“And Deborah, a nebiyah (prophetess) the wife of Lappidoth, was judging Yisra’el at that time. And she was dwelling under the palm tree of Deborah between Ramah and Beyth El in the mountains of Ephrayim. And the children of Yisra’el came up to her for right-ruling.” Judges 4 v4-5
What I started off as a rough (never intended for clean-up) animated run cycle ended up becoming this short, dramatic sequence. ’Rooftop Chase!’
Watch it in full screen, just make sure you hit the HD button! Full description of how this came about & what I plan to do with it on the video’s page. I’ll try to post up a process vid also, soon.
Creating this comic is about more that highlighting traditional Yoruba narratives. It is an exploration of African aesthetics, a blend of western and African artistic techniques. The textile and sculpture arts I use are not simple background, they are an ode to the artistic exuberance of of the Yoruba people and by extension all west african visual art forms. Too often these traditions are belittled as “craft” or “decorative” as opposed to “fine arts”. Their value only recognized when reinterpreted (often misinterpreted) through western contexts. Picasso and Matisse’s asinine obsession with a so called primitive spark ignores the the complex aesthetic and philosophical motivations behind African works of art, ignoring the need to look at it on its own terms. Coolness, spiritual agency, symbolism layered with metaphor within metaphor all are present in the hand and head of the weaver, aladire, carver and potter when they work. The same principles are present in a song, a poem, a proverb or a drumbeat. Whether uttered in Africa and the diaspora, they are imbued with aesthetic and philosophical principles that must be read on their own terms and seen through their own lens. I cannot truly explore the depths of black aesthetics without exploring the power of black arts. That is why it is so important that I make this comic the way that I am making it, To break the delusion of an aesthetic hierarchy that places european ideologies at the top. Support Itan comic today by visiting https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/itan-part-one-africa-art.
SUPPORT ITAN:PART 1!! I am one month in to the fundraising campaign and im still a ways away from reaching my $5000 goal! Visit indiegogo.com/projects/itan-part-one-africa-art to support a project bringing Black thought and aesthetics to the forefront! Support A project focused on important African narratives. Help me highlight the Beauty and complexity of Yoruba art and culture and its powerful impact on the diaspora!. A SAMPLE OFTHE FIRST EIGHT PAGES ARE AVAILABLE FOR VIEW AT ITANPROJECT.COM! CHECK THEM OUT AND SUPPORT ITAN: PART 1 TODAY!
Here is a little insight into the composition process. Its a lot of work, but its worth it to see this project come to life. I still need help to print and distribute this work. Visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/itan-part-one-africa-art#/ to help bring this vision of traditional Yoruba Oral literature to life! Back the project to reserve a copy of the comic!
When thinking about why I decided to create this comic I remember an incident in High School. When I was in ninth grade we had an entire unit in Humanities class dedicated to learning about world religions. In what our school thought was an inclusive discussion on world faiths and their impact on society and world history, our class learned about multiple denominations of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hindusim and a host of other “Major Religions”. Not one African or African derived faith was included in our studies. We learned about how these faiths shaped the history and worldview of each of the societies in which they were practiced. They even invited practitioners of each of these faiths to the school to share their beliefs and experiences with us. I remember hating that assignment. I remember with my teenage indignation handing in every annotated bibliography a week late. I remember every sneer and side-eye I gave my teacher as she chastised me on the importance of the project. I remember confronting her about omitting African based faiths from her curriculum and her looking at me with her condescending white lady smile and selling me the same tired brand of bullshit I heard from well meaning white ladies my whole life “we need to focus on MAJOR religious traditions during this course” We wouldn’t be able to find any practitioner of African based faiths in Boston to speak meaningfully about their faith” This lady who taught mostly Black and/or Latino students (most of which were from the Caribbean) looked me dead in my mouth and told that boldfaced lie. In a unit that that focused on how religious philosophy shapes our perspectives, narratives and experiences she didn’t think it was important to at least try to expose us to even ONE of the myriad of African based faiths that had shaped the experiences of Afro-descended peoples throughout the diaspora. I’m making Itan: Part one for fifteen year old me. I’m making the book I needed read with the images I needed to see, because I know there are young people out there that need it too. I can’t fix a racially biased education systems singlehandedly, but with your help I can make this book. With your help I can expose people to a small portion of the infinite complexity that is Yoruba thought and aesthetics, one of the great traditions of the thousands of philosophical traditions of the African continent. If schools and media don’t want to tell our stories we can tell them ourselves! We can acknowledge and uplift them ourselves! We have the power to create, uplift and validate our own, history, and our own experiences. Support Itan: Part 1 Today visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/itan-part-one-africa-art/x/15991312#/. If you can’t donate then help spread the word. Thank You
Hey Everyone! Check out the sneak peak for Chapter 2 of Itan: Part one! A graphic novel rooted in traditional Yoruba oral literature! Visit Itanproject.com to pre-order your copy and to see a preview of the latest pages! Join me on a journey through West African philosophy and aesthetics. Support Itan: Part One today!!
