Ain’t I a Woman
mix by Tina Reden
Mix inspired by a speech delivered by Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), US American abolitionist and women's rights activist.
1851 at a Women's Convention, Akron, Ohio.
Tracklist
Nicole Mitchell - The chalice
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - The Milk
Alice Coltrane - Turiya & Ramakrishna
Pamela Z - Number 3
Pauline Olivers - Reverberations
Nina Simone - Four Women
Dorothy Ashby - Lonely Girl
Erykah Badu - Bad Lady
Elestial Sound - YlangYlang
Voice
Kerry Washington
“It was an aptly chosen name, as illustrated by her speech, in which she at once refutes the prevailing myth that women are weaker than men while challenging social definitions of womanhood—which relies upon ideas about white women’s femininity and purity.
Truth says:
“That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!”
Truth criticizes her feminist contemporaries for focusing on the lived experiences of white women. Then she takes aim at the abolitionist movement for solely focusing on the rights of black men:
“Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘ cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”
The speech was particularly poignant as it was delivered at a time, as historian Nell Painter puts it, “when most Americans thought of slaves as male and women as white.” Truth “embodied a fact that still bears repeating: Among blacks are women; among the women, there are blacks.”
by Aamna Mohdin
Text Source
Read full article here
Tina Reden is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and Dj living in Zurich and Amsterdam. Her work is collaborative, performative and dialogic and explores the political possibilities within the active position of listening – both as a metaphor and as a concrete, sound-specific practice. She uses notions of rhythms, polyphony or cacophony as a way to listen to multiplicity and undo the modern notion of a singular narrative. She explores different formats such as sound improvisations, poetic soundscapes or storytellings as possible places for feminist, decolonial and mindful practices – always trying to integrate discursive situations and initiate moments of being together.