Book Review:
I Am Still Your Negro by Valerie Mason-John

I Am Still Your Negro: An Homage to James Baldwin
by Valerie Mason-John
University of Alberta Press, 2020

Dr. Valerie Mason-John, also known as Vimalasara in Buddhist Dharma communities and Queenie in slam poetry and theatre circles, is a world-renowned playwright, author, and beloved Buddhist teacher who co-founded the Eight Step Recovery Program. In their recently published collection of poetry, I Am Still Your Negro, Mason-John pays homage to James Baldwin through seven sections of poetic vignettes spanning nearly 100 pages. The topics range from slavery and colonization to global politics and historical realities, addressing the racialized and gendered intersections of African identity, diaspora, and ancestry.

Mason-John’s opening section sets the stage, outlining the author’s intellectual history and accomplishments while simultaneously discarding the story of self we are expected to cultivate. As they explain in the introduction to this poetry collection, “all of that is the bypassing story. It’s what kept me alive.” In their Dharma teachings, Mason-John often draws a distinction between the stories we are trained to tell about ourselves, and the more real and raw life experiences and lived truths that lie beneath them. I recall sitting in meditation halls while they directed participants to form pairs and tell our “story”—however we interpreted this. By asking us to share continuously without interruptions or cross talk, Mason-John allowed us to speak freely on any prompted part of our story until the narrative we were used to telling dissolved—melting away to reveal the parts of ourselves we are frightened to name. Mason-John explains the power of breaking this narrative: “to regain my sanity and my emotional health, I had to come face to face with the stories many of us push down for years, and carry around as toxic baggage every time we are activated.” By integrating this approach to guided exercises with their poetry and sharing their history of abuse at the hands of Whiteness, Mason-John allows readers to approach the poetry therein with grace, compassion, and mutuality.

Dr. Valerie Mason-John. Photo by Henrik Meyer

Mason-John is inspired by the literary movement of Negritude, birthed and stewarded by such scholars as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and W.E.B. DuBois. When writing, “I am a taboo within a taboo,” in the introduction to this book of poetry, the author alludes to the inseparability of race, gender, and sexuality in the bodies of Black people assigned female at birth. This lens is central to the themes that weave this book together, never once forgetting that to be Black, queer, and forcibly assigned as female is to walk through each phase of life differently and uniquely.

In this collection, nearly all of the seven sections begin with a message from a deity Mason-John names Yaata, a representation of Earth and nature. Yaata is a historian, offering, first, the story of the Hungry Ghosts—white colonizers that arrived on her lands and destroyed them, enslaving her people, and returning again and again to pillage her resources. The image of the Hungry Ghosts likely serves as a double entendre, linking the pillaging of White colonizers to the Hungry Ghost realm in Buddhist cosmology—beings with tiny mouths incapable of satisfying the hunger of their excessively large stomachs. This connection cannot be understated as Mason-John masterfully links histories of White desires, exploitation, and oppression with spiritual hungers that are never satiated.

Yaata is also an observer, following her kin to new lands to witness their strategies for survival. She offers advice on her observations, which are shared as raps and prophecies. While the narrative of Yaata provides a unifying thread for the entire collection, each section stands distinct, marked by unique hashtagged themes that readers move through in a particular order: #Undocumented, #ThisIsAfricanDiaspora, #MeToo, #IfMyPlantsCouldSpeak, #Swag, #RaveScene, and #Intersectionality.

In 1968, Baldwin appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and stated, “I am not your nigger.” Since, there have been many discussions about the implications of changing “nigger” to “negro” in the the oft-quoted Baldwin documentary released in 2016. The censoring of Baldwin’s language functions as tone-policing by eschewing “nigger” in favor of “negro” in order to placate, win-over, or comfort white viewers and readers. This is both concerning and critical as Black communities have always and already reckoned with the “hard R” use of “nigger,” often hurdled at us against our will as an expression of power. In contrast, dominant culture seems to prefer sweeping this word under the rug, altering texts and quotes in an attempt to erase its existence. Baldwin’s use of the term “nigger” and not “negro” matters because it points to how he believed Black folks are seen within the White psyche, still as niggers. Not as Negros, or Black people, or even African-Americans. That is to say, despite the abolition of slavery and the evolution of language, the sentiment remains the same, the oppression persists, and the conditions of this country continue to demand dismantling. Mason-John alludes to the link between the continued need for abolition and Baldwin’s sentiment from over a half-century ago in her epigraph, noting that many things have not changed. She writes:

I am still your negro
AND
I am not your negro

In the curated selection of excerpts to follow, Mason-John reminds us why Baldwin’s message remains relevant today. In other words, why am I still your negro? The author answers this by stating that “reparations and apologies have not been given to us. Colonizers are still enslaving Black people.” Be this through prisons, carceral school environments, substandard employment, or neo-colonial practices such as resource extraction and military invasions deployed abroad, Black people across the diaspora continue to suffer at the hands of White colonizers. In other words, while I can refuse to be your negro, the systems that make me one still persist, remain, and run rampant. This is why we continue to demand for abolition.

Mason-John’s poetry sheds light on these harsh realities through personal and vulnerable narratives. Their writing also offers hope for our futures by reminding readers of our collective reservoir of power, resilience, and creativity. With these tools in our hands and our ancestors beside us, we may still be negros, but we ain’t silent about it no more.

Excerpt from I Am Still Your Negro