A Quickening of the Heart: Crossings into the Republic of Love, Reflections on Laurie Anderson’s The Republic of Love by Wanda Sabir

 

A Quickening of the Heart: Crossings into the Republic of Love

Reflections on Laurie Anderson’s The Republic of Love
by Wanda Sabir

Official promotional artwork for Laurie Anderson & Sexmob, The Republic of Love Tour, Curran Theatre, San Francisco. Promotional art: folkYEAH!/ATG.

I am so excited to be at this Laurie Anderson concert!

That is what I wrote before The Republic of Love started at the Curran Theatre Friday night.

I am no longer leaving myself behind. I am making myself happy. Making plans, doing the work, taking care of myself—all of me.

When I think about the whole day now, though, I realize the performance had already started before Laurie Anderson walked onto the stage. Or maybe I had already entered the ritual before I entered the theater.

Friday morning I was in a Spirit Rock course with Jill Satterfield, Anxiety: It’s Not All in Your Mind. One of the practices we did was alternate nostril breathing. I had known about the practice before, but I had never really practiced it this way. This time I didn't have to count.

That was liberating.

Usually, when I am doing one of those counted breathing practices—inhale four, hold seven, exhale eight—my mind gets involved. Was that seven? Did I inhale for four? What number am I on? Suddenly I am managing the breath instead of breathing.

This time I could just breathe through the right nostril, pause, exhale through the left, reverse, and follow my body instead of numbers. Releasing the counting took me out of my head and brought me back into my body, which was the whole point.

Jill also defined mettā in a way I had never heard before. She said mettā literally means “a quickening of the heart.”

I like that so much.

Usually we learn mettā through the familiar phrases: May you be happy. May you be safe. May you be free from suffering. Those are beautiful wishes, but language can become mechanical if we aren't careful. A quickening of the heart is a feeling. Something moves. Something responds.

After the workshop I went to my weekly acupuncture appointment. I have been going for a couple of months now, and I asked my practitioner, Is this working?

Oh yes, she said. You look much more relaxed.

Maybe it was the four hours today, I told her.

She laughed.

I hadn't eaten enough, though, and that is another thing I need to put back into my schedule now that autumn is here. The autumn equinox had just passed. The season was turning. Taking care of myself also means remembering to eat. Spiritual practice does not replace lunch.

This body needs food. It needs water. It needs breath and rest.

And I am especially grateful for this body right now.

This is my blue year, dedicated to my kidneys, and it is also my Gratitude @ Five year—five years since my cancer surgery.

I even bought a blue car in December. I am literally swimming in water on wheels.

I had received a chronic kidney disease diagnosis, and that frightened me. Then my numbers changed. Within a remarkably short period of time, I was no longer in that category. My testing was normal, and months later it was still normal.

Wow.

The body is magnificent—its ability to heal, recover, rejuvenate and restore itself.

I don't have any illusions that I will live in this house forever. None of us will. But I am so grateful to be living here right now in this flesh body. I am grateful to my kidneys. I am grateful to my heart, working hecka hard every minute to keep this entire operation together. I am grateful to my lungs, to the ancestors, to the earth and air and water and fire, and to all the feelings and matter that went into my literal manufacture.

And that manufacture isn't finished. Every day I have to eat. Every moment I have to breathe. This body continues to be renewed and restored for as long as it can carry me.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Someone said, “Thank you is a prayer.”

I love that.

Later I was on the bus and BART heading from the East Bay into San Francisco, listening virtually to a CIIS Public Programs event that was actually happening live in San Francisco at that very moment: On Weaving Ritual into Everyday Life: An Evening with Tracee Stanley and Niralli D’Costa. Stanley was talking about her book Living Ritual: Infuse Each Day with Purpose and Spirit and about bringing ritual into ordinary life.

I wasn't physically sitting with the audience, but I was entering San Francisco while they were gathered there. I was moving toward the Curran while listening in real time.

There was even a guided meditation.

I thought that was wonderful. Who expects to be on a bus and BART heading toward a concert while simultaneously participating in a meditation and a conversation on ritual taking place in the very city you are entering?

Tracee Stanley talked about releasing distractions and reclaiming our attention. She talked about creating our own rituals and about the importance of ritual at transitions.

Thresholds. Doorways.

At every threshold, pause and ask:

What do I want to carry forward? What do I want to leave behind?

I really liked that.

I was literally in transit while listening to a conversation about transitions.

We are always crossing something, aren't we?

Life isn't a straight line. It feels more like an intersection of cosmic ideas—as small as a grain of sand, as large as the rock I love that attracts the waters of my heart.

I think about portals too. Ancestors are portals. Memories are portals. Art can be a portal. Places can become portals. To me a portal is a place of transmission. Knowledge, memory, love, grief, story and presence move through.

As the bus carried me toward San Francisco, the sun was setting, and I happened to look out the window and see the moon.

Oh my goodness. Look at the moon.

She was full, big and beautiful, an orangish color against the evening sky. I hadn't gone looking for her. I just happened to look up.

The moon returns inside while Anderson plays her virtual violin. The Republic of Love. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

That is attention too, isn't it? Maybe that is also ritual: noticing what has arrived.

By the time I reached the Curran, I was still listening to Tracee Stanley and Niralli D’Costa. Stanley talked about dharma as that which nourishes and sustains us and asked us to look at our lives—jobs, careers, commitments—and ask, Is this nourishing and sustaining? She spoke about personal and collective dharma, gratitude rituals, geography, noticing who shares the spaces where we live, and even growing an ancestral herb.

I have to think about that ancestral herb. What would that be on my motherline? What did the women grow, cook with, steep, rub on the body, keep near the house?

All of that was entering the theater with me.

I had not been to the Curran in decades. I remembered coming there when I was a student at UC Berkeley studying Ibsen in Comparative Literature. We were reading a collection of his plays, and I came to the Curran to see either Hedda Gabler or A Doll's House. I honestly don't remember which one now, but when I walked into the theater Friday night, that younger Wanda walked in with me.

This is what I mean when I talk about places as portals. You enter a building and another time becomes present.

I looked up at that gorgeous ceiling and chandelier. The columns, paintings, red carpets, blue, gold. I took pictures and zoomed in so I could really see the details.

