Some days, writing these sorts of posts is harder than others.
This is one of the harder days.
Normally, I use the Wednesday post as a straightforward feature of one of Wings’s newer pieces. Yes, I manage to work history and culture and symbolism and gemology into it, but it’s all in the service of highlighting his work.
Work which is, of course, for sale.
A commercial proposition.
Today, I had decided the feature this piece, Holding the Sky. It’s one he created for inclusion in his recent one-man show, but as his work goes, it’s relatively modest in price. It’s also a simple, frankly vintage design, one that he’s discussed in the context of his own ancestors’ artistic legacy.
But the headlines aren’t going way, the message is insistent, and the symbolism unmistakable:
Hands Up.
Of course, that’s an abbreviated message, and even in its shorthand form, it’s only half there. The real message reads:
Hands Up.
Don’t Shoot.
And that is something devastating.
I refer, of course, to the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri: Yet one more in a long and obscene history of devaluing the lives of young Black men to nothing. One more in a long line of ghosts marching through the misty lanes of memory, ghosts of young men (and women) seen as not worth respecting, not worth hearing, not worth keeping. One more in this country’s long litany of lynchings, the shameful strange fruit of racism and hatred and power.
Our peoples, our ancestors, know something about lynchings. I know it in ways more personal than most realize: my grandfather and his young family targeted by the Klan in the early decades of the last century — revenants of another sort, in white sheets and hoods, bearing nooses and firebombs to be lobbed against those who were Other. On the opposite side, the Black blood and bodies and skin kept buried, hidden, like the Indian blood, “not our kind of people,” and not to be freed from the family’s genetic attic under any circumstances.
In Wings’s family, watching his father, home from service in World War II, good enough to serve as cannon fodder, but not good enough, not “American” enough, to be permitted to vote. Being stolen himself while in his teens, forcibly ripped from his family and his home and his culture and his dreams, farmed out to a Mormon community in Utah where he was expected to serve their god and serve as their labor, a mid-20th-Century victim of this country’s Indian Policy: Kill the Indian, save the man. Or even (especially?) the boy.
So we both recognize the killing of Michael Brown for what it is. It strikes familiar chords in our own souls, souls that have been touched by the untimely deaths of immediate family members, yet fortunate enough not to have to feel that particular bond of brutal kinship, that tragic brother- and sisterhood of those whose own children have been slaughtered mostly for the color of their skin.
And I look at the piece I had picked out for today’s feature, and all I see is the raised hand, and my spirit weeps.
And yet . . . .
I look at this piece, and I look at its description and the interpretive text that accompanied this and a related piece in Wings’s show, and I can’t help but think, “What if . . . ?”
What if.
In the interpretive text from the show, Wings discussed the bricks, the building blocks of his culture and his art, and the importance of remembering — honoring — not merely the old ways but the people who kept them and taught them: his father, and his grandfather before him, self-taught silversmiths both, and both exceedingly traditional men.
This homage to tradition appears again in the piece’s individual description:
Sometimes, the old ways allow you to catch and hold a tiny piece of sky. So it is with this vintage-style necklace. Against a backdrop of a round silver sky, sunrise symbols ring a hand overlay holding conjoined stars in the palm. On the reverse (shown below), a central Morning Star is tilted to the ordinal points, with hand-stamped rays of light reaching in the cardinal directions.
Even the deerhide thong honors the old ways in a culture in which deer play an important role and signify powerful medicine.
But what strikes me is the imagery the symbolism evokes: reaching for the heavens; capturing a star, however briefly; surrounded by the warming rays of the sun on one side, guided by the stars on the other.
It’s a message of hope in an upraised hand.
What if we could take the tragedy in the Ferguson, the unspeakable loss of Michael Brown and the loss to his family, and transform its ultimate impact into one of hope? What if we could take the message:
Hands Up.
Don’t Shoot.
and transform it into:
Hands Up.
Reach the Stars.
Hands Up.
Hold the Sky.
There are traditions in Africa in which women are said to be the ones who “hold up the sky.” In other words, they are the ones who keep their families’, their cultures’ world alive and functioning.
It’s a fundamental shift in experience, in existence itself: from a gesture of supplication, of defense and the quest for raw survival, to a gesture of hope and happiness and contributing to community.
What sort of change would we see in the world, in this country, in the dominant culture that governs it, if we could create a world where young people of color felt the need to raise their hands only to reach for the stars?
What if we could create a world where everyone, including our young people, were only told to raise their hands simply to hold up the sky?
~ Aji
