On Culture
The channel “Culture” is a space I’ve cultivated over the past few years in an attempt to conceptualize a home for myself. Culture by definition is contingent on its belonging to more than one person. Yet for me, I was trying to localize what culture means on an individual level. I avoid the word intersection when diagnosing my cultural identities because I lie in the in-between. I sit at the in-betweens of Jamaican-immigrant and Black-American culture. I ebb and flow along the spectrum of these two vibrant and distinct identities and along this expansive spectrum is where I search for my version of culture. This channel consists of nostalgia, aesthetics, sweat, funk, sex, smut, scum, fucking, loving, dancing, dubbing, rubbing, bumping, grinding, shooting, dreaming, living, and dying — in effect — culture.
I remember the tenderness of a soft velveteen touch. The subtle brush of my arm against its softness turned to static. The kind of touch that would make your hair stand on end. The kind of hold that, after repeated use, would learn the intricacies of the curve of your arms, hips, and legs. The subtle relief of sinking into softness. The harshness of what came once the fluids dried up and turned the velvet into shards — scratching the places it once held so tenderly.
The average length of a handgun is 8.40 inches. Young black boys, at least the ones I know, grew up obsessed with the idea of inches. The length of locs and if you can get em to swang. How high can you jump, cus niggas are meant to fly. The length of your dick cus niggas walking around with firearms unregistered. You put your hands up and they still shooting for ya gun.
Mothers, other mothers, aunts, church aunties, grandmothers, great and grander, wise women, I think of your decorated hands. Worn fingers, scars, tears, and folds that cue the world into your age, but cannot communicate the sheer luster they’ve left on me. I cannot thank you enough.
I had a white boy tell me that the Pow-Pows I heard every night before I went to bed weren’t gunshots. This mother fucker lived in a nice neighborhood. The fuck he know about gunshots?
You a stupid mf, if you think I ain’t counting up this paper. Nails did. Teeth Clean. Fitted down to the toe creases. I’m not robbing you, I’m just taking what's rightfully mine — this money. “Pay a nigga damn!” I got a mom I need to do right by so think twice if you come between me and my money. I work too damn hard. You see this skin? You see it? I’m the Sun, the Moon, and the Earth. What’s mine is mine and what's yours, I left with the rest of your shit by the door.
Njari shared the channel “Culture” at our last “channel walkthrough” online event, which you can find more about here and here.
Njari Anderson (b. 2001, Clarendon, Jamaica) is an artist and writer from West Palm Beach, FL. His work looks to define for himself, what he refers to as the "Black Quotidian," Black everyday life. He works in sculpture, new media, performance, and the written word in an effort to bricolage the nuanced, morally-complex facets of Black, Caribbean life in digital and physical spaces. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he is a Dual Degree student studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and Modern Culture and Media Brown University.