Inside the Curran Theatre before the performance. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

I was seated in the accessible seating, and I really liked my chair. It was more comfortable and much easier to get up from. The drummer was partially obscured from where I sat, but I could see most of the musicians.

Accessibility has become part of the way I participate in media now because of my audio description training, and The Republic of Love struck me as an extraordinarily accessible performance.

Laurie did not depend upon one sensory pathway to communicate an idea. Huge images appeared behind her. Words moved across the screen, sometimes repeating. Laurie read the words aloud. She named people and told stories. Image, text, speech, sound, music and body were all working together. There were multiple ways into the piece.

And the musicians were phenomenal.

Laurie was joined by Sexmob and guests, and these were not musicians sitting quietly behind a storyteller. They were part of the storytelling. Steven Bernstein was on trumpet; Briggan Krauss on saxophone; Doug Wieselman on guitar and woodwinds; Tony Scherr on bass; Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion; and Mazz Swift and Christina Courtin played violin and sang. Laurie herself was another percussionist of sorts with all her electronics.

The sound was huge.

Steven Bernstein on trumpet with members of the ensemble. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

I couldn't see Kenny Wollesen well from where I was sitting, and I also couldn't see Mazz Swift from that part of the stage, but I could certainly hear all that was happening. The musicians moved between instruments and textures so fluidly that sometimes I wasn't even sure where a sound was coming from. Wieselman moved between guitar and woodwinds, including that wonderfully deep clarinet sound. There was also this huge saxophone—or what looked huge from where I sat. Swift and Courtin's violins and voices added another whole layer.

And then there was this long, haunting trumpet solo.

Steven Bernstein had been onstage just behind Laurie playing trumpet throughout the evening, so I knew who he was. What surprised me was where he suddenly was. Somehow he had moved over to the part of the stage that was harder for me to see. I don't know how he got over there.

The stage had gotten dark, and at first he was almost a silhouette. Then that eerie, echoing trumpet stretched out into the theater as the light came up around him. It was hecka beautiful.

When the solo ended, he moved back toward the ensemble.

Later, near the end of the concert, I watched him take on another role, cueing and directing the musicians as the sound gathered momentum and the photographs and names moved across the screen behind them.

That was one of the things that made the ensemble so phenomenal. They were not only strong individual players; they were shaping the movement of the whole piece together.

What a band.

At the beginning Laurie also showed us some of the people who were going to be part of the discourse—thinkers, artists, teachers and beloveds whose counsel she would draw upon in constructing this Republic of Love.

I don't want to call them “voices” because that isn't quite what they were. Some may have literally appeared through recordings or songs, but many didn't. I think of them as a council.

Gertrude Stein. Bob Dylan. Allen Ginsberg. Pema Chödrön. Her husband, Lou Reed. Her dog. Friends, teachers, artists, beloveds. Some living, some dead.

They offered counsel.

What principles would need to be present in a Republic of Love?

Maybe every republic needs a declaration. We have a Declaration of Independence. What would a Declaration for a Republic of Love say?

Laurie gave us some possibilities.

We don't rank love.

I loved that.

She spoke with Chicago pride about the Pope—“Bob”—and challenged the idea that love should operate in concentric circles: family first, then neighbors, then city, then country, while everybody else sits farther and farther away from the center.

No.

We don't rank love.

Then there were the three rules Laurie and Lou Reed arrived at:

Don't be afraid of anyone.

Get a really good bullshit detector.

Be really, really tender.

Sounds like the beginning of a constitution to me.

And maybe that first principle is not telling us that fear never appears. Fear is part of being alive. The question is whether we let fear govern us.

We can respond in fear, or we can respond with love.

I like with love better than “out of love.” People have justified all kinds of things by saying they did them out of love. To act with love asks something different of us. What quality is present in the action? Is there care? Tenderness? Recognition of another person's humanity? Are we helping, or are we simply reacting to our own fear?

Laurie told a story that gave this idea a body.

She was in Frankfurt after performing a solo show. She went back to her hotel and tried to go to bed, but there was something happening downstairs. She got dressed again and went to investigate. When she reached the gathering she realized she was underdressed. People were in elegant evening clothes, but it wasn't exactly a party. They weren't down there dancing.

She asked what was happening.

It was a fundraiser for New York firefighters after September 11—to help replace equipment lost in the response and to help the firefighters and their families.

Frankfurt. New York. Across an ocean.

Something terrible had happened in one city, and hearts quickened in another.

That story stayed with me because Laurie had also been talking about borders. National borders were closing, she said, barriers were being erected between countries, and yet cities remained connected to cities. As an artist she doesn't necessarily think, I'm going to Germany; she thinks about the city she is going to. There is an urban circuit, a cultural network carried through music, dance, fashion, film and the visual arts, almost like a Silk Road that artists travel. It is important, she said, to keep that circuit open.

I love that.

And the Frankfurt story shows what can travel along that circuit besides art.

Care can travel. Compassion can travel. Love can travel city to city.

Imagine how different our responses to suffering might be if the first question were not, What force can we deploy? but, How can we help? What does this person, this community, this nation need? What would it mean to respond with love instead of allowing fear to decide what happens next?

Pema Chödrön was also one of the people pictured at the beginning. I was right when I first thought the image was of a woman. I know her work—I have her books and her Compassion Cards—so recognizing her among Laurie’s council delighted me.

Later Laurie shared a teaching from Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche about practicing how to feel sadness without actually becoming sad. We don't pretend the suffering isn't there. There are too many terrible things happening in the world for that. We acknowledge them without allowing sadness to swallow us whole.

Maybe that belongs in the declaration too.

Then there was the technology.

Wow.

Laurie touched her body and I heard electronic sound amplified from her gestures. I immediately thought: Hambone.

That was hecka important to me.

Hambone is us. It is an African and African American body-percussion tradition, the body carrying rhythm when perhaps there was no drum, or when the body itself was the drum. Laurie was riffing on that tradition. She had mechanized it, electronically amplified it, sent it through circuitry, but I could hear what was underneath.

The body as percussion. The body as instrument.

She mechanized Hambone, but she didn't erase it.

That was us in there.

