Check In With Najha Zigbi-Johnson

Institutions are defined by the people who work within them and the objects they steward. Still, they are also defined by the community members, artists, and audiences that intersect with and support the work and missions—different audiences and participants help make the story more full, more human, and more alive. In this Studio Check In, Ilk Yasha speaks with Najha Zigbi-Johnson, an independent writer and cultural curator living in Harlem.

Najha, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. I always begin with a simple question to introduce our interviewee to our readers. Can you tell the readers a little about yourself?

I'm a Harlem girl. I've lived in the neighborhood for over twenty years. This neighborhood feels like a physical and spiritual representation of who I am and what I am made of. I'm still coming into myself, but I do think of myself as a steward of this community.

I'm a movement baby if you will. My mom has long been a part of Black and Indigenous food justice and sovereignty work across the United States. She's the daughter of immigrants who both fled war and displacement and she was very much shaped by their experiences. I also grew up in a family of creatives and artists. Both my siblings are artists. My grandmother was a practicing artist for over sixty years of her life. She went through the Art Students League and Hunter College in the fifties and sixties and took classes at the League until the pandemic.

All of this makes me think about what it means to sit at this intersection of Black radical world-making and contemporary art through a lens of Afro-Surrealism. I'm constantly wrestling with how blackness is shaped by the material limitations of structural inequity and white supremacy, while also inherently understanding that blackness is in and of itself limitless. There's something about the way those two contradictory experiences rub up against each other and create the world that I live in. In that sense, my understanding of and experience living in this neighborhood is one of Afro-Surrealism, which is, yes, a literary movement, an artistic movement, and a philosophical movement, but more than anything it's a way of life.

So, I think about my experiences growing up surrounded by movement folks, surrounded by creative people, and I've found myself back in Harlem trying to make sense of gentrification, trying to make sense of racial capitalism, but always with an eye toward creativity and the possibility that emerges through the process of world-building.

I can see how your upbringing impacts your interest in art, politics, and critical thinking—it all shines through in Mapping Malcolm, a remarkable collection of essays and perspectives from artists, community organizers, and scholars thinking about Malcolm X's legacies in Harlem. So, thinking about these echoes and this lineage, can you share some more about friends whose contributions reverberate in your work, or family members who are near and dear to your work?

The essence of this project is a collaborative one. On the one hand, I have the people who contributed essays, conversations, and art to the publication; I also have this constellation of community members and family members who have helped shape how I think. I think about my father who has never held a traditionally “artistic” job or thought about himself in that way, but I see my father as the first collector of art I ever engaged with. My father is very much a curator.

I grew up in a house where we were always playing really great music, like obscure 1980s house music from the UK or Chicago and wonderful jazz albums. And, my dad loves incense. In the morning he burns floral incense and in the evening the incense changes, it becomes a bit muskier and heavier to reflect the changing mood of the outside world. He's also particular in the way that he collects furniture or art and hangs things and engages with objects. My dad taught me about how we engage with the material world— that it can be a reflection of our politics and soul. The minute I got Mapping Malcolm, I asked him what he thought. He was the most important critic I had for this project.

I also look to my siblings, who I draw so much inspiration from in their own practice. My sister has an MFA and a BA in filmmaking, and my brother has a BFA in visual art, and both of them are deeply creative and have pushed me to figure out as a writer, as a thinker, as an educator, and organizer, what it means to explain our histories as Black folk in a way that resonates with a lot of different people, not just movement folks or academics, but also people who are interested in design but who otherwise wouldn't know about a figure like Malcolm X in Harlem. I think about this project as a way to bring the elders who have stewarded such an incredible legacy into the space of young people who are using figurative expression to make sense of the world that we're collectively trying to build.

And my mom's commitment and articulation of a very specific Black internationalist politic around freedom and land justice has allowed me to make sense of someone like Malcolm X within a context of global Black sovereignty. So, my whole family animates how I move through the world.