Although I havent posted updates in a while i am still hard at work finishing Itan: part one a graphic novel based yoruba oral literature. Please visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/itan-part-one-africa-art/x/15991312#/. We still have long way to go to reach our goal. Please support Itan: Part one today!
a movie that has a largely-female cast has to be well-written, well-shot, well-acted, well-advertised. people will spend 2 hours on youtube talking about a single plot hole; about a moment of bad pacing, about a singular background character’s poor scripting. if there isn’t something obvious, they will say - well there’s nothing specifically bad, but it wasn’t specifically good either.
they will turn out another all-male movie, and it’s just a movie.
a book that has queer representation in it has to defy every convention of writing while also being true to traditional plot, structure, format, and pacing. it must have no boring chapters, no missteps, no awkward dialogue. it must be able to “prove” that any queer relationship “makes sense”, their sparks must fly off the page and their love must be eternal. the writing must be clear and beautiful, the storyline original and fresh, the values traditional but with an undercurrent that is modern and saucy.
they will turn out another book without queer rep, where a man and woman just-fall-in-love, and it’s just a book.
i am latinx. i am queer. i am nb & neurodivergent. my father said to me once: you will need to be exceptional to be just-as-good, and you will need to be beyond exceptional before they see you as just-a-person, and not your labels.
i am not beyond exceptional. i am a human person. i am skilled because i worked my ass off to be skilled.
i am currently reading a book that’s so-bad-it’s-good about a girl that falls in love with a vampire. i was 64% of the way through the book before she figures out tall-dark-fanged is not natural. i like books like these, i like letting myself relax while i just enjoy the read. but i do spend a lot of time wondering - would this have been published if it was about queer people? would this have gotten past the editors if the characters weren’t white and sexy?
i want to write a movie about being a woman in a male space, and i want to start that movie with a 10 minute scene where the woman is lectured with the exact same whining that occurs in the youtube comments of even the trailers for those movies: “haven’t we had enough diversity?” “we’ve had enough girl power movies” “sorry, this is just pandering. it’s boring.”
here’s what’s fucked up: it shouldn’t matter, you’re right. my identity shouldn’t fold after my name like a battalion of stars: a cry of what i’ve gone through. what we all know i had to move past and through. i should just be a writer, plain and simple, without my work being shifted through with tweezers - i know everything i make, always, i am incredibly responsible for. beholden to. i don’t like knowing that if i fuck up, i am also fucking up for every person like me. every person in a community i belong to.
once, back in undergrad, i wrote a short story about a girl who had been kicked by a horse. it was my first time writing about my experience with my ocd; i felt proud of it. the story was mostly about grief and slow recovery. the queerness of the main character was not important to the plot, my main character was just-queer. there wasn’t even a romantic interest in it.
i remember one of my classmates being disappointed. “i just feel like you always write about girls who like girls, and i’m bored of it,” he said. “you’re a beautiful writer, but i’m like - oh, at some point, it’s gonna be gay again.” during the workshop, he folded his hands over my story and said, “and okay, i’m just going to say it. she’s ocd, she’s gay, she’s depressed - it’s a little much for me to believe is all happening to one person.”
it is a little much to be that person (and more besides). i have therapy weekly, after all.
… though i am not currently at liberty to share the book-length memoir that precedes this, this is the final piece of the much larger whole and may be of interest to some…
EPILOGUE: A STAR WARS STORY
One of the many benefits of Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm is that a Star Wars prequel, sequel, or equal, can now be reliably counted on to hit the screens at the same time, every year, from now until… well, I imagine pretty much until long after I’ve died.
This is all very convenient for geeks like me because it is not only guaranteed entertainment, but also because it helps to mark the passage of time.
By the time Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was released in December of 2016, the controversy over Lexa’s death was enjoying a brief resurgence when “Thirteen” - either because of the death itself, or the way the series aggressively promoted itself to the LGBTQ+ audience prior to the death - showed up on a few end-of-the-year “worst of” lists. Trying to take this in stride, I took to retweeting the links to the “worst of” lists under the heading “Hey look! I made an end of the year list! Oh… wait”.
The life of a walking cautionary tale is not too awful if you manage to keep your sense of humor.
All of this was made only more bittersweet by my knowledge, - which I had to keep secret at the time - that the Xena reboot was not moving forward. After more than a year of work, I had reached an impasse with the co-creator of the original over the show’s tone and execution. So I resigned from the project and kept the news to myself in the name of being a good soldier - and keeping negative press away from the property - and privately grieved the loss that Lexa’s fans would never get to see my “apology”.
With richly-earned wariness, many fans of both The 100 and Xena assumed that my departure from the project was due to the network or studio blocking my stated goal of putting the romance between Xena and Gabrielle front and center in the reboot. Nothing could have been further from the truth: from jump street, NBC, Universal, and all the other involved parties, supported that part of my take on the characters.
On the day Rogue One opened, I took my niece to an early showing. She was visiting from college for my daughter’s first birthday. Over lunch before the screening, she confessed that that she had not “really” seen much Star Wars but knew enough about it due to its pop-cultural ubiquity that, hopefully, I wouldn’t have to explain too much of what was going on in this between-two-trilogies-prequel to her.
