Jamila Woods And The Poetry Of Black Love
A small, framed, black-and-white photograph sits on the windowsill in Jamila Woods' basement apartment in Chicago. In it, a black woman and black man are walking barefoot, away from the viewer, down a dirt road. Her hair is wrapped and she balances a straw basket on her head, while he uses a stick to sling a briefcase over his shoulder. Woods encountered the photo on the cover of bell hooks' 2001 treatise, Salvation: Black People And Love. She told me it's a text that helped inspire her debut solo album, Heavn, which came out in 2016 and was re-released jointly by Jagjaguwar and Closed Sessions earlier this year. The influence of hooks is particularly felt on the title track, which is about the survival of black love:
Nothing old, nothing new
Nothing borrowed, nothing blue
They're dancing in the deepest ocean
See? Not even death could stop them
"Afrofuturism's not just about imagining people in the future but also reimagining black history," Woods told me over the phone a few weeks before I met her in Chicago. "I remember reading a story about enslaved black people who jumped off of the boats in the Middle Passage, but they didn't die. They created these underwater civilizations in the ocean."
In , hooks writes about the failure of the black liberation struggle to fully incorporate what she refers to as a love ethic. She says Martin Luther King Jr. (particularly before his later, more openly anti-capitalist
