The Map is the Only Territory
How making art together helps us build a better world
“There is a place where love forever shines and rainbows are the shadows of a presence so divine and the glow of that love. We’ll light the sky, up above. And it's free, come with me, can't you see? The Creator has a master plan. Peace and happiness through all the land…”
—R.A.P. Ferreira, “MASTERPLAN,” Purple Moonlight Pages
Friends,
We're at the end of a month-long series inspired R.A.P. Ferreira's Purple Moonlight Pages. More than only reviewing the album, I’ve viewed it as a “cultural map,” letting his lush wordplay invite us to learn more about the culture and history he references. We looked at “fence-building” nihilism and the history of music genres, gathered “soul folks” who help us navigate our own creative low points, and collaged our way back in time to the “eternal spirit and soul of the grandmaster Jack Whitten.” Truth be told, I feel like we're only scratching the surface.
And this last week, I really struggled to figure out what to write for the final letter in this series. Do we look the ways R.A.P. Ferreira calls himself an “apostle of wonder” looking for beauty wherever he finds it? Or how about unpacking references to beatitudes—both the scripture and a historic beat poetry journal founded by his Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman? Or should we explore Black Orpheus—one of his rap names referencing the French film and the mythic poet who searches hell for his beloved? There's just too much here. But that's the excitement of any good art right? That it keeps giving the more we struggle with it. Or as R.A.P. Ferreira raps in “NONCIPHER”:
Slow farming my necessities, ancient recipes
Move with ease and grace
What's modern is plagued with hesitancy
Lag interruptions, you need time to process instruction
It's true, you know the self is defined by the struggling
It's true, you know the self is defined by the struggling
Found the pain quite humbling
You get the sense that he pours his own life into his poetry, and he makes it hard to understand on purpose. Why? Because by wrestling with his words, it changes us along the way. Any art or music worth its salt offers a bit of struggle when we engage it. It's useful friction, and it helps us press against our own ignorance and literally expand our minds. No joke: I gave myself a headache this week trying to track down every reference in his songs. But that's why I wanted to live with this rap album during Black History Month—not to write a review but to struggle with a genre I'm not familiar with, to follow R.A.P. Ferreira's own “cultural map” into unknown territory. Because you can't celebrate what you don't know. And let me tell you: the more I learn about Black culture and history, the more there is to celebrate and be humbled by. Here's R.A.P. Ferreira on how he views his own work as an artist:
We're just going through to and trying to service people. Amiri Baraka called this art form “black cultural work.” Black cultural workers. And that's how I feel when I'm on tour. Like I'm servicing these places that maybe haven't ever seen people like us, never got to interact with people like us. Maybe they didn't even know people like us existed. You can't really be angry at people who've been groomed by propaganda to hate something they've never even been around. We're giving people that opportunity to update their operating systems and interact with something new and maybe learn about themselves and the world around them. It's always exciting.
That's the work. With each song and album, he’s expanding the cultural map and giving opportunities for others to do the same. Or as he raps in his song “DUST UP”:
I write this from the Soul Folks vessel Ruby Yacht ancestral mothership
Plottin’ coordinates to peace, hull integrity full
Five thousand parsecs beyond trans warp
With a fresh oil change, come test it if you bad
Wrote it wearin' a burlap durag
My humblest experience in truth came packaged as a thought in this sense:
The map is the only territory
When I say out loud, “the world is my idea”
When I say out loud, “suede Timbs on my feet make my cipher complete”
I am saying the same thing out loud
I find comfort in the allegory of the journey
Because I am in a literal search for brightness, voluptuousness
Brimming clarity in service of nothing else...
