A Heavy, Beautiful Burden
A Heavy, Beautiful Burden
Eniola Abioye
“Our crown has already been bought and paid for. All we have to do is wear it.”
- James Baldwin
I don't remember the first time I saw Basquiat's name or a piece of artwork with the iconic crown. I recall being put off by how fierce his scrawls were. I remember wondering why someone would call that art. I was overwhelmed by the scribblings, I didn’t understand. They reminded me too much of the world around me.
I heard stories of young girls being kidnapped in Nigeria, economies supported by pillars of human trafficking in Southeast Asia, and European nations drowning in alcohol abuse. Stateside, families being torn apart by political opinions, like something reminiscent of the Civil War, while urban cities experience food deserts, shortages, and water crises, and wealthier communities are overrun by suicide and opium overdoses.
And still, there are stories of soldiers coming home, families being reunited, children getting into their dream school, and marginalized people groups defeating the odds.
The complexities are jarring.
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I like to wander through my local art museum. I try to take my time with a specific category of expression. I study not only the works themselves, but my own reaction to the work. I felt quieted, reflective, and sobered by art. Everything from the use of colors during the specific time period to the subject matter. Everything from the shading practices, whether the artist is male or female. Learning the stories of the artists and the events that took place during their work's release. All of this helped provide context and understanding for their art. It is easy to look at a collection of paintings and sculptures and make assumptions about their significance, but it takes humility to understand.
There can be much pretension surrounding art. For me, art has become an opportunity to invite people into narratives and conversations that typically require emotional charge or complex concepts.
In 2019, I worked for a non-profit organization that serves a network of underserved communities in the DFW area. We took a group of about 15 high school students to New Orleans and visited an art gallery called StudioBe. An artist named Brandon Bmike Odum had filled a 30,000 square foot warehouse with enormous canvas and wall masterpieces of black activists, motifs, and victims of police brutality and racially-motivated crimes.
As I wandered through, I was moved by the reverence and honor of the victims. Haloed portraits of Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin holding the “I AM A MAN” signs noted during the Million Man March during the 1960s, colorful backdrops with pictures of Muhammed Ali, and other celebrity activists. There were FBI transcripts of Dr. King's conversations plastered on one of the walls beside an old-school phone. The artist also used pieces of the walls from homes destroyed during Hurricane Katrina as canvas to pay homage to his homeland.
But out of all of it, what caught my attention were the spray-painted three-point crowns between quotation marks that accompanied Odum's signature and sometimes represented in for his signature. The symbol reminded me of Jean-Michael Basquiat’s signature three point crown.
About half a year ago, I was studying up on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life and art. Tension, question, and commentary filled his canvases and sketchbooks. I realized that sometimes, we don’t give ourselves permission to process tension. Hence, my initial reaction to his work.
One of his most predominant symbols was a crown. A three point crown, roughly drawn, typically filled with the color yellow, hovering over a figure. Sometimes the crown was suspended above nothing, but it constantly carried the weight of the beauty and pain of being black in America.
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I am Nigerian. Nigeria is in West Africa. I was born in the United Kingdom. Camden to be specific, but I grew up in the United States. Beginning in New York, then Florida, then the largest chunk of my childhood in Atlanta, with a year and a half in Tulsa, OK, and after, returning back to Atlanta. I graduated HS in Charlotte, NC. After 2 years of college in Oklahoma, I moved alone to Dallas, TX, believing I was following this invisible yellow brick road to my purpose. I landed in Dallas, and ultimately found myself at a Bible School. Over the next decade of my life, I would hear the distant call for justice for members of the African Diaspora (people of African descent). I would sense how the call was larger than hashtags and slogans, but a deep longing in God’s heart to see the lost reconciled, first back to Him, then to one another.
As an African, the weight of that complexity overwhelmed me, and I wasn’t sure how to progress. This was one of those things you can’t sit back and watch play out. One, because it is part of my story, and rejecting it would communicate a form of self-hatred. Two, because it is important to God to join the narrative of reconciliation. The Scriptures speak of ministers of reconciliation. It is part of our inheritance as new creations to lean into this ministry. The hulking HOW was then the most daunting undertaking before me. How do I step into a narrative with so much history, pain, and opinion? What space do I take in this story? After joining the chorus of vocal pundits on social media, I got quiet and learned that God wanted me to take up the space I was made to take up.
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One day, I was sitting with my parents and began to ask them about their families and how they grew up. After a series of humorous stories, eye-opening conversations, and tender moments, my mom and dad told me how they both had royal blood in their respective villages in southwest Nigeria. They came from a line of king-makers: a group of people who sit on a council and decide the next chief or monarch of their community.
Interestingly enough, years before that, during my senior year of high school, my father changed our family’s last name to “Abioye”, a Nigerian name that means royalty from "Oguntona", a Nigerian name meaning “god of iron”. He did this at the request of his late father, Samuel Abioye Oguntona. It seemed like God was weaving my story into His the whole time.
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I almost lost my mind when I realized Marvel was releasing a black superhero film. It was over a year before the release date when I saw the first teaser, and I remember crying and trying to replay it as many times as possible. I think it was during a Super Bowl Commercial. It was a full year before I would watch it. As someone who prides themselves in not jumping at the latest trends, I danced to the theaters opening night and watched the movie not once, not twice, but seven times, and each time I watched symbolism play out. I watched as a newly crowned African king took ownership of the lost people of his continent and began the road to reconciliation through the royalty he won. Having a crown meant serving his people on a massive scale. Our questions, our tension appear like unexpected house guests, and we find ourselves fumbling for the best way to host.
However, I find that Jesus’ response to tension, questions, and even political commentary was to create. Instead of trying to solve the solution like a tenured mathematician, he chose to create. When asked about the Kingdom, Jesus responded with a story. Not song. Not a poem. Not a piece of new technology. But a story composed to carry within it, the deepest and simplest meanings. Isn't it fascinating how if you told a child the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, they would hear the message without you ever needing to preach it to them?
Sometimes I wonder if Jesus had his parables memorized or if they were free-styled. When asked “Who is my neighbor?”, He offered a tale riddled with racial tension, and when asked why He would allow a known immoral woman to wash his feet with her tears, He responded with a story about two debtors. Possibly implying that this woman was not the only known sinner, but also the one asking him the question. Jesus chose story as a weapon. He crowned his truths with creativity, with a story. When God hovered over chaotic darkness before time began, He made a decision. He chose to speak light. He chose to create. Cultural complexities, political pundits, and frustrating opinions are nothing new and are going nowhere, but sons and daughters of God are equipped to tell a different story. Responses of presence, courage, and hope that look like intention-filled words and color in poetry, film, art, and song. During the Civil Rights Era, many marched, many sang. Songs penned by the men and women who stood beside their peers declaring a new future, with their words. Others sculpted, while others painted. Artists are prophets. They carry a banner that reminds all with breath in their lungs of a probable future headed their way. Maybe this is the invitation of today. To dig through the tragedy and glory of our stories, to take inventory of our passion and purpose, and create. Create the future we desire to live. To remind ourselves of the life of co-laborer with God, one who longs to comprehend what He sees and create a future He is in. Like Abraham, who sojourned looking for a place whose builder and maker was God. If you are overwhelmed by complexity and tension, create. Your creativity is a crown given to you by God, so pick it up and wear it.
Eniola Abioye
Writer & Musician
Photography by Uri Segura
