By any medium necessary

M.K. Asante Jr.'s Year of First Fruits

by Tara Murtha

“Oh, my dad has critics,” says 25-year-old M.K. Asante Jr., Leaning back, eyes shining upward as he carefully measures his next words. “I haven’t been around long enough to have critics.”

It’s the first crack of vulnerability Asante has revealed, a departure from the confident, easygoing, poised-but-casual manner he’s maintained all afternoon.

“But I’m sure there will be some as soon as the book and the film comes out,” he says, letting his natural, perpetual smile settle back on his face.

A bright-eyed overachiever, he has a lot going for him. With a master’s degree in screenwriting from UCLA, he’s been a full-time professor at Morgan State University since he was 23. In 2005, 500 Years Later, the first full-length film he wrote and produced, was showered with honors for best film and best documentary at multiple film festivals.

He’s published two well-received, award-winning books of poetry, and last year married Maya Freelon, the woman of his dreams, in a ceremony his family jokingly calls the wedding of the century. His first nonfiction book—It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop: Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation—was published by St. Martin’s Press last month.

And Asante’s got plenty to smile about lately.

The book, he says, had been on his mind for a while. Makes sense. It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop is riding a tidal wave of books in a similar vein as the field of hip-hop studies continues to move into mainstream academia. There are more than 300 classes on hip-hop at universities across the country, and scores of books that graft a hip-hop analysis onto everything from the effect of music videos on young African-American girls’ self-esteem to Bill Cosby’s controversial pound cake speech.

Howard University hopes to establish a minor in hip-hop studies by 2009. Anthologies abound. The hip-hop intelligentsia (Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Tricia Rose and Jeff Chang) are well-established. This is Asante’s year to join the ranks.

Now he’s gearing up to drop his biggest film project to date.

His documentary The Black Candle—narrated by his wife’s aunt, the legendary poet Maya Angelou—will world-premiere next week in West Philadelphia.

Talking over brunch at Silk City on a recent Sunday, Asante is so amped up he barely touches his food.

“Hold on, hold on, check this out,” he says, rummaging through his bag, practically bouncing in the booth.

He wants me to hear a voicemail he received a few weeks back that he says blew his mind. I hold his iPhone up to my ear. The deep, earthy voice on the other end sends my brain spiraling deep into the memory vault. The voice is simultaneously familiar and foreign—like déjà vu—and rumbles like a steady thunder.

“Hello, M.K. Asante. This is Maya Angelou. You have a great piece of work here. I wish we could make 5 million, zillion copies. I wish we could have every black person sit down and watch it and listen. I wish every white person could sit down and listen. Congratulations.”

“I mean—is that deep? That’s so deep!” Asante says, shaking his head back and forth and beaming bright as a benchwarmer who somehow got up to the plate and smacked the ball out of the park.

“Getting that message was the ultimate,” he says, slapping the table.

The kid’s on fire. He hasn’t even touched his waffle.

“Maya’s narration was the foundation, and if she didn’t like it, I would’ve been devastated. I put so much energy into the film. Now no one else has to like it—Maya Angelou liked it.”

The Black Candle explores Kwanzaa, the weeklong holiday created by Dr. Maulana Karenga in 1966. Today more than 40 million people celebrate it from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1 all across the African diaspora. Asante’s film uses the traditions and principles of Kwanzaa to trace contemporary African-Americans’ relationship to their culture through history.

Though most Americans have at least heard of Kwanzaa as the “black Christmas,” many people mistakenly believe that it’s a recently resurrected ancient African holiday. Kwanzaa is actually the first holiday created specifically for African-Americans as a way to learn about and celebrate their cultural and spiritual connection to Africa.

The titular black candle refers to the lead candle in the kinara, the Kwanzaa candelabra that holds one black, three red and three green candles. The black candle symbolizes the people and represents the Kwanzaa principle of umoja, or unity, and is always lit first.

The film also touches on how Kwanzaa has been co-opted by capitalism—celebrants are often disgusted by the shoddily constructed kinaras sold at Wal-Mart—and how Kwanzaa observance in the U.S. inspired people around the world to adopt the rituals.

Even though Maya Angelou just saw the film that led to the voicemail a few weeks ago, she recorded the narration in 2006. After the narration was done, Asante shot fresh footage and wove it in with archival clips, slowly assembling the film a few frames at a time on top of Angelou’s narration.

“It was just like magic,” he says of the day he spent recording the film’s narration in the living room of Angelou’s home in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Here’s the transcendent anecdote, the one that will burn bright and clear years from now, even after time and more books and poetry and film productions inevitably blur Asante’s memories of the artist as a young man.

