This episode features two pieces from the vault of bitchface, NK & Phoebe’s experimental audio project.
Part 1: PUNK IS BLACK
From the bitchface episode HEAVY GIRLS featuring JASMINE NYENDE, singer for afropunk band FUCK U PAY US.
Featuring the voices of: (in order of emergence) Angela Davis, Jasmine Nyende, Assata Shakur, Nina Simone
Part 2: DAYTIME TALK SHOW
A dreamy mash-up of Oprah and Yocheved Zenaida Cohen.
This piece was stitched together from Oprah interviews from 2010 and 2015 and a tape we recorded of Yocheved at an event in 2017 in Los Angeles.
Featuring the voices of: (in order of emergence) Oprah Winfrey, Yocheved Zenaida Cohen, Marsha P. Johnson, Angela Davis, Judith Butler, bell hooks, Tourmaline, Audre Lorde
“The reallotment of material resources is going to be the only thing that will save us” - Yocheved Zenaida Cohen
transcript
Phoebe Unter:
From Radiotopia and Mermaid Palace, this is Swelter.
[smooth bass beat, high pitched swirly sounds, pool splash]
Nicole Kelly (NK):
[whispering] sweatyyy
Phoebe:
By… The Heart. I'm Phoebe.
NK:
I'm NK. But you know that because we've already dropped some pretty personal stories this year, we're spending the summer making some new episodes for the fall with a lot of our friends and Kaitlin will be back to host.
NK:
But in the meantime...
Phoebe:
We're going to bring you some sweaty summer stories: A dream. A scheme. A steam.
[whispering] Swelter
This episode, A Dream, will make you sweat in the part of your brain that craves the fall of white supremacy. Both pieces you'll hear are from bitchface. bitchface was us before we up and professionalized, when we got to say whatever we wanted.
NK:
We have two episodes for you from the deep vault of bitchface that are pretty relevant right now. First, a reminder that all Black people are inherently punk with Jasmine Nyende, the lead singer of an L.A. based Afro punk band: Fuck You Pay Us. An episode we made for bitchface in 2019.
Phoebe:
NK, are you ready?
NK:
Umm, yeah. Here it is. Let's go. Let's get into it!
Phoebe:
[laughing]
Angela Davis:
Because of the way this society is organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere… You have to expect that there are going to be such explosions.
Jasmine Nyende:
You have to expect things like those reactions, if a Black person lived...
[slow heavy guitar]
Angela Davis:
I was constantly stalked! Because they thought that I might be a quote militant.
[Jasmine yelling]
Jasmine:
When I say punk is Black, I mean that… where do I start? This — people may contest this. [silence for a moment] But I believe [with reverb for emphasis] punk was invented by Black people.
[singing "suck my nappy Black, suck my nappy Black, my nappy Black pussy!']
I also believe that, like [with reverb for emphasis] all Black people are inherently punk.
[cop siren]
Assata Shakur:
Why do I warrant such attention?
Jasmine:
To me, punk is about living in resistance to something and being honest and upfront about that, like living in your truth of knowing that it ain't all peaches and daisy out here.
Assata Shakur:
Capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policy.
Jasmine:
Sometimes you don't have the choice to be punk. I don't think Black people have the choice to really have to fight for their lives. Like we didn't choose to be targets of the police.
A lot of us didn’t choose come to this country, like —
Assata Shakur:
What do I represent that is such a threat?
Jasmine:
Punk means knowing the mainstream is not here to support you.
Punk means..
Nina Simone:
Black! ness. That Black Power. That —
Jasmine:
DIY because there's no other way to do it.
Nina Simone:
[with reverb for emphasis] Pushing.
Jasmine:
I have no choice in the first place!
["suck my nappy Black, suck my nappy Black" song]
That's why when I think of punk, I think of Black and brown people, the theories of punk like the community, that all of that really come so much more life to me in Black and brown people.
Nina Simone:
To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world. [with reverb for emphasis] Black people!
Jasmine:
[with exuberance] I'm in my own little bubble sometimes! I completely forgot that white people are in punk music. [laughter fades into punk screaming]
Well, I think for me, the question that guides my punk is like, how would I feel if there was nothing in resistance to me? Like how would I feel if I could really just live authentically myself and, like, feel like my voice was heard and respected. And would I walk differently if I didn't have any oppression like, would I talk differently, if my tone would be read as white or if it wouldn't be read as Black? Would I dress differently if I wasn't read as like a woman or if I hadn't been like socialized to think that a woman is all I could be, how would I, what would my freedom feel like?
[bass in punk song pulses as singer sings "suck my suck my asshole, eat my asshole, eat my eat my asshole" vibrant unintelligble shrieking continues ]
Phoebe:
As we await the fall of capitalism, here is a word from our sponsors.
NK:
We made this next piece in 2018. It was based on a dream that Phoebe once had. A dream about Oprah.