...I hope to only ever be utilized and in service of another's journey
This artist is rapping to construct a worldview and share it with others. And it’s a journey that doesn’t happen alone: he wrote this rap album from the “Ruby Yacht ancestral mothership / plottin’ coordinates to peace.” Like much of his writing, the “Ruby Yacht” refers to many things all at once: a nod to his grandmother Ruby, a homonym for the Rubaiyat (a famous book of Lebanese mystical poetry), and his independent rap label. The Ruby Yacht is social metaphor, a way to gather and name a community of Black artists, rappers, and close friends. He's not doing this cultural work alone, he's writing from the deck of the Ruby Yacht.
And the Ruby Yacht is part of a long history of Black artists and poets imagining the future from their own “ancestral motherships,” too. I'm thinking of The P-Funk Mothership from George Clinton's funk concerts, Sun Ra and his Arkestra “knocking on the door of the cosmos,” Alice Coltrane's gospel and jazz-infused ashram the Vedantic Center, the Soulquarians, even Soul Train..….Like the Ruby Yacht, these are artist collectives defining the world and charting a new course home. Or as the theologian James Cone wrote in The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation:
In order to affirm being alive, a people must create new forms…and project it with images that reflect their perceptions of reality. They must take the structure of reality and subject it to the conditions of life—its pain, sorry, and joy.…Home would always be more than a plot of land, more than a lover, family and friends—though it would include these. Home would be the unrestricted affirmation of self and the will to protect self from those who would destroy self. It would be self-reliance and self-respect. In short, home could only be freedom, and the will to create a new world for the people I love.
It’s worth re-reading that quote, because I think it gets to something essential at the core of what this artist builds for himself and the community around him: art and music that reshapes social structures and imagines a better future—and an ever-expanding map that can help us find our way there. Or as R.A.P. Ferreira writes: “a quest to get open and free.”
Take care,
Michael
Featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial in New York City, Adam Pendleton's video work Ruby Nell Sales explores the life and thought of the queer theologian and civil rights activist (note: no relation to R.A.P. Ferreira). At the end of the hour-long documentary, Ruby evokes new ways of thinking through a theological “litany,” and here's a transcript of her words: ...I want a theology to help people find meaning in a society where we are meaningless. I want a theology that's raises people up from disposability to sensuality. I want a theology that raises white people up into all of their identities that does not reduce them to the emptiness of skin. I want a theology that allows Black people to have the courage to become all of what we can become in a society that says we're unworthy of being anything. I want a theology that predicates itself on love rather than “anti.” I want a theology that begins the conversation with “I love justice, and therefore this is why I work for justice.” I want a theology that does not root itself in antithesis. I don't want a theology that talks about anti-racist work—that's antithetical. I want a theology that talks about pro-justice work. I want a theology that helps us locate the consciousness of God in each of us, that asks the fundamental question, what does it mean to live a good life? What is the sum total of a good life? Is it what we own and what we possess? Is it the materialization of human existence? Or is it our inner lives, our inner consciousness, the consciousness of God in each of us? And I want us to realize that we are more than what we produce, we are also who we are on the inside. I want a theology that trancends the constraints of gender, that transcends the constraints of race, while at the same time allowing us to have a gender. I want a theology of simultaneity rather than of dualism. I want a theology that honors ancestral voices. I want a theology that allows us, as Audre Lorde says, to touch our most erotic selves, our deepest feelings of ourselves and the world that we live in. I want a theology that allows us to navigate the “I” with the “We” and the “We” with the “I.” I want a theology that, as Bernice Johnson says, that allows us to rise up all equal, that allows us to rise up sanctified, that allows us to rise when we rise. I want a theology that says “sometimes.” I want a theology that says that I don't know why it rains, but when it rains, I still go on. I want a theology that gives us the power to imagine, even in things that we do not see, the possibility of things that can be done. I want a theology of hopefulness...
Naudline Pierre envisions new angels out of the old
Nathaniel Mary Quinn prays through portraits of Black life
Georgia Anne Muldrow flies into the future in this nostalgic music video
Kevin Beasley remixes dance music with turntables and an old cotton gin
Ruby's theological wishes! A keeper!