He and a film crew of 20 are carefully crowding Angelou’s house. When Angelou wants to break and talk script issues, the whole crew stops and stands around, choking on anxiety, hearing dollars flushing in the silence. But this is Maya Angelou, and this group of young black “artivists,” as Asante says, is pretty much going to do whatever Maya Angelou says to do, and right now Maya Angelou wants to stop and talk about the script.

When they’re ready to start recording again, a sound guy with batlike hearing calls cut. He hears birds singing in the background; it’s not a clean take. He says hold on, he’s going to shoo the birds away. To this, Maya Angelou sweeps around slow and steady as a mountain, hands on those phenomenal hips.

“No you will not,” she says. “Let those birds sing.”

M.K. Asante Jr. was born in Zimbabwe and raised in Philadelphia. Though he hasn’t lived in town full-time since he left for Lafayette College in 2000, he considers himself a Philly guy at heart.

photo by michael persico

“I’m from the Illadelph,” he says. “Two-one-fifth all day. Broad and Godfrey. East Oak Lane.”

It’s important to him that The Black Candle screens in Philly before traveling to festivals. Executive producers Kenny Gamble (of Gamble & Huff fame) and Dr. Walter Lomax, and producer Ben Haaz, Asante’s regular partner, are all Philly folk.

Appearances include writer Amiri Baraka, Maulana Karenga, poet Sunni Patterson, stic.man of Dead Prez, filmmaker Kiri Davis, spoken-word poet Ursula Rucker , artist Synthia St. James and both of Asante’s parents. The music was scored by Grammy Award-winning jazz singer Nneenna Freelon (Asante’s mother-in-law) and Derrick Hodge, a producer and musician whose bass lines thump through Common’s albums Be and Finding Forever.

Asante’s face is always glowing, but practically throws lightning when he talks about the people who appear in The Black Candle. It’s as though he can hardly believe it, as if he’s a small-town boy with big, improbable dreams of success. The kid on the bench waiting for a chance to hit.

The truth is that Asante’s been around famous artists and intellectuals since he was in diapers. He toddled around Kenny Gamble’s house as a kid and ran into Public Enemy hanging out at his dad’s office when he was a teenager.

Asante’s humility and earnestness is surprising and touching because in some ways his success is right on time—expected, even—as is the direction of his work, which focuses almost exclusively on the African-American experience, with some love poems for his wife for good measure.

He’s the son of Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, one of the most famous and controversial black scholars in the world—a man who was made a king in Ghana and a saint by students and admirers. He was an intellectual adversary of the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and was described as anarrogant academic tyrant in the Village Voice

Molefi Kete Asante is an African-American studies scholar and activist credited as the father of Afrocentricity. In 1987 he founded the nation’s first PhD program in African- American Studies at Temple University, where he’s still a professor today.

He changed his name from Arthur Lee Smith Jr. after learning that a librarian in Africa thought one of his books was written by an Englishman. One of 16 children born to laborers in Valdosta, Ga., he was the first in his family to graduate college.

Asante Jr. says he got his work ethic and confidence from his parents, who always told him—even when they thought he was a bit ambitious—he could do what he wanted if he made a plan.

“My dad was born in a shack in Georgia, picking cotton since he was six,” he says. “His grandfather would tell him in the cotton fields, ‘Boy, work the work. Don’t let the work work you.’ He’s my mentor. I look up to him.”

He laughs when I ask him why his parents aren’t identified when he cites them in his work. “What am I going to do?” he asks. “Put ‘director’s dad’ in small letters on the screen?”

Asante’s father has written 68 books espousing Afrocentric perspectives and history: The African American Atlas, Malcolm X as Cultural Hero & Afrocentric Essays, African American History: A Journey of Liberation, Rhetoric of Black Revolution and so on. His latest is An Afrocentric Manifesto. The next book comes out in December.

Though his hyperprolific father gets the most ink, his mother, Dr. Kariamu Welsh (she dropped the Asante part of her name after the couple divorced in 1999), is also recognized as a leader in the 20th-century Afrocentrist movement.

Welsh, professor and chairperson in the dance department in the College of Music and Dance at Temple University, was born in the projects in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. She’s credited with coining academic concepts like the “Nzuri model” and the “epic memory sense,” theories that define Afrocentric approaches to aesthetics.

Molefi Kete Asante referred to Welsh’s 1978 book Textured Woman, Cowrie Shells, Cowbells, and Beetlesticks and his book Afrocentricity (published in 1980) as “the first self-conscious markings along the intellectual path of Afrocentricity.” He also wrote that their respective books were the first to attempt to “explain a theory and a practice of liberation by reinvesting African agency as the fundamental core of our sanity.”

“You don’t come out of my house without knowing certain things about who you are, your history and your legacy,” says Asante Jr. “Some kids go to the ballpark. We went to the Mumia rally.”