Then she played what looked like an invisible violin, but she really was playing through electronic circuitry. I didn't know that either.

Laurie Anderson playing violin. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

She is such a genius.

Meanwhile, all through the concert I was going back and forth with AI on my phone.

Who is this?

What did she mean by that?

What is SI?

I knew what AI was. SI was new to me, so I looked it up: Synthetic Intelligence.

Who wrote “Language is a Virus”?

So there I was consulting artificial intelligence in real time while Laurie Anderson was onstage talking about synthetic intelligence, automated language, William Burroughs and Gertrude Stein.

Talk about a loop.

Laurie called Stein a kind of mother of AI, while I was asking AI what Laurie meant by SI.

That's funny.

And somehow it fits.

Technology in Laurie's hands didn't remove the body. It amplified it. A touch became sound. Gesture became music. The invisible violin became audible. And an African diasporic body-percussion form could still be heard beneath electronic circuitry.

She also introduced Mazz Swift, whom I began researching during the performance. I became fascinated by their work with Sankofa and ancestral music: going backward to retrieve what is necessary for the present.

Fetch it.

That is Sankofa.

Go back and get what we need—not nostalgia, but resource. Memory. Spiritual technology.

I realized Laurie was doing something like that all evening too. She was fetching people, teachings, memories and stories.

She told us about her uncle Allen, who came back from the war in France traumatized, before PTSD had been named that way. As a child she heard him screaming night after night. France became, in the imagination of young Laurie, the place where something terrible had happened to her uncle.

And then one day, after years, he stopped screaming. He came downstairs. He went out. He got a job and eventually married and had a family.

That story stayed with me.

What crosses a threshold with us?

Sometimes we get to choose what to carry. Sometimes we don't. Trauma crosses too. Memory crosses.

But so does life.

Laurie kept changing the scale of things. One human being. A family. A city. A nation. The entire Earth.

There was that huge image of the planet rotating. Earth—giant, magnificent, and yet home.

She sang about home.

There was water too. Rain on glass. Rain on trees, almost a glade. And then floodwater.

The flood sequence was long, and I thought about Mississippi, New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. I didn't take pictures during that part. I didn't want to live with those images afterward.

Sometimes witnessing is enough. You don't have to possess everything you see.

Later there was openness again, something that felt like hope. Not pretending the flood didn't happen, but not drowning forever either.

Earlier that day Jill had given me that definition of mettā: a quickening of the heart.

After the concert I saw a man I think I had also seen earlier in the week near the Opera House. His body is permanently bent over, almost as though he is bowing to the earth. He cannot look straight ahead. His eyes necessarily face the ground.

It was cold.

I wondered where he was going and whether he had shelter, and I sent him a little mettā.

Not a mechanical recitation. A quickening of the heart.

I had seen him. Something in me responded.

Maybe that is citizenship in a Republic of Love too.

On my way toward BART I heard people talking about the concert. Years ago you could recognize who had attended the same performance because people carried programs. You saw that program in somebody's hand and immediately knew: Oh, you were there too!

And I would start a conversation because, of course, I do those things.

Now we don't necessarily have that physical object identifying us as part of the temporary community, but I heard people talking, and The Republic of Love was still moving through the streets.

The concert had ended, but it hadn't stopped.

At the end of the performance, Laurie brought everything back into the body.

She invited us to do Tai Chi.

Twenty-one movements.

The whole theater was moving: people in front, people farther back, people upstairs in the balcony where I had once sat in the late 1970s. Bodies moving together.

Laurie talked about the forms and how Lou Reed, who practiced Tai Chi seriously, had helped give the complicated movements simpler names that were easier to remember. One became “carrying the pizza.” Another carried the reminder: have no weapons.

And there was something else in what she was teaching that stayed with me: you don't have to know a practice perfectly before you begin.

You can go through the motions. You can rehearse the movement.

At first it may feel unfamiliar, even artificial. But if there is sincerity there, if the practice resonates with your heart, repetition changes you.

I think of that as embodied rehearsal.

The body can practice something before the mind is completely comfortable with it. Eventually what felt borrowed begins to belong to you.

That is what had happened with my breathing that very morning. I practiced the form until I could stop thinking about the form and simply breathe.

Mettā is like that too. We begin with words somebody teaches us—May you be happy. May you be safe—and perhaps one day the words become more than words. The heart quickens.

Maybe tenderness has to be rehearsed too. Maybe not ranking love takes practice. Maybe nonviolence takes practice. Maybe responding with love rather than allowing fear to govern us takes practice.

A Republic of Love would not exist simply because its citizens agreed that love was a good idea.

We would have to practice living there.

My day had begun with breath practice designed to take me out of my head and into my body, and the performance ended with an entire theater practicing movement together.

Final bows at the Curran. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Afterward I turned to one of the security women standing nearby and told her how lovely it had been. She said Laurie had done something similar the last time she was there.

“You've seen her before?”

Oh yeah.

And immediately I thought: Oh my goodness. She might come back.

Return.

I think about returns a lot lately. Endings that aren't always endings. Doors that close and then open again. Artists we encounter more than once. Places we return to carrying different versions of ourselves.

I first encountered Laurie Anderson's Songs from the Bardo maybe six years ago during one of the Sunday gatherings I was attending. A therapist whose husband had just died chose not to cancel her presentation, and the gathering became a reflection on death and how death isn't necessarily something to fear. Someone in a breakout room mentioned the bardo and Laurie Anderson and shared information in the chat. I was doing what I always do—looking things up while listening—and encountered those gorgeous images from Grace Cathedral and Laurie's work.

Oh my goodness, so beautiful.

That work stayed with me. It opened a discourse with my soul about death, impermanence and the other side.

I have had my own close encounters with mortality since then, so I have fewer illusions. But I also have a lot of gratitude.

Before I left home Friday evening, a package had arrived in the mail.

bell hooks.

Communion: The Female Search for Love.

It was the last book I needed to complete the trilogy with All About Love and Salvation: Black People and Love. I couldn't even get the stiff packaging open because I had to leave for the concert.

And then I went to something called The Republic of Love.

Come on now.

