a documentary called Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which talks about how the US Government used (uses) music and musicians to co-opt movements and propagate the idea of American freedom and democracy outside the US in the hope of winning over the citizens of other countries without them even realizing that so much of that art is there to question the system itself, not to celebrate it. Unfortunately, there are situations in which an artist’s work is co-opted to be used as propaganda, and the artist buys into it. They become indoctrinated, and you realize that we’re all susceptible to the possibility of taking that bait."
}
,
{
"title" : "The Culture of Artificial Intelligence",
"author" : "Sinead Bovell, Céline Semaan",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/sinead-bovell-on-ai-artifial-intelligence",
"date" : "2025-07-20 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/sinead-bovell-headshot.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?",
"content" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?Sinead Bovell: It depends on where you are… in the Global North, and particularly in the US, perspectives on artificial intelligence and advanced technologies are more broadly negative. When you look at regions in the Global South, when you look at regions in Asia, AI is seen in a much more positive light. Their societies tend to focus on the benefits new technology can bring and what it can do for their quality of life. The social media ecosystem thrives on negative content, but it really does depend on where you are in the world as to how negatively you’re going to view AI. When it comes to the actual fears and the threats themselves, most of them have some validity. Humans could become less intelligent over time if they’re overly reliant on artificial intelligence systems, and the data does show that AI can erode core cognitive capacities.For example, most of us can’t read maps anymore. If you are in the military and your satellite gets knocked down and you need to understand your coordinates, that might be a problem. But for the average person, not reading a map has allowed us to optimize our time; we can get from A to B much more quickly. What do we fill the time with that AI gives us back with? That’s a really important question.Another important question is: How do we purposely engineer cognitive friction into the learning and thinking environment so we don’t erode that core capability? That’s not something that is just going to happen. We are humans, we take the path of least resistance, like all evolutionary species do. If you look at the printing press, the chaotic abundance of information eventually led to the scientific method and the peer review. Educators, academics, scientists, and creators needed to figure out a way to sort through the valuable information and the nonsense, and that led to more cognitive friction. Those pathways haven’t been developed yet for AI. How we use and assimilate AI depends on the actions we take when it comes to the climate apocalypse, for instance. As of now, how AI uses water and energy is nothing short of a nightmare. However, it’s not really AI in isolation. It’s our social media habits in general. When you look at them in aggregate and globally, our digital habits and patterns aren’t good for the climate in general. And then AI just exacerbates all of that.AI is not a technology that you are going to tap into and tap out of. It’s not like Uber where maybe you don’t use the app because you would prefer to bike, and that’s the choice that you make. AI is a general-purpose technology, and it’s important that we get that distinction, because general-purpose technologies, over time, become infrastructure, like the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. We rebuild our societies on top of them, and it’s important that we see it that way, so people don’t just unsubscribe out of protest. That only impedes their ability to make sure they keep up with the technology, and give adequate feedback and critiques of the technology.Céline Semaan: I recently saw you on stage and heard your response to a question about whether AI and its ramifications could be written into an episode of the TV show Black Mirror. Would you be able to repeat the answer you gave?Sinead Bovell: The stories we see and read about AI are usually dystopian. Arguably, there are choices we continue to make over and over again that we know will lead to negative outcomes, yet we don’t make different choices. To me, that’s the real Black Mirror episode… can we rely on ourselves? In some circumstances, we continually pick the more harmful thing. Most of the big challenges we face are complicated but not unsolvable. Even with climate, a lot of the solutions exist, and actually most of them are grounded in technology. What isn’t happening is the choice to leverage them, or the choice to subsidize them so they become more accessible, or the choice to even believe in them. That scares me a lot more than a particular use case of technology. Most of the biggest challenges we face are down to human choices, and we’re not making the right choices.Céline Semaan: Are you afraid of AI taking over the world and rendering all of our jobs useless? How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: There’s AI taking over the world, and that’s AI having its own desire and randomly rising up out of the laptop or out of some robot. I’m not necessarily concerned about that. You can’t say anything is a 0% chance, right? We don’t know. There are so many things you can’t say with 100% certainty. I mean, are we alone the universe? It’s really hard to prove or disprove those types of things. Where I stand on that is… sure allocate research dollars to a select group of scientists who can work on that problem. However, I am quite concerned about the impact AI is going to have on the workforce. We can see the destruction of certain jobs coming. It’s going to happen quickly, and we’re not preparing for it properly. Every general-purpose technology has led to automation and reconfiguration of the shape of the workforce. Let’s look at the first industrial revolution which lasted from approximately 1760-1840. If we were to zoom in on people working in agriculture, by the end of the 19th Century, around 70-80% of those people were doing something different. That is an astounding change. People had jobs, they just looked very different from working on the farm. But what if that happens in seven years rather than 80 years? That’s what scares me. I think the transition will be quite chaotic because it’s going to be quite quick, but it doesn’t have to be. History isn’t a great predictor of the future, but it does give you a lot of examples of what you don’t need to do again.The reason the industrial revolution turned out to be a good thing in the end, in terms of the life we all live, is that, for instance, we have MRIs and don’t have to have our blood drained to see if we’re sick. But people were just left to fend for themselves. It was chaos, and it turned into this kind of every person for themselves. Kind of figure it out. Get to the city. Bring your family. Don’t bring your family. It was really chaotic. How are we going to not repeat that? I don’t know if we are putting the security measures in place to make sure people are protecting that transition.The most obvious one to me is health care in the United States. I don’t know the exact number, maybe it’s around 60% of people, but don’t quote me on that, are reliant on their job for health care. That’s where their insurance comes from. What is going to happen to their insurance if their job goes away or if they transition to being self-employed? How do we help people transition? People don’t even dare go down that road, but those are the types of conversations that need to happen.Céline Semaan: In 10 years from now, will we look at AI as just another super calculator. And we will be asking the same questions that we are asking today, meaning that the change we’re seeking is not necessarily technological, but philosophical and cultural. How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: AI will look like much more of a philosophical, cultural, and social transition than solely a technological one. This is true of a lot of general-purpose technologies.The inventions in technology lead to how we organize our societies and how we govern them. If you look at the printing press, it led to a secular movement and gave power to that engine. You get big social, philosophical, cultural changes, and revolutions in society when you experience this scale of technical disruption. I think we will look back on the AI inflection point as one of the most pivotal transitions in human history in the past couple 100 years. I would say it’s going to be as disruptive as the printing press and maybe steam engine combined. And we made it through both of those. There was a lot of turmoil and chaos, but we did make it through both of those.We are a much more vibrant, healthy society now. We live longer and, relatively speaking, we have much more equality. There is a path where it works out, but we have to be making the decisions to make that happen. However, it’s not practical that a subset of the population makes the decisions on behalf of everyone. And that’s why I think it’s so important for people to get in the game and not see AI as this really technical device or technology, but instead, as a big social, cultural and philosophical transition. Your lived experience qualifies you to participate in these conversations; there’s nobody who can carry the weight of this on their own."
}
]
}