Two years ago, hip-hop legend Ghislaine “Qi Dada” Jean set out to record the lullabies that mothers sing in the first blurry months of their child’s life. “I don’t think that kind of intimacy is highlighted enough,” she explains. “And it’s one of our first contacts with true intimacy.”
She captured not only songs, but also deeply personal stories. One mother revealed that she had been too shrouded in postpartum depression to sing to her child. Jean set her spoken words to music and dance, making it into a cathartic moment of empathy rather than shame. “Art transmogrified it into something beautiful,” the musician explains. The song was featured on Black Divas, a nationally syndicated live music special on PBS that Jean produces. The show features classical and gospel singers and shines a spotlight on Texas mothers.
An activist, coach, mentor, and producer, Jean is the portrait of a multi-hyphenate. She is half of Riders Against the Storm, the first hip-hop act to win Band of the Year at the Austin Music Awards three years in a row, alongside her husband, Jonathan “Chaka” Mahone. Together, they’ve opened for national artists like K’Naan and Wu-Tang Clan. The duo has also teamed up with DJ Chorizo Funk for monthly “Body Rock ATX” dance parties. Casually, she’s known as the Priestess of the Party. “I have a particular gift for uplifting droves of people at once and being able to curate that experience to feel intimate to each and every person,” she explains. Four years ago, she added another descriptor to her identity when she became a mom.
Black Divas exists at the convergence of all of Jean’s passions. For her, the experience of pregnancy and having a child was a powerful creative spark. She had long been familiar with the troubling state of women’s health care, and particularly maternal health care, in Texas. In addition to “maternity care deserts” and a relative lack of postpartum support, Texas Women’s Healthcare Coalition places the maternal mortality ratio at 27.7 deaths per 100,000 live births—and significantly higher for Black women, 39 deaths per 100,000 live births. Those numbers took on a new and personal immediacy for Jean.
While she knew plenty of women were pushing hard for better government policies and better clinical care, there was a gap in the conversation: art. “I was going through this process, and I didn’t have art that was speaking to what I was living in that immediate moment,” she explains, “as a woman of color [who was] was giving birth in Texas where things are dicey.”
Black Divas is that art. The show is a kaleidoscope of emotions—a live music performance that centers the experiences that so many Black mothers have in isolation. After its debut in 2024, Jean returned to the show this past December to produce a second special that will air in 2026.
As Jean sees it, Black Divas invites you to care about motherhood because of its joy, not because the show recapitulates the hardships in women’s health and maternity care in Texas. Women’s joy, she says, is worth investing in.
Great Job Rose McMackin & the Team @ Austin Monthly Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