Sometimes the ancestors are not subtle.

bell hooks talks about love. Martin King imagined the Beloved Community. Thích Nhất Hạnh built Plum Village. Pema Chödrön teaches compassion. Mingyur Rinpoche teaches a relationship to suffering that does not require despair. Cornel West connects justice and love. Laurie Anderson gathers a council.

Different traditions. Different languages. Different forms.

Yet sometimes I think the good people—the people who pay attention, the people of conscience—keep arriving at some of the same places.

How do we live together? How do we stop abandoning one another? How do we stop abandoning ourselves? How do we remain tender? How do we remember? How do we pay attention?

Late that night I finally crossed back into the East Bay. It was windy and hecka cold, and we had quite a while to wait for the AC Transit bus.

The driver had gone away to do whatever he needed to do during his break. Then he came back while there was still time left before departure and opened the doors so we could sit inside.

The heater wasn't on.

It didn't matter.

It was so much better than standing out there in that wind.

Such a small kindness, yet that is what love looks like too. Someone notices that other people are cold and opens a door.

There was that threshold again, but this time it wasn't metaphorical. A door opened and we stepped from the cold into shelter.

And now this whole weekend continues. Tomorrow I am going to the Monterey Jazz Festival, and then I will drive back and go hiking at Point Lobos.

More music. More landscape. More crossings.

The autumn equinox has just passed. The full moon was hanging over my journey into San Francisco. John Coltrane's centennial birth week is here. I am in this flesh body that has carried me through illness and recovery and five years of gratitude, and I am not leaving myself behind anymore.

I am making plans. I am going places. I am feeding myself—literally and otherwise.

I am alive, and it feels like a good time to be alive.

Maybe gratitude itself is a portal. Maybe “thank you” really is a prayer.

And maybe every time the heart quickens toward another being—an ancestor, a stranger, the moon, a musician, a bus driver, a teacher, a tired miraculous body, this beautiful Earth—we find ourselves crossing another threshold into the Republic of Love. The band heads to Santa Cruz Saturday night to a sold-out engagement.

Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, A Review by Wanda Sabir

 Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, A Review

by Wanda Sabir

Wanda Sabir and devorah major with Mildred Howard’s oversized $100 bill at OMCA.
Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, OMCA entrance, with inset portrait of Howard in her first Oakland studio, circa 1978. Entrance photo: Wanda Sabir. Portrait: Raymond Holbert; courtesy of Raymond Holbert. Collage assembled for this review.

devorah major and I pose in front of Mildred Howard’s oversized $100 bill. When do you see a Black woman on a hundred-dollar bill? Like, what? Black woman currency—Holla!

We enter the exhibition. “Locks and Keys for Harry Bridges” (2001) opens another story—labor. An older woman in the gallery comments to her friend that she knew Harry Bridges. I think to myself, I bet Brother Cleophas knew him too. Later I learn so much more from the ILWU archives and from Sister Sadie Williams, Brother Cleophas’s widow and Ms. Howard’s mother’s friend. From labor we walk into Howard’s reflection. We meet her here in the early work—self-portraits, textiles, works on paper and wood.

In “Untitled (self-portrait),” c. 1979, lace partially covers Howard’s face. There is a photo of Howard dressed in a garment her mother gifted her. Ancestral antiquity passed to her mother from her mother—Howard’s maternal grandmother. Howard dresses history. She grew into her vocation surrounded by antiques and adults who knew their value and taught their daughter through their example her worth. Her personal appraisal was all that mattered. The world would sell her cheap had she let it. She didn’t, nor did she allow it to sell her ibeji or twins cheap either. In Ifá or Yoruba culture, Ibeji or twin spirits are divine beings. Equal pay for equal work, she told the agency that hired her daughter and son and their mother as artist models.

Howard says this story belongs to a people she belongs to, so it’s hers to tell. 81 this year, I think about the places her life and work intersect with this writer's life. I retired after 25 years teaching at College of Alameda where I was one of two tenured Black English Composition and Reading faculty. Now there are none. I retired three years ago. It was one of the happiest days of my life. When I got tenure it was also one of the happiest days of my life. I could take care of my two daughters. That was important to me. Though our paths didn't cross there, Ms. Howard studied fashion design at COA while she raised her ibeji or twins.

If only I knew now what I learned at the end of my tenure. These institutions are not interested in Black liberation. Mildred Howard is.

Her mom bore ten children. The family migrated from Texas to San Francisco, then moved to South Berkeley. The antiques business moved across geographies as the youngest child learned appraisal and appreciation. Her home had old things in it, her friends commented.

I think it might be a Southern thing. My mother had an aesthetic I saw in other homes. I saw this aesthetic in the homes of my Senegalese family too. Photos of historic figures, scriptural tapestries, covered sofas and armchairs, a large rug, coffee table, maybe beads or a sheer curtain hanging in a doorway. The rooms were full even when humanly empty. There was texture in the air.

Presence, character, the space felt alive. Often a guest could smell food cooking, a welcoming smell.

Like my grandmother, born in 1901, Howard’s parents belonged to a generation whose parents might have been born during slavery.

Mildred Howard in the exhibition’s early-work/self-portrait gallery.
Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Black community is important to Howard. We see this in the family photos and albums, her Berkeley High School yearbook. My younger daughter was class of 2000. “The Other Side of the Coin” (2014) reminded me of the Amazon Queen, Queen Califia, for whom our state takes its name, and of course, Black Gold—Califia’s people. Howard inserts her own silhouette where the racist “Gold Dust Twins” caricature once appeared. Then there is “A Salute to Sojourner: Still Waters Run Deep” (2001).

Remember the Black Doll experiment? Well, in this retelling, the pretty Black doll is the “fairest of them all.” The mirror is right there. When you look at the Black doll, you are looking at yourself. So what do you think? Is she beautiful? And you’re looking at yourself, right? So am I beautiful? She’s not passing. She is very, very melanated. You know she is a Black girl. You can’t look at it and not think about it.

Wanda Sabir and devorah major looking into Howard’s work in the gallery.
Photo: Wanda Sabir.

There is “Skillet to the Frying Pan: Sitting Black” (2001)—a black skillet with a mirror on it. Who’s calling whom Black? (smile).

