Today we’d like to introduce you to Nayazha Coleman.
Nayazha, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
My story begins in Manhattan, NYC May of 1990. I like to think that my origin being in the center of a performance Mecca had something to do with my love of expression. My mother and I grew up together, she had me when she was 17. Very young, my father was incarcerated and we spent some time on the streets and in shelters that were a saving grace. I learned a lot about life through our experiences with one another. In her 20s she joined the Army and that began our journey moving around the US. Even though we moved around a good bit in the beginning, my military travels didn’t go past the 13 colonies. My family always had a love for travel so we used any opportunity we got to go somewhere new even if it wasn’t far.
At my last stop, Ft.Benning in Columbus GA, I spent the years that shaped me. This is where I really grew up, apart of a blended family. Like many families, we loved each other in our own way just not in the way that best connects with the other person, not in their love languages. There was a lot of separation, walls, and emotional barriers between us and it was hard to live in that environment. Growing up I dealt with extremely low self-esteem surrounding my weight, my background, and different aspects of my blackness like my complexion and hair texture. I didn’t get the positive reinforcement about myself that I needed. I just knew I was different and that made me a target.
So since I didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, I found friendship and adventure in stories whether that was in a book, play, or a film. Getting into a character became my escape from a messed up reality and internal world. It fueled my creativity in fine arts but that became my MO beyond performing, there were positive and negative consequences to escapism. It helped me cope but it became a crutch that I am still healing the wound of today. It takes time to release trauma you’ve been carrying so long it’s turned into your personality traits, your life story, and who you think you are versus seeing it as just a thing that has happened. It still needs to be acknowledged and then overcome, but at least from this perspective, it’s not synonymous with you and something you carry with you forever. There’s the possibility of release through spiritual practice, mental health, and opening the mind.
Which led me to my partners, Rico and Love. We met at different points in our lives but our paths aligned perfectly at this moment to go on this adventure. It was all so synchronistic.
Rico and I actually met in middle school. We had a similar military background and knew each other around school but not well. She was pretty popular, on the basketball team and I had books for real friends, so hellos in the halls were the extent of our relationship. Ten years later Facebook brought us back together and we’ve been on this journey since then.
We’ve supported each other through so many evolutions and one of those was our perspective on love, specifically monogamy. We reshaped our perspective on our potential, what we should strive for, and what limitations we will or won’t acknowledge. We knew we never wanted “The American Dream”. I mean, we are Americans and we have dreams but it’s not the traditional white picket fence version. We want to support ourselves through our crafts, as entrepreneurs, which in turn supports our community.
We met Love living that dream. Rico was vending at a local fashion show at Metropolitan Lofts, ironically called Unconventional, and we were looking at art around the venue created by other artists. We fell in love with this raw, majestic full moon in a deep blue sky. We had to have it so we went looking for the artist, and we found Love and that was the start of our triad, which grew to be Nomiads.
Has it been a smooth road?
I know struggle so well, we are closer than I’ve ever wanted to be. I’m a Life Path 8 so it’s in the cards for me to experience great hardship so that I can gain the discipline and wisdom to achieve my goals (pretty extreme, huh?). In my lifetime I have lost over 100 pounds, had a tumor removed from my ankle, and survived a life-threatening blood clot in my leg. Those are just physical changes and manifestation of what had been festering behind my masks regarding my personal self worth and residual from my childhood. You know the way stress can cause a heart attack? My heart and apparently other parts of my physical body were responding to what was going on inside.
Summer of my Junior year I took a class that was supposed to be an easy A, it was called Queer Theory, and it really put my entire life into perspective. We broke down the different systems of oppression and the ways those systems subtly manifest in our society today.
In college I was heavily involved in activism, I marched for Troy Davis, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Oscar Grant, but Sandra, my SoRHOr Sandra Bland, that one broke me. It hit me like a ton of bricks and it took me back to when I went to “celebrate” the 50th Anniversary of the March across the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma. It felt like an out of body experience standing there in the 2000s but the energy was that of the 60s, it was a repetition that we had been reliving every generation post-slavery. I call it our “We Shall Overcome Hamster Wheel”. It started my relapse into depression, I had to find another way. There must be another way to make a change. And I realized it starts with me.
