The Missing Stories of The Women Disciples: A Hip Hop Womanist Consideration
Matthew 27: 55-61
Women and men tend to tell stories differently. If you ask my father to tell you the story of my first kiss he would likely approach the discussion with some embarrassment and lingering frustration while my mother would probably laugh and tell you about how I got caught by Mrs. Alexander, in the 6th grade, on the back stairs before homeroom, kissing Jarvis Poole. My dad would tell the story, but the energy of his recollection would be different and would include no details outside of his own internal shame and awkwardness on the subject of his "Baby Girl" getting caught kissing at school. He isn't just telling the story, he is telling it the way he perceived the story from his location as a cis man with certain privileges and slightly irrational phobias; his preteen daughter kissing a boy at school being high on that list. For my mother, she is, somehow, capable of telling the story with details and entering into her experience of girlhood while telling the story that makes her telling of it differently.
If you were to ask the most noted Hip Hop historians to tell you the story of how, when, and where Hip Hop started, any credible person would mention DJ Kool Herc, Bronx, NY, and Sedgwick Avenue. However, it is the Hip Hop Womanist in me that would tell the story of Hip Hop's origin by including that DJ Kool Herc was a teenager and his older sister Cindy Campbell conceptualized and funded the party. She, in fact, asked her teenage brother to come to the party and play music as a way to cut down on spending for the event. It was his first gig as a DJ. So while it would be accurate that DJ Kool Herc, Bronx, NY, and Sedgewick Avenue are necessary and relevant to the history of Hip Hop - depending on who tells the story we usually lose the name and credit to Cindy Campbell; the first hip hop promoter to ever exist. The history of hip hop isn't just a story being told by historians, it's also being told the way they perceived it. Somehow, the majority of hip hop historians perceived hip hop's history absent of any women including the woman that threw and funded the notorious party credited with being the origins of this important culture.
In this same vein, if you were to ask the most public theologians to name the most noted amongst Jesus' disciples, I would wager that 100% of them would list the 12 apostles: Peter, James, John, Andrew, Bartholomew or Nathanael, James, Judas, Jude, Matthew or Levi, Philip, Simon the Zealot and Thomas. This would be a historically accurate list but it would be sorely inconclusive.
Dis-ci-ples: (1) a personal follower of Jesus during his life, especially one of the twelve Apostles. (2) a follower or student of a teacher, leader, or philosopher.
Following the death of Jesus, Matthew 27:55-61 says, "Many women were there, watching from a distance. They had followed Jesus from Galilee to care for his needs. Among them were Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee’s sons. As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body, and Pilate ordered that it be given to him. Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were sitting there opposite the tomb."
Verse 55 says, "...they [the many women] had followed Jesus from Galilee." We understand the definition of a disciple to be a "follower of Jesus during his life." These women followed Jesus (on foot) from Galilee to Galgotha which covers 79.8 miles in distance and you want me to somehow believe that they were just cooking the chicken dinners during the prayer meetings and washing the feet with their hair? You want me to believe that, despite how incredibly equitable Jesus was with his grace, love, energy, and affection towards women, that they had no intimate relationship outside of their duty to the men that the text always lists their names in relation to? (Mary the mother of James and Joseph, Zebedee's baby mama). You want me to believe that these women traveled 79.8 miles on their feet and they never interacted with Jesus face to face? You want me to believe they were brave enough to go to that tomb after the death of Christ (when all the men were scattered about running for their lives/denying Jesus up, down, and all around) and they had no intimate relationship with Jesus?
I would love for us to take this moment, in this sacred Lenten season to ask, "Why didn't anybody ask the women folk what really happened?" They were there, in many stories, when no one else was there. They were there in some of the most intimate times of Jesus' life when there is no indication, in the text, that any of the disciples were actually there - and yet there is no book in the Bible written by any of these women? Not even his mother? The one who carried him in her womb immaculately had nothing of unique consequence to add to this text about the boy child she raised who would grow to become the savior of the world?
Mary raised the Messiah but beyond her womb, got no credit and no chapter in the book. Cindy Campbell ideated and paid for the party, but gets none of the credit and on the rare occasion that she is mentioned she is called, "DJ Herc's sister." No credit. No chapter in the book.
Why do we talk about the history of hip hop and not talk to any of the women that contributed to the creation and maintenance of this work? Why would we tell a story about the savior of the world and not talk to any of the women disciples that, obviously, cared very deeply for him?
A study on memory and storytelling shared on Psychology Today found that when families tell stories, women are more likely to include depth and details that men, on average, leave out. Observing several families at dinner sharing stories they found that, "Everyone shares in the telling, but mothers essentially provide the glue that pieces what everyone else remembers into a coherent story, and in doing this, mothers provide more of the details of the story" (Fivush, 2016).