[daytime Quincy Jones-esque piano music begins]
NK:
It takes place in a speculative world, where Midwestern white ladies and Oprah's live audiences go wild for the provocation of one of our favorite Black trans scholars Yochevad Zenaida-Cohen.
[daytime TV show theme music]
A world where the safety of black transwoman is ensured and fiercely protected and reparations networks are as common as brunch gathering's. Best of all, Oprah's here for all of it.
[daytime TV show theme music distorts]
[audience applause]
Oprah:
Just, let me get a word in here!
[audience bursting with cheers & applause]
Oprah:
We're on the verge of a new way of thinking about sexuality and gender [end of the word ‘gender’ repeats trippily]
[audience applause]
Oprah:
So, all these years of doing the Oprah show in all my conversations, I've considered myself open-minded and understanding that homosexuality or sexuality, sexuality, heterosexuality...
[beat drops...Oprah's words are edited to play along with the beat]
Oprah:
Homosexuality, sexuality, sexuality, heterosexuality —
[Oprah's voice returns to play unedited]
Oprah:
That that is a spectrum.
[audience cheering]
I was really proud of myself for figuring that out many years ago.
[audience yelling in support]
And I and I imagine, that when you — you're... you're lesbian, right?
Yocheved Zenaida-Cohen:
I um, am a trans lesbian separatist.
Oprah:
OK. Uh, so when you're lesbian —
Yocheved:
Trans lesbian separatist.
Oprah:
OK. uh —
Yocheved:
Who writes a lot about the intersections of people of color, separatist space and intentional woman separatist space.
[audience cheering]
Yocheved:
And I'm so honored to be here.
Oprah:
Lots to talk about here. Let's start with the backstory.
Marsha P. Johnson:
Darling I want my gay rights NOW!
[music begins & plays underneath]
Angela Davis:
In order to create a world where human beings can live and love and be healthy and create, you have to completely revolutionize the entire fabric of society.
[audience cheering]
You have to overturn the economic structure. And you have to destroy this political apparatus, which, under the guise of revolutionary government, perpetrates the most incredible misery on the masses of people.
Judith Butler:
We act as if that being of a man or that being of a woman is actually an internal reality or something that's simply true about us. A fact about us. Actually, it's a phenomenon that's being produced all the time and reproduced all the time.
bell hooks:
White supremacy. First of all, it isn't a white thing.
[audience cheering]
bell hooks:
It's part of this culture. It's part of how all of us have been taught to think about difference, who's better, who's inferior, superior.
Tourmaline:
Feminist movements, must always, and are inextricably linked to movements for trans liberations to movements for disability justice. Inextricably linked to movements to end settler colonialism and the prison industrial complex and the underlying carceral logics that support it.
Audre Lorde:
Well not one of us will ever be free until we are all free!
[music stops & audience applauds]
Yocheved:
Now would be a good time to mention that I'm a non-binary trans woman, which I like to write as a “woman, etc.”
Oprah:
Aha!
Yocheved:
It's like racialized and specific and I don't have 20 minutes to explain, but ask me sometime.
Oprah:
OK. We'll be right back.
[daytime TV show theme music begins]
Oprah:
Coming up...
Yocheved:
It's the job of all people who consider themselves actually to be feminist, to be dismantling the binary. And that means no more identifying as heterosexual because you don't have an opposite sex.
[daytime TV show theme music plays and fades under Oprah]
Oprah:
There have been so many and I know some of you are watching right now, people who have grown up in smaller communities. Who have gone on and married.
[some audience booing]
And done the things that society said that they should do and are leading really miserable lives right now because they didn't have the courage to,.
[audience cheers quietly]
You know, to say this isn't who I am. Was that hard?
Yocheved:
I'm going to give you not the Dr. Phil version. It is 100% unacceptable for a person to make their feelings about your body more important than your emotional needs.
Oprah:
So at what point did you decide that you wanted to go all the way? [audio distorts and is drawn out on the word “way”]
[audience making noise]
Yocheved:
That's emotional violence.
Oprah:
I am so darn confused.
Yocheved:
It's only going to be worse for everybody the longer it goes on.
Oprah:
So then did you try to conform for them?
Yocheved :
First of all, what the fu-[audio dragged out]-uuuck does a woman look like?
Oprah:
Pretty privilege is real, girl!
Yocheved:
Passing should not be the goal of any woman outside of… we need to be safe. We need to not be attacked because we're getting clocked.
Oprah:
Wow. That's a tweetable moment.
Oprah:
Tweet, tweet.
Yocheved:
Almost every cis-woman of color has an experience about being oppressed for people gendering her in a masculine way, because the way that whiteness and gender works is that whiteness and femininity are associated and the darker you are, the more masculine coded you are.
Oprah:
Do you feel that you've now been othered or have you transcended [repeated with synth under] that?
