Jamila Woods: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

Jan. 29, 2018 | Suraya Mohamed -- Singer, songwriter, poet, educator and community organizer Jamila Woods is also a freedom fighter: a voice that celebrates black ancestry, black feminism and black identity. “Look at what they did to my sisters last century, last week,“ goes a line from “Blk Girl Soldier,“ her powerful opening number at the Tiny Desk. “Traumatic things ... happen to black people, but then you still have to go to work the next day, or you still have to wake up and teach a class, or go take care of your family,“ Woods told NPR in September. “I had just been bottling up all my feelings about these things ... so I remember this song being a way for me to cry about a lot of those things and just feel them and sit with them.“ Woods followed “Blk Girl Soldier“ with “Giovanni,“ another anthem of black female pride, inspired by the Nikki Giovanni poem “Ego Tripping.“ The original text includes no punctuation, not a single comma or period, and reveals a liberated prosody that is also illustrated in t