I don't know if your father would call himself a curator but there's something powerful about not needing a label. Some of the most intelligent and brilliant people I know lack the formal credentials and titles that we think of as legitimacy. Take, for example, my grandmother, who had a sixth-grade education. She was wise, like an intellectual, but was taken out of school in the sixth grade because that was the cultural and class boundary of her time in Iran. She was one of the deepest thinkers I’ve ever met.

Let's think about the book as a beautiful object. I love the way the citations in the text are on the side of the page legibly laid out for the reader. Can you tell us about the design ideas that went into this book?

Firstly, I want to express my gratitude to the book designers, Ayem, Marcus Washington and Albert Hicks, who are dear friends of the Studio Museum and have worked with the Studio Museum and many other wonderful collectives, galleries, museums, and thinkers. I still pinch myself knowing they held this project alongside me and the editorial press, Columbia Books on Architecture in the City. We all worked together for nearly a year just on the design alone. The book is called Mapping Malcolm, but there's no map in the book. It's more of a conceptual mapping project. A lot of what we thought about is how we might map the various contributions and Malcolm X's own movement across space and time through the physicality of the book. With regards to something like the footnotes, it was important that we honored the range of thinkers and archival materials that we pulled from. We don't want to ever suggest that our thoughts are ours alone. So you'll see all of these wonderful footnotes that are their own project. You have the actual text, but the footnotes are their own world and constellation.

Part of how I understand Malcolm X is through the built environment of Harlem. I grew up just a couple blocks away from Temple No. 7, the new Nation of Islam temple that was erected after Malcolm X was martyred. This temple’s awning is a beautiful shade of burgundy—not quite the same burgundy of the book, a bit more red or blood red. I wanted the book to reflect the materiality of the political and religious moment that Malcolm existed in and, in a sense, beyond. The text color and the color of the front, back, and spine of the book reflect this burgundy I see almost every day walking down Lenox Avenue. I also thought about this wonderful archival image that the Smithsonian has of an original Organization of Afro American Unity pamphlet outlining the aims and objectives of Malcolm X’s political organization that he founded in 1964 alongside John Henrik Clarke and other Pan-Africanist leaders.

There is this beautiful seal on this historic ephemera—it’s a cipher, a circle that says “from darkness to light.” It represents, I think, Allah's 360 degrees of knowledge—the infinite contained within the Islamic religious worldview. It's also its own artistic imprint. This made me think about what the visual language of the Black radical tradition was while understanding a figure like Malcolm X as having a particular artistic and aesthetic vision for the world he was building. This project, while it can't do everything, it can gesture and honor this way that Malcolm X was engaging with visual languages.

Another thing I thought a lot about is how Malcolm X has been erroneously characterized and remembered in popular discourse as someone who was really angry. But I think of Malcolm X as someone who was so committed to collective humanity and his own expansive humanity. He was a deeply joyous and pious person. He had a butterfly collection. He wrote love poems to his wife when he went on trips. He read love sonnets. He had six daughters, four of whom he got to meet, two of whom were born after he was martyred. I imagine all these things animated his life and that he did smile a lot.

We wanted to include images of Malcolm X smiling to push back against this collective memory of Malcolm as austere and angry, because the point of doing justice work, the point of living the sort of life he did, was so that people could be full of love and full of joy and full of humanity. So, another way of honoring Malcolm was by showing images of him smiling, particularly through that pocket-sized cover image.

Malcolm's political philosophy was, at its core, was most concerned with dismantling white supremacy, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism as the means to realizing Black self-determination. So, considering this, and the fact that it's been more than forty years since his assassination, what is one local issue that you think Malcolm would be working on if he were alive today in 2024?

I think there's probably so much Malcolm X would be thinking about as it relates to Harlem. Harlem is in an interesting and difficult moment when we see the effects of disinvestment post-Covid, and we understand there is a lot of development happening, and speculative development, that will continue to shape and change and gentrify this neighborhood.