My greatest struggle has been accepting that my life wouldn’t look like anyone else’s and loving myself fully. I feel like this digital age is defined by masks and I don’t want to ascribe to having multiple faces. I would rather live authentically but first I have to figure out what that means to me. I will never be like everyone else and for too long I tried to fit into the black, Christian, straight respectability politics. I’ve tried to end my life on this Earth because of the illusion that I don’t belong here.
That’s not me. I am black, queer, poly, and my gods look like me. I am not an imposter, this is my country, and I will do what I have to do to make sure it is more welcoming of my people. My ancestors were the ones that wouldn’t break and I carry that legacy. That requires love. That requires joy. That requires validation. My greatest struggle was the internalization of not receiving those things. I justified it by convincing myself I didn’t deserve love, joy, and validation. That inherently I deserved to be in pain, to hate myself. To anyone feeling that way. It’s not true. Change your truth. Your life has the utmost value. Your life is invaluable. It’s taken me 28 years to figure that out & somedays (a lot of days) I need reminders myself. I want to spend my life healing myself through expression and therefore helping others do the same. So we decided to sell all of our stuff, buy a bus, and spend our lives spreading light and uncovering the truths about our ancestors.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
We are the Nomiads, an artistic collective made up of three partners. We are partners in every way; partners in a loving triad relationship, creative partners, business partners, and partners in crime…. (that last one sounded much less corny in my head). We are visual artists, Jewelers, actors, writers, and overall creators. Connections are our favorite thing to create. We were brought together at different points in our lives with the purpose to ignite and unite our community. The way we have been called to do that is by using our varied artistic skills to merge history together in a way that uplifts our community and increases the level of positive energy we create. We love to travel and as people of color, we have found it difficult to do so in a comfortable and safe manner at times. The amount of research and sifting through reviews to find a safe place to be young, black, and free is tedious and racist at the least.
Back in 2016, I was driving back from vacation in Florida with a car full of my closest friends. I was feeling the Bern so I had a Bernie Sanders sticker on the back bumper of my orange car. Out of nowhere a large Ford F-150 with monster truck tires and a Confederate flag the same size started revving up and getting closer to my bumper. Then sped up and swerved around to the passenger side of my vehicle matching my speed and sporadically veering over to push me off this two-lane rural road. I slammed on my break to make some distance between us and drove 45 for the next hour until I felt safe enough to stop at a franchise gas station and breathe again.
That was in this generation. Not the 1960s, 50s, 40s, 30s, I could really go on all day with the history of racism in this country. While I was in college, I had a professor mention a book to me, a green book, called the Negro Motorist Green Book that I found to be so fascinating. I’ve always had a love for history but I gained my research chops working as a museum interpreter at the Atlanta History Center. I gained a deeper level of a connection to my ancestors through channeling a character I created while I was there. So once I found out about this book I had to know more and then I wanted to know what happened to the places in this book and the families that owned these establishments.
Here’s a short Green Book 101 summary, since we’ve found that a lot of people haven’t heard of it beyond the misinformed film that came out last year. Even folks from that era say they’ve heard of it but never seen one or thought it may be a myth built off the dreams of black people. I find it fascinating because it’s like the first Yelp reviews for black people before the internet.
In 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a United States Postal Worker, and Harlem-based writer wrote the first annual edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book. During this time it was common for people of color to be traveling and come across sundown towns, we weren’t allowed to be in after dark, or hotels, gas stations, and diners that wouldn’t serve us solely for being melaninated. It made traveling extremely uncomfortable and unsafe so Mr.Green decided to do something about it and created this book that became a safe haven for black people. But what happened to those diners, barbershops and family homes willing to rent a room in very small towns that opened their doors to those travelers in need? What happened to their families and do they know their legacy of resilience and heroic rebellion against Jim Crow?
