This podcast will explore thoughts, concepts, stories about fatherhood in the context of Black fathers, taking Germany as a locational point of departure. Yet, in line with the exigencies of our time, we hope that our reflection will meander much further and broader while tethering itself to specific references from everyday realities. The central theme (and a running thread) of the first season of the podcast is “nurturing”. We depart from the premise that fatherhood – like its counterpart motherhood – is a concept which embodies the regenerative potentiality of Creation. In other words, it carries within it the pulse of life, where this also means the deep awareness that our present actions are concurrently the future of those who come after us. If it is true that the moment of our birth also sets in motion the process of our death, then our lives do not lend themselves to hoarding but rather, to passing on from one generation to the other.
How then might we reflect on nurturing as Black males within the context of Germany and, broadly, the West? The notion of “Blackness” is a construct necessitated by the hegemonic institution of “Whiteness”. Thus, we must remember not to take the word “Black” for more than what it is in the changing times: a word which envelopes so many contradictions and paradoxes of the human condition; working to resolve – through a self-invented process – into a harmonious flow rather than a hitherto schizophrenic conflict. It embodies the disposition of a “new humanity” Frantz Fanon conjures when he speaks of the human who breathes anew, creates new gestures, new respiratory rhythms and whose struggles are transformed into a celebration of imagination. Thus, the crisis is no longer one of identity but rather the challenge of understanding the process(es) by which our identity, imbued with the power of transcendence, morph into various forms of presence(s) as it crosses from one border to the other. It goes without saying that we hope to also problematise the word “Blackness” to such extent as allows for the making of knowledge by which its emancipatory subjectivity can be truly personified by those with the urge and urgency.
We want to highlight, through our reflections, a part of Black masculinity languishing in obscurity under the emphasis of its toxic, villainous counterpart. The part of masculinity that knows what it means to be diligent, caring, empathic, sentient, yet disciplined and deliberate because it too received these qualities from the many peoples instrumental in his process of nurturing. Much of the aforementioned qualities are often relegated to motherhood and the feminine. Yet, in the real sense, they are exactly what complicates the notion of gender.
The purpose of this podcast is to articulate thoughts around Blackness, masculinity, fatherhood that are as frontal in their address as they are attentive in their critiquing while always keeping in view the wellbeing and future of our children.
The introductory episode gives an overview and a hint as to what will follow in the subsequent ones. We shall stretch out our thoughts and inferences about nurturing across the following areas of interest formulated as exploratory questions:
How do we understand blackness today?
What is nurturing from the standpoint of a black father?
What is the place of dreams
How do we understand and embody the paradoxes constitutive of the life of a sojourner?
What is our position here in the West?
What will become the future of our children, and how do cater for their present?
What is the identity of our children?
A tree does not make a forest: On community and support systems.Alain Missala & Emeke Okereke
Conceived and Produced by Black Dads Germany and Atelier E.K Okereke