With this understanding, then might it be reasonable for us to ask, what mechanism or ideology manifests itself into our psyche to never fully or wholly interrogate the missing voices of the disciples of Jesus Christ who were women?
Toni Morrison suggests that even our documented history is impacted by hegemony. She talks about the hundreds of slave narratives written to say principally two things, “One: "This is my historical life--my singular, special example that is personal, but that also represents the race." Two: "I write this text to persuade other people--you, the reader, who is probably not black--that we are human beings worthy of God's grace and the immediate abandonment of slavery." With these two missions in mind, the narratives were clearly pointed (Morrison, 1995). She goes on to acknowledge that it did not matter how determined these black writers were to persuade their reader that slavery was evil because, more often than not, this work was done with the assumption that there was some “nobility” or “high-mindedness” in the readers heart. “They knew that their readers were the people who could make a difference in terminating slavery”(Morrison, 1995). Zora Neale Hurston said, "Like the dead, seeming cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me."(Hurston, 1991). Toni Morrison says that these "memories within" are the foundation upon which she writes to tell the whole story. So there is a reckoning that has to be done with the documented stories of our past and the way Morrison sees for us to complete those stories is to tell those stories for ourselves.
Dr. Emilie Townes speaks of the imagination of hegemony that is so outlandish that it's fantastical; the fantastic hegemonic imagination (Townes, 2006). The fantastic hegemonic imagination of the Bible taught us to imagine women out of every story. Women witnessed the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ - yet we have no permission to believe that they were possibly present at the last supper. We are to believe that they were not present in all of these other milestones in the life of Jesus, and we are to believe that there isn't one woman credible or worthy of contributing, in her own words, to the memoried recollection of what happened to Jesus during his lifetime - including the one who gave birth to him.
This same thing is still happening today and we can look to hip hop for the proof. This is the reason I say that the Bible does a great disservice to the way that we learned to imagine women out of the most important histories of our spiritual traditions and our cultural legacies (in such a fantastical way) that we don't deal with the fact that Kool Herc's sister is the Mother of Hip Hop. If it were not for her, the party on that fateful day on Sedgewick Avenue wouldn't have happened.
Now, of course, we can spend time imagining to ourselves what other ways hip hop would have, certainly come to the forefront but those are not the lived stories, those are just speculations. What we know for sure is that Cindy Campbell had an idea, she conceptualized the idea, she brought all the major factors together, she produced and paid for the idea - and as a result of her work, ideas, and efforts, history was made.
Similarly we can make claims that even if it were not for Mary, Jesus' mother, Mary Magdalene, or Martha and Mary two of Jesus' best friends - along with a host of other nameless, faceless, storyless Mary's - Jesus would have still come, taught, performed miracles, died, rose, and lived again. But, that is not what happened. What we know for a fact happened is that women loved and followed Jesus Christ. They were there when he was crucified. They followed his body to the tomb to see him be buried, and the first person he revealed himself to after resurrection was a woman.
Make it make sense that she isn't the most credible person to tell this story.
Make it make sense that Cindy Campbell isn't mentioned in every conversation on hip hop's origin.
Make it make sense that there is no account of Jesus' suffering and sacrifice from the memory of his own mother.
Make it make any sense at all.
No, the only way to actually reconcile the absence of women's voices, both in Hip Hop and in this story of the women disciples that cared for Jesus in his living and in his resurrecting, is to acknowledge that patriarchy will center itself and always do the work of creating narratives that support its centering. You and I know that women were there. Hip Hop Womanism gives us the methodology to intentionally see those women disciples in the sacred text of the Bible and to see those women pioneers in the sacred gift and culture of Hip Hop. That is the only way that we can make it all make sense. We must go to the sites of memory of women and become, for our own sakes, the glue that holds the whole stories of our mothers together because what we know, for sure, is that left to their own devices, men will not remember us as we actually were and currently are.
Fivush, Robyn. Are There Gender Differences In Telling Family Stories. Psychology Today; 2016. Web.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on the Road. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 1991. Print.
Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory,” Inventing the Truth, Houghton Mifflin Company: New York, 1995.
Townes, Emilie, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York, NY: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2006
EbonyJanice Moore is a Hip Hop Womanist scholar and activist concerned with decolonizing authority, doing community-organizing work, most specifically around black women’s body ownership as a justice issue, and equal access to education and pay for women of color in the U.S. and in several African countries. She is the founder of Black Girl Mixtape, a multiplatform safe think space created to center the intellectual authority of black women. EbonyJanice has also launched an online POC centered school called BGM Institute, doing the work of decolonizing education by putting black women at the center of curriculum development. She hosts a podcast called Rap Theology and an IG webseries centering hip hop as sacred text called #PreachEb. www.ebonyjanice.com IG & Twitter: @ebonyjanice