Yocheved:
I do affirmations literally all day, every day, like my gender is valid regardless of how people perceive me. It is OK that thinking about being a trans woman takes up so much of my thought power, because it's not taking up enough of other people's thought power so someone's gotta think about me being a woman. Affirmations are just great. [giggling]
I am great and good at things. All of them. All day long, every day.
[audience cheering]
Oprah:
And all the things that you were afraid of, the people who you thought would reject you, the people who wouldn't love you anymore....still did.
Luckily, there are a lot of cultural narratives for that.
[audience cheering]
Oprah:
Let's take a break. We'll be right back.
[fast-paced beat comes up underneath]
I think it's also evolving, isn't it? Isn't it changing, changing, changing?
[sound of light tones ascending]
Yocheved:
How familiar are you with the history of whitewashing and mainstream feminism?
Oprah:
Yeah yeah yeah yeah [fades pensively, like she’s tripping or lost in her head]
Yocheved:
And how much we've lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo lost in feminist history to whitewashing.
Oprah:
Wow.
Yocheved:
Do you feel like, you can recite all the names of the Black women who are at the Stonewall riots and you, you know, you know who coined the word fleek, and intersectional feminism and cultural appropriation.
[sounds of light tones ascending]
Oprah:
And I'm like her...I'm like, ahh.... okay okay okay [repeats and fades]
Yocheved:
If you are a non-native person, if you are not a trans woman, if you are not a Black person, hello, where do you think THINK you feel about the experiences of Black people and the requests that have already been made? The experiences that trans women face.
[the ascension cresendos]
Oprah:
OK. We'll be right back.
[daytime tv show theme music]
Oprah:
Wow. This is new territory.
Yocheved:
The binary is dead.
Oprah:
[exuberantly] It's STUPID!
Yocheved:
dead, dead, dead, dead, dead [repeats and fades] It's an unfortunate thing that happened, but it's not a real thing. It was a thing that was asserted for a minute. It's over. We all know better that there's more than two genders. That's like a violent campaign that gender fascists are trying to do to us. And we're just not even here for it.
Oprah:
[chirps] Tweet, tweet.
Yocheved:
It's the job of all people who consider themselves actually to be feminist, to be dismantling the binary.
Oprah:
I really do understand that. Tweet, Tweet. I really do understand that.
Oprah:
And I think you are the trailblazing leader of this movement, redefining also the way we talk about it and the way we think about it and the way we discuss it.
Yocheved:
We in my coven talk a lot about how all women are intentional women.
[audience applause]
About how cis women aren't just women because someone told them to. And then trans women are women because they told themselves they were. All women have agency and have the right to autonomous sex designation.
[audience applause]
And so understanding that and understanding that people also have the right to code their genitals the way they want to.
[audience cheers]
Which leads me into the question...
Can we raise hands if anyone's already running a reparations network?
[audience cheers]
You need to know the names of native people who live near you and be giving them dollars.
Oprah:
Ah! I just had an aha moment. ["tweet, tweet" softly]
Yocheved:
I need you all to meet with five friends in two weeks and talk about how you are going to move resources from people who have resources to marginalized people who are being oppressed.
Our activism means nothing without reparations. Our activism means nothing without reparations. The re-allotment of material resources is absolutely the only thing that is going to save us from a tyrannical governmental system with material tanks.
Oprah:
[shouting] Wow. WOW!
[audience and Oprah cheering]
Yocheved:
Let me say that again: the re-allotment of material resources is going to be the only thing that will save us.
Let me say that AGAIN. Let me say that again, the re-allotment of material resources is going to be the only thing that will save us.
Oprah:
Your definition of God?
Yocheved:
I live in a coven of lesbian separatists who write theory.
Oprah:
Perfect. You're perfect. Just perfect. Thank you.
[daytime TV show music]
Yocheved:
It's over.
Phoebe:
This piece was stitched together from Oprah interviews from 2010 and 2015. And the words of Yocheved Zenaida-Cohen, which we recorded at an event in 2017 in Los Angeles.
NK:
This episode was hosted and produced by Nicole Kelly and Phoebe Unter.
Phoebe:
That's us.
NK:
The Heart is Kaitlin Prest, Sharon Mashihi, Chiquita Paschal, Nicole Kelly and Phoebe Unter.
Phoebe:
Share The Heart with your friends. Give us a rating on iTunes. You can follow us on Instagram and Twitter at The Heart radio.
NK:
Follow our parent company at Mermaid Palace Art.
Phoebe:
This show does run on your donations. If you'd like to make a donation, you can do so at the heart radio dot org. You can read and listen to our whole back catalog on The Heart radio dot org. The Heart is a proud member of Radiotopia.
Oprah:
[beat plays underneath, Oprah's voice edited to match music. Her voice sounds a little robotic] Am I gay am I not, do I like men do I like women? Am I gay am I not, do I like men do I like women?Am I gay am I not do I like men, do I like women? Am I gay am I not, do I like men, do I like women? Women? Women. Women?
Yocheved:
Stop using the word heterosexual. Period. That's everything that had to be said, right?