As the literal love child of Afrocentricity’s founding intellectual and artistic scholars, it’s impossible to look at Asante and his work without considering the effect of his childhood on his views and work.

He tells me a story about the holidays when he was a student at Friends Select School, a Quaker private school in Center City. The teachers proudly announced they were celebrating Christmas and Hannakah that year. Asante started to shake so bad he could hardly stand up. But he did. He asked about Kwanzaa, which led to the inclusion of the holiday from then on. But still, despite the quick reflexes of middle-class P.C. cultural sensitivity at play, Asante felt out of place.

He was no angel. He was kicked out of Friends Select for spraying graffiti in the school’s bathroom. He sprayed typical kid stuff like his vanity tag (“Menace”) but also politically charged phrases like “No more war” and “Where are all the black people?”

The obvious answer: not at a private Quaker school.

At first blush, the irony seems too rich.

That's a rap: Asante on the set with fellow "artivist" Chuck D of Public Enemy (photo by dan alvarado).

How did a son of the father and mother of Afrocentricity end up at a school full of white kids?

Second crack. Pause. Look up.

“I think it says something about the state of our public schools,” he says. “The system—despite some of the cultural atmosphere at Friends Select—it’s preparing people for higher education.”

After getting tossed out of Friends, Asante attended Benjamin Rush Middle School. For high school he went to Samuel Fels for about a year and half before graduating from the Crefield School in Chestnut Hill. Asante says that Crefeld, a private alternative school, was finally the “emancipatory education” he was seeking, a consciousness he says he strives to bring to his students today.

Asante has mixed feelings about his time in Philadelphia public schools. He says that when he got to public school, the curriculum was filled with topics he’d covered years earlier in private schools. He hated the metal detectors and the cops in the halls, and said it felt like a prison—you against them.

But earlier at Friends Select, he felt isolated as one of a handful of black kids. Though he was disappointed in the quality of the education at public school, he felt he fit in better in some ways and he loved his friends. Still, he was different than most of his schoolmates there too.

“My parents were able to take me out and bring me to another school,” he says. “But most of my friends couldn’t—and that’s something I want to change.”

Finally we come around to talking about his new book, It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop, The Rise of the Post-Hip-Hop Generation. I had serious reservations about the book, but in the constellation of his films and poetry and overall mission, my criticisms of it shrank.

Now Asante’s talking about his favorite hip-hop artists and poets: Philly’s Eshon Burgundy, the Roots, poets Just Greg and Black Ice, Baltimore’s Labtekwon.

“When people see that, they’re going to know this cat knows about old-school Philly hip-hop,” he says.

Though Asante is positively sparkling with the desire to bring consciousness to his people by any medium necessary, It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop is not the strongest moment in his body of work. Perhaps the book bore the brunt of producing so much, so fast. It strikes me as having the tone of a groundbreaking academic work, yet it relies mostly on deft syntheses of voices—from bell hooks to Thomas Frank—to support anecdotal observations. Its attempted sweep is the music industry, the prison industrial complex, the war on drugs, urban planning, semantics, history, co-opting ethnicity and so on. But it reads more like a collage of interesting facts spliced with inspiring rhetoric than a cohesive analysis.

The politics of commercially successful hip-hop that wraps misogyny and pro-violence messages around tasty beats isn’t new ground. As I read it I kept wondering: What does he mean by hip-hop here, exactly? The four elements? A mindset? Gangsta rap? And are we really past it? The kids just spent summer rattling their asses to Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop.”

Information that falls somewhere between two well-documented sides of the same story are presented as simple fact. For example, the cases of Mumia Abu Jamal and Assata Shakur aren’t teased out. A reader unfamiliar with the various arguments and testimony loses out by not being presented with an established context.

Ultimately, while hip-hop is used as an entry point to talk about politics of race, class and culture, the knot—what’s been called ‘the cult of authenticity”—isn’t untangled. But as a call to action, as Asante describes it, the book is a good introduction to critical thinking for younger readers.

Asante talks of the legacy of socially conscious black artists. Citing his marriage, the book and film and even Obama, he calls this the year of first fruits. (The word “Kwanzaa” means “first fruits” in Swahili.) His own fledgling legacy is already different from that of his parents. It’s an interesting paradox for the first generation of African-Americans raised on hip-hop (and after civil rights): His parents ascended out of poverty by establishing the principles that have provided him a relatively privileged life—a life he’s dedicated to bringing their principles to the oppressed—but does his privilege remove him from them?

Breakfast now cold, it’s late afternoon and Asante is about to drive to New York City for an appointment before returning to Baltimore to teach on Tuesday. It’s like he’s reading my mind when he paraphrases Paul Robeson right before he leaves: “Don’t judge my people based on me. You can’t look at one black man and say he is doing okay when there are thousands of my people living off $700 a year.”