Mother of the Quest: Review of “Mama Phife Represents” by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
by Sheila Maldonado
I am trying not to fangirl. A Tribe Called Quest is like the Beatles to me. The Beatles of my 20s, the ’90s. The Beatles were the Beatles of my teens. Then there was Tribe. There are days I forget that was 30 years ago. Holy fuck. I still listen to all of it on whatever streaming service owns my memories now. I can access the sound of my college years, when I did no work but memorize Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders, every pause, every skip, boom bip, every lyric. I loved Q-Tip. He seemed to want to be an English major like I became, he might favor tweed in the fall and carry a dictionary. But I felt really kindred to Phife’s sound. Phife Dawg. Malik Taylor. I could mimic his lower tone and his energy. He was always ready to go, could really jump on a beat. He made the everyday a joy to say, even the smallest line, a shoutout to “My best friend Steven at the Home Depot” on “Clap Your Hands” has all the pop, he rode the breaks of a tight drum and made an earworm that still bursts out of my mouth when I’m in a good stride. When he swings into his Trini patois cadence, my blood still jumps. The Caribbean coast of Honduras in me rises up, I know where his sound is from. It’s the clash that made hip hop, all the resisters and colonizers meeting, beating each other on the tongues, first, warm on the islands, then, cold in the city.
How can he possibly be an ancestor already, gone almost five years? How can you possibly deal with that loss. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, his mother, a poet in her own right, a mother of poetry, does what that job entails, she shares how. She offers us her dizzying lyrical grief in Mama Phife Represents. She is kind enough, generous enough to take us through her intimate memories. Malik was diagnosed with diabetes just as ATCQ’s first album was released in 1990 and he fought it throughout his life and career, receiving a kidney from his wife in his 30s before succumbing to its complications at age 45. Boyce-Taylor remembers how that struggle haunted her and him, “Mom, I don’t think I’m gonna make it / I held that knife inside thought it would kill me”. There is no time here, grief scrambles it into a swirl of poems and prose, journal entries, fragments, childhood writings, family photos, texts and voicemails, random lists, the minutiae and epiphanies, all the rummaging and revelation that happens when you have to handle the details of a death. A detail, a beat to carry you through. Malik is a baby falling from a ledge in a phone booth on one page and a few pages later he’s calling from California talking about his future wife. Throughout Boyce-Taylor grounds us with moments of prose for context, enough to let us know where we are, then she spins us back into the memories and mourning. She plays with lines, restrains, keeps them short, then stretches them out to wander and wail:
ants fruit flies
kitchen flies spiders snakes
how many small things can I kill before I am whole again?
Here and in her last book, Arrival, Boyce-Taylor is partial to zuihitsu, the running brush of the Japanese, a formless form that allows for random thought. A woman’s form, attributed to Sei Shonagon, a court lady in the 10th and 11th centuries. Tribe got the jazz, Mama Phife got the zuihitsu. She swims in it, it is an ancient jazz that serves her pain well and can lead her to joyful imagining, a resurrection of her sons, Malik and his twin Mikal who died in childbirth:
poems to light white candles for good luck spells poems that blow
kerosene and inspire rage poems to taunt the gods and almost get them vex
let Mami cut oil drums to make steel pan
and rock melodies until my dead
twin brother come walking unshaven in de yard
with Malik on he arm an say
all right all’yuh I home again
She is also as capable of the boast, the toast, as her son was. He taught me a great deal about what I liked to call egocentric survivalism, talking to himself like, “I never walk the streets think it’s all about me / even though deep in my heart it really could be,” and “I’m on my own jock still / if I don’t say I’m the best tell me who the hell will,” also “and if I ever went solo my favorite mc would be me.” Boyce-Taylor does the thing in his name, “Phife keep he fiyah till the very end…/meh boy was pure thunder an hurricane too…/ so who want it with the gladiator mama,” anointing herself one of his many names. He would call her Mama Phife, she runs down his multiple titles, “You Phife Diggy / You Funky Diabetic / You Don Juice / You Mutty Ranks…/ You Trini Gladiator.” I have to jump in with the rest of his line, “anti-hesitator, Shaheed push the fader, from here to Grenada.” She calls to herself, “You Cheryl boo, You mama Ibeji,” Ibeji from Yoruba for blessed spirits, twins, mother of twins from a family of many twins, writing a twin memoir, an artist mother/son book.
She and his father raised Malik to be expressive. She “had been raised with a Caribbean strict gene” and wanted “to be less critical” with him, raise him “with fewer secrets than when we were brought up.” She came to New York from Trinidad in the ’60s in her teens and had and raised Malik in Queens in her early 20s. Her marriage to his father ended when Malik was in his teens. She eventually remarried decades later to her current partner. As a child, Malik watched her perform as a theater major at York College in the ’70s. Throughout the book, we witness the exchanges in an artist family. Malik asks his mother over and over to tell him the stories of his birth, a curious child creating the stories of himself, a grown man writing song lyrics, an artist son made of his mother’s stories. Boyce-Taylor, on her fifth book, drives Malik crazy consulting him about the title. They settle on Arrival. A Black immigrant artist family of this city with many books and albums between them continues to gift a world to us who need to hear and read them and know they exist, know life is not just survival but creation. Boyce-Taylor’s first book, Raw Air, is part of this family too, published by Fly by Night, the press for A Gathering of the Tribes, in the late ’90s.
Facing the endless loss now, it is cathartic to read this open mourning, to have a place to put the pain, to remember. This writing, a resting place. I don’t want to put the onus on a mother, a woman, to do that work but this presence is also what I have long sought in this art, in the books, in the music. What the women do to the art, how they make new places. The hip hop I put on a pedestal when I was young did not necessarily do that for the women. Even hip hop hippies like ATCQ could make seductive music that attracted us but then complain about groupies. Here we are now though, in this time of Megan and Cardi who are still questioned and insulted but are defining terms, “mak[ing] a forum on [their] sexual drive” as Q-Tip once requested. Here is a time a fangirl of an MC becomes a fangirl of a poet mother. Time to hear a woman’s voice. Beyond time to hear the voices that have surrounded, supported all the sound. Boyce-Taylor tells us and herself, “praise the daughter in me and the brave son who carries my poetry.” Praise.
Sheila Maldonado is the author of the poetry collections one-bedroom Solo (A Gathering of the Tribes / Fly by Night Press, 2011) and that's what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, forthcoming, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Ping Pong, and Callaloo, and anthologized in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext, Brooklyn Poets Anthology and The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States. She is a CantoMundo Fellow and a Creative Capital awardee as part of desveladas, a visual writing collective. She has served as an artist-in-residence on Governors Island, New York for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and a Cultural Envoy to Honduras for the U.S. State Department. She teaches English for The City University of New York and has led residencies as a teaching artist for the National Book Foundation and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She has degrees in English from Brown University and creative writing / poetry from The City College of New York. She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Coney Island. Her family hails from Honduras. She lives in uptown Manhattan where she is working on an ongoing project about a lifelong obsession with the ancient Maya.
Mama Phife Represents
by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Haymarket Books, release date 1/5/21
$16.00