One of my favorite pieces is “Volume I & II: History of the United States with a Few Missing Parts” (2007). The two open American history books are riddled with holes. They look like bullet holes to me. Funny. I wonder how she made the holes in the document? Was it target practice? Nearby is “Blind Thomas Green at the White House” (2024), a White House constructed of glass bottles and wood.

Mildred Howard, Volume I & II: History of the United States with a Few Missing Parts (2007), detail. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Today at Chochenyo Park as we practiced Qigong forms, poured qi into our crown chakra, I looked up into the Magnolia trees where several blossoms sat upon fragrant altars too far above to reach. Howard has “The Magnolia Project: III” (2008). In a mixed-media portrait, we see another self-portrait embedded in a tree.

I am just riffing on OMCA. Miss my friend Hubert Collins. Miss Arthur Monroe. Miss Raymond Saunders. Hubert introduced me to both men. He told me I needed to interview Saunders. Who knew Saunders would teach my younger daughter and be the faculty sponsor of the club she started at California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC)—BAAD: Black Artists And Designers? Howard taught there too, but wasn’t tenured. I asked my daughter if she had any classes with her. It was a vicarious moment that bore no fruit (smile). Yet, little did we know about Howard’s work with the Edible Schoolyard. TaSin attended Oxford Elementary School, where there was an early school garden program. Later, I taught at Jefferson Elementary School, another Berkeley school with an edible garden.

TaSin was a girl when we went to Saunders’ retrospective at OMCA, June 11–August 21, 1994. I was telling my friend devorah today that on Sundays we’d go to the OM. Admission was free on Sundays. These were happy days spent with my daughter cultivating a shared love of art. This was over 30 years ago. Loved the OM then and now. Even with its recent architectural changes, it remains one of my favorite museums.

I didn’t see Raymond Saunders’ painting today in the Art Gallery on the upper level. I just wanted to say hi. I did run into a Sargent Johnson sculpture. devorah said her dad, Reggie Major (Asé), knew Johnson, Charles White, Bob Kaufman too. They’d all get together for fun and mischief as only erudite Black Brothers could. She recalled a story where the men went to see Nina Simone. These men affirmed Blackness in these segregated spaces. Simone appreciated seeing them there. I was like wow! when devorah shared her historic legacy. I’d met her father through a mutual friend, Kiilu Nyasha. His book, “A Panther Is a Black Cat,” was on her table. I don’t remember if she called him on the phone, but I remember speaking with him. Love the play on the word “cat.” “Cat” as in Black man per parlance.

Later devorah and I walked up to the Dorothea Lange exhibit. Many familiar faces greeted me there. The OM is home to the Lange archive. In “Dorothea Lange: Photography as Activism,” located in the California History Gallery on the upper level, there was an exercise in perspective we played with. The photo on the table had five Black men with a white man interrupting the fluid discourse across the canvas. Was he necessary or a distraction? We took one of the two frames and excised him. The mood shifted on the canvas to one of camaraderie.

Perspective is thesis.

Howard’s early-career gallery, with Black Has Always Been a Color (2024) shown in Wanda Sabir’s
close-up at left.  Photos: Wanda Sabir.

Gallery view with patrons watching Howard’s public-art video. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

The Howard gallery proceeds into the next smaller gallery. It is like an artist’s studio. Here are the notebooks, photos and other artifacts that illustrate Howard’s life. Her artistic query questions as it answers. Love her curiosity. It is her theme song. Similar to her secret powers of insight and creative reuse. She has been a “maker” all her life. It is also where patrons can sit and watch a short video depicting Howard’s stunning public works—a very short list.

Locks and Keys for Harry Bridges (2001) appears in the video—keys where parking meters would stand, open locks—at Third and Stevenson Streets in San Francisco. Curiosity is there too, at the San Leandro Main Library—a giant bronze question mark, with Quincy Troupe’s poem about curiosity on the wall.

A library is a place where we have questions, and our curiosity takes us into the library to investigate further what we don’t know, what we know, to confirm what we know, and to question what we know, because maybe we don’t know what we think we know. Not seen is “Three Shades of Blue” (2002) in San Francisco, beautiful clear blue glass across the multiple-lane thoroughfare at Geary and Fillmore. Quincy Troupe's poem, “Shades of Blue for a Blue Bridge,” dedicated to Mildred Howard, Joe Rudolph and Yori Wada dances across its surface. Nor is The Music of Language (2008) at Glide Memorial, Howard’s beautiful collaboration with poet Janice Mirikitani. However, these works live here. Somebody could actually go to that street in San Francisco and see that artwork. Somebody could actually go to the San Leandro Library and see that artwork. Even after the exhibit closes, her work lives on.

Gallery view with patrons watching Howard’s public-art video. Photo: Wanda Sabir.

Howard has been busy. She has so much work. She works monstrous, enormous, bigger than life. Music is an important element to Howard’s composition. One of her many commentaries available via QR code speaks to this. I love Ms. Howard’s collaborative work with Joanna Haigood and Marcus Shelby; Quincy Troupe and David Murray. The latter two with Howard are a creative dream team.

We turn around and enter the grand opus. The room has twilight-kind of lighting. To the left is Crossings (1997). I think about Howard’s revisioning of the iconic image of African Ancestors packed like boards or sardines in a vacuum-sealed can. These eggs arranged so precisely recall a ship deck...recall the flesh bodies dismembered, robbed of life, rights, agency.

The large, twilight-lit gallery in Mildred Howard: Poetics of Memory, with Wanda Sabir’s Fort Point view inset at upper right.
Photos: Wanda Sabir.

The gilded mirror is across from the eggs—the slave ship. The reflection extends or magnifies as it includes one in the journey—its terror and ode to survival. We are an amazing people; however, we bleed, die, suffer just like the onlookers.

The eggs represent the fragility that is life, Black life and how little it matters. Yet, seen here in its elemental form—all life comes from this fertilized embryo. How did we survive the journey? How do we continue to survive this horrendous passage without breakage? We are but flesh and blood. Howard says we have to continue to look at these things. Don’t look away.

To the right and ahead is the blue glass house, “Blackbird in a Red Sky” (a.k.a. “Fall of the Blood House”) (2002). I looked at the glass house and saw my mother’s childhood home in Mississippi—three rooms with an outdoor toilet and kitchen. I started writing a story after I left the house and swimming apples: So many stories live in sweet red 🍎. Poison, beauty, secrets...then there is the house made of glass and no tree. Its absence is singularly noticeable. Where is the parent or life that gave these apples life? But then these glassy apples are for show, for company, not for use.