One of the things I think a lot about is the influx of Senegalese and other West African migrants, particularly young men, who are congregating around the 116th and Lenox corridor. I think that Malcolm X would be committed to being in partnership and conversation with these men because Malcolm was an internationalist. He understood that the plight of Black America was and remains the plight of all Black people across the globe; it is the plight of a decolonial Africa. I think that by building in partnership with newly migrated folks, Malcolm X would help our community understand what the conditions were that forced these people to leave their homes and their loved ones and to come to Harlem, a new and ostensibly difficult place to live. I think he would also help us consider the conditions that many Black folks in this neighborhood are currently experiencing, and how these conditions mirror those of Black migrants coming to this community.

Part of how I tried to remember and understand a figure like Malcolm X is through this lens of a Black internationalism that affirms the necessity of our collective political imagination as something global. If we are to deeply care about Black folks in Harlem and Black America, we must also deeply care about our kin on the continent who are struggling under colonialism and the ways the African continent is pillaged for its resources. I still want to learn more, but I imagine he would be imploring Black folks born in this country to understand and build alongside our kin who are coming here from the continent.

Yes! I feel he would absolutely challenge us to look at the movement of people as a symptom and result of much deeper systemic catastrophes of inequality and imperialism. He would see this moment as a political opportunity to deepen relationships by mobilizing and organizing.

I really appreciate this question because it brings me back to my south-facing childhood bedroom, which overlooks trees and the backs of other buildings. There is a small Haitian church and every Sunday they have a band with acoustics and singers. If I'm to be honest, the music was never that great, but that's how I woke up every Sunday for years. Part of what's so beautiful about a neighborhood like Harlem is the number of religious spaces, mosques, and churches that pepper the community. Part of this history of material dispossession is that poor folks, Black folks, working-class folks, weren't always able to keep their homes, keep their brownstones. So, in order to keep them, a lot of their spaces were turned into churches because of tax codes. That was a way that people could at once hold onto the physical structure of their homes and be able to worship and be spiritual and build community in their own likeness.

The last question I have is that I get this feeling that maps play an important role in how you see and chart ideas and places, both tangible and intangible. Can you tell me more about this idea of mapping?

Yeah, I'm interested in how we make space as people generally. The scholarship of Black women theorists like Dr. Elleza Kelley, Dr. Mabel O. Wilson, Dr. Katherine McKittrick, and many others has expanded my understanding of what geography means. They have helped me rethink cartography not simply as a mapping exercise as we know it but, that in order to truly understand a place like Harlem, we have to understand the religious, cultural, environmental, historical, and sonic imprint of the community to properly map it. Their work reflects a type of “Black counter-cartography", to pull from the words of Dr. Wilson, which has helped me rethink the relationship of institutions in relation to the community they are a part of.

This notion of counter-cartography has helped me rethink questions around the material reality of gentrification in Harlem; it's also helped me make sense of this cultural moment we’re experiencing in Harlem. For example, I think a lot about 125th Street and the fact that the Studio Museum is reopening its space, alongside the fact that the Apollo Theater has recently reopened with the acquisition of the Victoria Theater. I think about the expansion and redevelopment of the National Black Theatre. All of these cultural spaces made by and for Black folks that are being led by Black women are part of this counter-mapping of Harlem. For me, the question becomes: how might we think about these cultural spaces as geographic reorientations toward community?

Part of Kelley’s work is looking at Romare Bearden's piece The Block (1971). Recently, I found out that he was standing, back in the 1960s or maybe 1970s, on a friend's balcony who lived in Lenox Terrace overlooking Lenox Avenue. That was part of his inspiration for The Block. Bearden was very much painting what he saw-–the barbershop, the church, people on the stoop, the music, the sound, the feeling of Harlem. Kelley’s work explores and expounds on Bearden's The Block as a way to reimagine and map a place like Harlem that forces us to critically engage these alternative modes of knowing and perceiving. Ultimately, I think, this expands the disciplines of geography and critical studies in a way that is necessary, particularly given this deeply layered sociopolitical, moment wherein so many of our systems are breaking and so much of what we have no longer serves us. So, the tools we have to create, fix, and rebuild must be able to properly respond to our world and changing landscape. It takes imagining space through the lens of counter-cartography to do that.

Thank you for this project and your time today!