Hearing that put me in a reflective mood.
In 1977, in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico - in the middle-class circles in which I was raised - all things American were held as aspirational. American films were better than Spanish-language films from Spain and Mexico (I think I can count on one hand the number of Puerto Rican films I have seen), and subtitled American films were considered a superior viewing experience to dubbed films because fluency in the language of our colonial masters was a status symbol.
It was around this time that cable TV first appeared on the island, and being lucky enough to live in one of the select neighborhoods where the feed was available was a definite indicator of wealth and status.
Similarly, vacationing in - or sending your children to college to - the United States was a huge indicator of wealth and position. An American Higher Education was a boon that would handily prepare your offspring to return to the island and take their part in the ruling circles. And moving your entire family wholesale to the United States for some career opportunity with an American business concern?
That was like being selected by “The Claw” from Toy Story.
The United States I knew growing up was not the United States you probably knew. The United States I grew up knowing was the Bright Center of the Galaxy. It was a fantastic, glowing city made of equal parts history book hagiography and Hollywood invention.
It was the only place I wanted to be.
And, of course, the audible buzz of racial discrimination was every bit as much a persistent background noise of our Puerto Rican lives as it was in the continent. In our small island, this took the form of a subtle - sometimes not so subtle - ongoing discussion about the racial purity of your friends and neighbors. In a place where the Conquistadors intermixed freely with the slaves and natives, a value system had evolved in which the lighter the skin, the closer you were to the original masters from Mother Europe… or the current ones United States.
When I first saw Star Wars, it crystallized both my sense of vocation and my desire to come to the United States to fulfill that burning wish to tell stories at the highest levels of access to the broadest audience and technological sophistication. I suppose my colonial overlords did too good a job imprinting on me - or maybe I’m just genetically wired for Stockholm Syndrome - because the message I took from Star Wars was not “you’re not the same race as these heroes” but rather “you need to get out of this subjugated colony, just like Luke Skywalker”.
–
Thirty-nine years later, at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood - some two-thirds of the way into Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - I felt a strange sensation in my throat. It was a hot, cramping choke-hold: a powerful emotional response amassing somewhere inside of me.
It happened during a scene in which “Cassian Andor”, played by Diego Luna, and “Jyn Erso”, played by Felicity Jones, have a big, climactic argument about heroism, mission, and morality.
I stopped for a moment to process what I was feeling. The scene was perfectly fine on its own, but, in truth, I have seen its like a million times in a million other sci-fi and war movies.
Why was I reacting this way?
That’s when I realized that I was watching not just a film, but a Star Wars film, in which a Latino man with a discernible - and pronounced - accent was actually one of the two people in the climactic two-person scene about heroism, mission, and morality.
Because my skin is light, most people who see me just assume I’m “white”. Hell, upon first meeting me, my wife thought I was Jewish - and gay - but I digress. The one thing that invariably gave me away as “other” after my family’s move to the United States was my accent.
After being much mocked in my first year in the States, I worked tirelessly to mitigate that tell-tale sign of my ethnicity.
Eventually - through some lucky combination of hours spent trying to imitate Robin Williams in Mork & Mindy, sustained recitations of the Star Wars Story LP, and the natural plasticity of my pre-tween brain - my accent receded into the aural nimbus of the now-distant past. In truth, I can barely call my accent back at will anymore. When I try, it comes out as more of a stylized impersonation of a memory than something native to my being.
Imagine that: hating something of yourself so much that you bury it so deep that there’s days you can almost convince yourself it was never there in the first place.
At the ripe old age of forty-seven I thought I had achieved a fairly serene state of learned resignation to the depredations of American mainstream popular culture on minorities. I mean, considering the portrayal of people of color in the media I grew up watching, my heart would have exploded years ago if I experienced a paroxysm of rage every time I saw the Latino partner of a white cop get killed to show that the bad guy meant business… or if the bad guy who needed to show that he meant business by murdering the noble sacrificial black partner of the white cop was the grotesquely Latinoid gang-banger subaltern to an as-yet-unseen, puppet-mastering, white villain.
And, lest we kid ourselves, you can look at my IMDB page and make the case that - through my entire professional life - I have more than frequently been an enabler of those depredations. All that taken into account, I figured I had long ago made peace with the uncomfortable truth that - try as I might to make it happen for others in my current occupation - I had become pretty much immune to the revelation that it feels good to see yourself on the screen.
Turns out I’m not.
And I’m glad I know that now.
Whatever greatness or flaws Rogue One: A Star Wars Story may possess on its own, that one moment transported me. It gave me a glimpse of how much more Star Wars could have meant to me as a child (and, believe me, it’s hard to imagine it could have meant more) had it deigned to reflect the world a little more accurately. That one moment made me wonder how my life might have been different if forty years ago Star Wars had perhaps made me feel that I could have gone on my hero’s journey without regard to - and not in spite of - the sound of my true voice.