The precision. The lines. 6x13 hum. 78 🍎

Lit, the red apples float like lanterns. There is a room near the larger glass house where patrons are encouraged to share their stories. There were lots of stories there. And there is a large statue covered in red cloth.

I’d seen Howard’s work at Fort Point—the three criminals wrapped in red cloth. They stood as sentinels along the open decks or passages. When a person looked up at the structure there they stood: curiosities. The three men were Peter Burnett, William Gwin and Francis Scott Key. Howard shrouded monuments to men whose histories included the enslavement of Black people and the exclusion of Black people’s rights.

Crossings (1997) echoing Crossings: Wanda Sabir’s gallery view with a smaller complete view of the installation. Gallery photo:Wanda Sabir.  Installation photo: Lewis Watts.

In gallery view with Blackbird in a Red Sky (a.k.a. Fall of the Blood House) (2002) inset.
Gallery photo: Wanda Sabir; Blackbird image courtesy of the artist / OMCA press materials.

The red carries urgency. It is also life—blood, water, collective breath. And across the back of this large gallery is Moving Stills (2025).

Howard says the film footage is hers. She took it when she visited family in Texas—I think she said she traveled there by train. Her mother saved the film, and Howard found it years later. I don’t remember where she said she found it. Now those images move across the paneled lace curtains spanning the back of the large gallery. I stood there for a long time gazing at Moving Stills. The lace curtain was no longer decoration. It had become an archive.

Moving Stills across the lace-curtain installation in the large gallery, with Untitled (1979) inset at right. Gallery photo: Wanda Sabir. Untitled courtesy of the artist.

In another gallery is one of Howard's bottle houses.

I am not a stranger to Mildred Howard’s work. I have been blessed to see a lot of her exhibitions, many at the OM, others at the Richmond Art Center and the San Jose Museum of Art. I remember Howard’s Richmond Art Center exhibition: “Mildred Howard: Spirit and Matter,” a four-decade survey guest curated by Jan Wurm. It opened March 22, 2015, and closed May 24, 2015. I had seen the exhibition earlier, but I returned on the closing-day reception, “And Then There Were None,” Sunday, May 24. Howard was there. I also ran into Ms. Howard at the BAMPFA, where she was a part of a group exhibition, “About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging,” at BAMPFA, May 17–July 21, 2019. “Safe House” (2005) showed up in both spots. Black folks do not take safety or homefulness for granted.

I interviewed her in her Berkeley studio in connection with the Richmond Art Center exhibition. This was before she lost that studio to gentrification and moved to her West Oakland site. Lucky for us. Howard always recognized and greeted me when our paths crossed.

I remember her contributions to the Día de los Muertos exhibitions at the Oakland Museum too, especially her 2003 work about the handgun deaths of Black people in Oakland, most between 15 and 30 years old. I remember standing there looking at the map with handgun-shaped pushpins marking the deaths.

I like all the storytelling with QR codes. Material culture is her palette and Black American culture colors everything.

Ms. Howard is a rock star. Seriously, she has made such an impact on this American landscape. She is such a gift. I don’t know why she hasn’t gotten a MacArthur Fellowship or the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her collected body of work, but this oversight needs correcting. She needs the MacArthur because it comes with money. The work she does, the skill she does it with, the material culture she resurrects and excavates—it costs money. Being an art-keologist is an expensive business.

I tend to go back to exhibitions on closing day. The Richmond Art Center exhibition wasn’t my first visit, but I went back for the closing and found Mildred Howard there. Poetics of Memory closes October 18. Maybe I’ll see the artist there again. That would be hecka lovely.

For OMCA information, visit museumca.org.

Watermarked: Reflections on Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra

 

Watermarked: Reflections on Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra I walked out of San Francisco Opera’s Simon Boccanegra and apparently was not ready to leave it. Even after the performance was over, people lingered. We had to be put out of the Opera House. I understood why. Verdi’s opera, in Claus Guth’s production, gave me so much to think about that I was still inside it long after Simon Boccanegra’s body was lying motionless on the stage.

At intermission, before I had worked out what all the images meant, I wrote:

This is certainly a memory play.

That was my first understanding of it.

What stayed with me immediately was the mirroring.

There were, in a sense, two Simon Boccanegras: the singer inhabiting the events of his life and another Simon who watched, remembered and sometimes mirrored him. Behind what looked at different moments like a mirror, window or transparent wall, another world existed. People walked through it. The dead appeared there. Sometimes someone would be present in the same theatrical space as the person speaking about them but would remain unseen.

In my notes I called it a two-way window:

Ghosts float between realms. It’s interesting being in the in-between. I like this kind of thing.

It reminded me of walking meditation.

Recently, at a Black women’s meditation retreat, we practiced mindful walking while studying the Seven Factors of Awakening. During walking meditation, people often cast their eyes slightly downward. The gaze itself communicates: I am present, but I am practicing; please do not interrupt me.

I am accustomed to making eye contact when I pass someone, sometimes putting my hand over my heart as a silent acknowledgment: I see you.

The people in Simon Boccanegra did something different. Their eyes were not lowered. They looked straight ahead, almost like zombies—but they were not zombies. They walked past each other while occupying entirely different realities.

At one point Gabriele Adorno, Amelia’s beloved, was speaking about her while Amelia was right there beside him, her face covered by a black veil. He could talk about her but could not see her. Then she walked away.

Maria, Amelia’s dead mother and Simon’s beloved, did the same thing throughout the opera. She could cross through the room while other people spoke of her. She was present to us and absent to them.

It was presence without encounter.

At intermission, I wrote another sentence that now seems to me one of the keys to the entire production:

The only time folks were engaged was when they were trying to harm each other.

That is startling when I think about it.

Tenderness was restrained. Recognition was restrained. People passed one another without touching. Yet violence broke through the distance. When someone wanted to attack, abduct, accuse, poison or overthrow someone else, suddenly there was engagement.

Simon’s plea for peace therefore becomes more than a political speech. He is asking these people to discover a way of being in relationship that does not require violence to bring them into contact.

The absence of touch made the few moments of touch even more important.

When Simon discovered that Amelia was his long-lost daughter, he did touch her. That mattered because so much of the evening had withheld physical contact.

But at the end, when Simon was dying and wanted his daughter’s embrace, Amelia walked in the opposite direction.

I thought, What the heck? Your daddy is dying!

Only after Simon was dead, stretched out on the floor, did Amelia and Gabriele touch his body.

By then I understood that this production was making separation visible. The characters could remember one another, long for one another and move through the same space, yet still be unable to meet.

And then came the final image.

Simon’s dead body remained on the stage, but behind the mirror we saw Simon and Maria walking toward each other.

After an entire opera of people walking past one another, these two finally walked toward one another.

They could finally be together in death in the way they had not been allowed to be together in life.

That is important because the tragedy begins with patriarchy. Maria’s father, Jacopo Fiesco, refuses to allow his daughter to marry Simon. He has authority; he exercises it. Maria is confined in the family home. She and Simon already have a child, but the baby is elsewhere with a nurse. Maria dies. The child disappears. Simon loses both the woman he loves and the daughter he does not know how to find.

Twenty-five years pass.

The opera does not stop and explain all of this neatly. I was glad I had read the story beforehand because events just keep moving. The lost daughter has another name and another family. Pieces of information surface years later: the woman who cared for her, a sailor who visited, the circumstances of her childhood.

Then Simon meets Amelia.

He has actually come regarding Paolo, who wants Amelia, but that plan disappears as Simon listens to her. Amelia tells him she is not really a Grimaldi. She takes out a tiny locket containing an image of her mother. Simon does not get up and inspect the picture; the locket is too small for that. Recognition happens through story and memory—the names Amelia gives him, the woman who cared for her, the details of her childhood.

And while father and daughter are sitting facing one another, putting together the broken pieces of their lives, Maria is there.

Watching.

That was one of the loveliest moments in the opera for me. Maria’s image is in the locket, Maria’s child is sitting with her father, and Maria’s spirit is looking in on them.

For a moment, the three of them are together.

She gets to witness what she could not live to see: her beloved and her child finding one another.

The mirror, the glass and even the shattered glass scattered across the floor began to mean more to me as the opera continued. Memory is reflective, but memory can also be broken. A family story can be shattered and reconstructed from names, objects, fragments and witnesses.

In my notes I wrote simply:

The glass is back.

Later:

Shards of glass form a centerpiece on the floor.

The broken glass kept returning, as though the production would not allow us to forget that remembering is never a perfectly smooth surface.

There is another element throughout the production: stone.

During the tremendous scene in which the patricians and plebeians are ready to fight one another, people are holding chunks that look almost like pieces of asphalt ripped from a street. Simon tells them to stop. Their ancestors handed them these hatreds, but they do not have to keep practicing them. He calls for peace. He calls for love.

And they put the rocks down.

That scene moved me deeply.

My notes from the evening say:

The Doge is a man of peace. He pardons his foes and tells his people they were raised on bloodshed.

And then:

Slowly the townspeople, plebeians and the others put down their rocks. It’s not a beloved community, but certainly not the reign of a tyrant.

I still like that distinction.

Simon is not creating utopia. These people remain deeply divided. They remain capable of cruelty and betrayal. His achievement is more modest and perhaps more difficult: he keeps interrupting the movement toward bloodshed.

Must we continue killing one another because the people before us did?

Must inherited grievance become destiny?

Apparently not, Simon says.

Put down the weapons.

Then later an enormous dark object hangs above the stage. When I first saw it, I thought it was a cloud.

I wrote:

What’s cool is the huge cloud that hangs like a mobile at the center—large, black and gloomy.

Only later did I realize it was not a cloud but a massive piece of rock—a meteorite. It cast shadows over the people below. Eventually it descended to the ground, looking to me like a mound of wet gray clay, with broken glass encircling it.

That first mistake—seeing a cloud before seeing the rock—now feels almost perfect.

At first the burden appears atmospheric: a darkness hanging over everyone.

Then it becomes matter.

Weight.

History.

The production identifies the meteorite with the accumulating burden Simon carries as leader and father. For me, it also became the weight of inheritance itself: violence, grievance, power, patriarchy, history.

The people can put their individual rocks down, yet this enormous rock still hangs over everybody.

In the Opera House lobby there was another huge meteorite on which audience members could write about the burdens they carried and leave some of that weight behind.

So the rocks onstage were no joke.

But against all that stone, there is water.

Simon was a seafarer before he became Doge. As an older man and political leader, he remembers the sea. He misses it. Things made sense to him there. He knew peace there.

I am not convinced Simon particularly enjoyed being a ruler. He knew how to lead, but leadership seemed to burden him. The council chamber is all rigid lines, doors, officials, wall-to-wall red carpet, factions and schemes.

The sea moves.

The political world hardens.

And then there is Amelia.

Paolo knows that Amelia walks along the shore in the evening. It is part of her routine, and he uses that knowledge in the plot to abduct her.

But what caught me was that she chooses the water, too.

She grew up without knowing Simon was her father, yet father and daughter are both drawn to the sea. Simon longs for it. Amelia walks beside it. Her mother is named Maria, a name with long poetic associations with the sea, including Stella Maris, Star of the Sea. I later looked up Amelia and found its Germanic root, amal, associated with work, striving and activity.

I would not claim that Verdi intended all that etymological symbolism, but poetically it delighted me.

Maria: memory, love, sea.

Amelia: work, striving, action.

And Amelia was born Maria before living as Amelia.

She carries both.

As I talked through all of this afterward with ChatGPT, it offered a phrase that stopped me:

The whole family is almost watermarked.

I loved that.

Watermarked: marked by water, certainly, but also carrying a pattern that is hidden until something reveals it.

Simon, Maria and Amelia are watermarked.

And Amelia is a kind of merwoman.

She is also the peacemaker.

That realization became one of the most important things I took away from the opera. Amelia is the person through whom the men finally stop killing one another.

And her peacemaking is not passive.

She speaks.

She tells Simon the truth about herself. She asks him to pardon the men she loves. She defends Gabriele. She asks her father to forgive a political enemy who has been prepared to kill him.

Simon listens to his daughter.

That matters enormously because Simon does not repeat what Fiesco did to Maria.

Fiesco’s daughter loved a man he opposed, so he exercised patriarchal authority and separated them. Tragedy followed.

A generation later, Simon’s daughter loves a man who is Simon’s political enemy—a man who, overcome by jealousy and suspicion, is actually prepared to kill Simon.

The patriarchal language of the opera is difficult to miss. At one point in my notes I wrote:

The girl is a bargaining chip. Who cares if she agrees.

Women are spoken of as daughters, brides, treasures, rewards. Amelia exists inside that world.

Yet she does not remain merely an object being exchanged among men.

She speaks herself into the story.

She changes its outcome.

Gabriele is almost comical in his emotional extremity. One moment he is essentially, I should kill her! I should kill him! Then he learns that the mysterious man with Amelia is her father and swings toward, I don’t deserve to live!

Dude. Really?

Joshua Guerrero made those moments both believable and funny.

But Simon does something his daughter’s grandfather could not do.

He listens.

Amelia tells him whom she loves, asks for mercy, and changes what he does.

Fiesco tried to control his daughter’s love.

Simon allows his daughter’s love to transform him.

In that sense, Simon practices personally what he has been asking Genoa to practice politically:

You do not have to continue what you inherited.

Amelia becomes the place where that lesson becomes flesh.

She is Simon’s daughter, Fiesco’s granddaughter, Gabriele’s beloved and a Grimaldi by upbringing. She stands at the intersection of worlds that have defined themselves as enemies. Through her, those boundaries become porous.

She does not become another rock.

She changes the current.

And by the end Simon has very little time to enjoy what has been restored to him. He finds his daughter only to lose his life. Paolo poisons him. Simon feels fire moving through his veins before Fiesco tells him what has happened.

Yet Simon’s last actions are acts of generosity.

He reconciles with Fiesco. He blesses Amelia. He forgives Gabriele, the man who was prepared to kill him. He entrusts his beloved daughter—his great treasure—to the future she has chosen. And he names Gabriele as his successor.

He dies practicing the peace he preached.

The irony and hope of the ending are that Gabriele, the hotheaded young man, will become Doge. I found myself hoping he has learned something. I hope he seeks Amelia’s counsel. I hope Genoa and Venice find a way out of their rivalry. I hope the new generation learns not to pick the rocks back up.

Because Simon Boccanegra felt remarkably contemporary to me.

I could not listen to Simon plead with people to put down their weapons, stop inheriting hatred and choose peace and love without thinking about the world we are living in now: wars, intolerance of difference, political violence and leaders unable or unwilling to imagine another way.

The opera asks whether history must keep repeating itself.

Simon’s answer is no.

Amelia’s life is an answer, too.

I was also watching the opera differently because I have been studying audio description.

I found myself wondering: How would I describe this room? How would I describe those three doors opening onto the red-carpeted chamber? How would I describe Maria moving silently through a space where the living do not acknowledge her? How would I communicate that Simon’s double is mirroring him? How do I describe an enormous dark object suspended above the characters without interpreting it too quickly?

Those questions made me aware of how much of this production existed beyond the music and translated words.

San Francisco Opera provides supertitles, but this production’s visual language carries an enormous amount of meaning. A listener could hear Verdi’s beautiful music and follow the words while still missing the bodies moving through separate realities, the absence of touch, the veiled Amelia standing beside the man talking about her, the ghosts behind glass, the shattered surfaces, the rocks being lowered to the ground, the meteorite hovering above everyone, and the final image of Simon walking toward Maria while his dead body remains below.

The staging is not decoration.

It is telling another story.

As someone learning audio description, I kept thinking about what a blind or low-vision person would need in order to enter that story too. Not every movement needs to be described. The music needs room to breathe. But some images are essential. Without them, a significant layer of this Simon Boccanegra disappears.

Perhaps that is another reason I remember the production so physically: who stood where, who crossed whose path, who looked, who did not look, who touched, who did not.

I was watching and, at the same time, imagining how to make what I saw visible in words.

The music itself was extraordinary, and Amartuvshin Enkhbat as Simon Boccanegra was magnificent. In my notes I wrote:

The Doge is well done. The singer carries his character in his voice.

That is still the best way I know to say it.

His voice held authority, weariness, tenderness and sorrow. Eleonora Buratto’s Amelia gave the production its living center. Aleksey Bogdanov’s Paolo was wonderfully sinister; sometimes his face alone told you exactly how poisonous the man was. And Guerrero’s Gabriele brought youthful passion, jealousy and, thankfully, some humor into this very serious world.

I also found myself looking around the Opera House with pleasure. Some people were dressed fancy; plenty of people were dressed comfortably, like me. I could see the orchestra. The conductor was a woman. I liked my seat.

And at intermission I wrote something wonderfully simple:

I am so happy to have become a subscriber.

But what I carried home was not simply the singing or the plot.

I carried the walking.

The absence of touch.

The shattered glass.

The little locket.

The people who were present but could not see one another.

The rocks people finally put down.

The great dark stone hanging over everybody.

The sea.

A daughter who becomes a peacemaker.

And finally, the body of Simon Boccanegra lying on the ground while, in another realm behind the glass, the sailor walks toward Maria.

At last, they see each other.

At last, they are walking in the same direction.

When I got home, I discovered that somewhere during the evening I had lost a heart-shaped rose quartz pendant.

I don’t know when it slipped away from me.

But I like imagining that while everyone onstage was being asked to put down their stones, I was unknowingly putting down one of mine.

I hope someone who needs encouragement finds it.

---

Author’s Note: I wrote notes throughout Simon Boccanegra at San Francisco Opera, including during intermission. When I got home, I continued thinking aloud about the performance in an extended conversation with ChatGPT. I used it as a thinking partner—to research questions that arose, test interpretations, make connections among things I had noticed, and help shape these reflections. I was also watching through my developing practice as an audio describer, paying particular attention to the set, bodies in space, movement, gesture, touch and the visual language of the production. Some language that emerged in the conversation, including the image of this family as “watermarked,” became part of the reflection.