One day we were sitting in our apartment, tired from working at our unfulfilling jobs, and we realized we literally worked just to be able to afford to live in this apartment which was fueling someone else’s dreams. That this home wasn’t really ours and that we didn’t want to fall into the pattern of living our lives paycheck to paycheck looking forward to our next planned vacation. We wanted our lives to feel like we live on vacation and we wanted to spread that feeling to others until things started to change in this world. So we decided, right there in our living room that we were going to buy a bus and turn it into a mobile home. We had a plan, we were going to wait until our lease ended but the ancestors wanted it to happen much faster apparently.
Our next door neighbor’s water heater had a leak and it was on the wall in our living room. It created a mold infestation that made the apartment uninhabitable. Once we realized it, we refused to pay rent until they had someone come inspect and remove it. Instead of having someone take care of it or allow us to be released from the lease they opted to instead evict us. We went to court and came to the agreement that we move out in one week. So we sold most of our things and packed up the rest to move back to Columbus, closer to Rico and I’s roots here and Love’s roots in Twiggs County / Macon area.
When we got to talking about our communities, not even 3 hours outside of the metropolitan area of Atlanta, we realized a pattern. They were on the decline. People are killing each other for fun out here in Columbus. You can’t take your kids to carnivals and other places where there will be a mass of black people without the fear of a shooting. There is poverty and food deserts so our people are hurting to provide healthy food for ourselves and our communities.
Does change cost money? That was the question we asked ourselves because of the excuse we had made time and time again for not doing something was because we couldn’t afford it. We don’t have the money to do x, y, and z. We just said F it one day. Why don’t we just reach out to people and talk to them about what our goals are? Maybe they will be willing to support our cause of uplifting our community through Art.
We hosted our first event as the Nomiads and exchanged $0 between participants. We had tables and chairs donated, a food truck, DJ equipment, a photo booth background promoting the eight vendors in attendance, two photographers in addition to 4 phenomenal poets. The venue location was Five Star Auto Detailing, a dope black-owned detail spot in Phenix City Alabama. The owner, Jay, is mad supportive of people that want to do something positive for the community and has been working with us in exchange for paintwork on the inside and outside of the building. Sticker Me Now, a local vinyl shop, was willing to donate two backdrops, t-shirts, stickers, and many words of encouragement in exchange for promotion online and word of mouth. We didn’t have to have stacks to create something positive for the community.
We had 50 attendees the first time around and every vendor made at least one sale. If we can do that in our community that’s possible in any community. We just have to use our Network and figure out ways we can benefit each other and come together on a collective goal. Many of the businesses we supported were our friends, Kesa of Heirtage Socks, Diggy of Gimme Em Laces Vintage Wear, Tor of Get Up N Glam, and JaCory of Insane Video Graphics. We are healers and creators in the full sense of the word. As Nomiads, one of our goals is to uplift the communities we visit as we uncover the history of those heroes that provided safe haven for our ancestors during the early era of Jim Crow. We believe we can do that by being the conduit for more connections to occur through art.
What role has luck (good luck or bad luck) played in your life and business?
I don’t believe in luck, as much as I believe in spirituality and resilience. I pull from the strength of my ancestors and the Orisha to help fuel me as I’m going on this journey. For me resilience is a multi-faceted characteristic; it includes consistency, never giving up, and keeping your focus. That’s what sets a person up to have “good luck”, in my opinion, it’s more about generating the energy and taking consistent action that manifests positive outcomes. One aspect that we have had to stay particularly patient about is our financial status, we all have experienced poverty in our own ways and weren’t equipped with financial literacy growing up so we are having to learn that on the back end. Our parents never learned about saving, investing, and making their money work for them instead of the other way around. That’s part of the exploration surrounding the school bus turned mobile home concept. What does financial freedom look like for black people in America? We want to do the work to find out. Apart of our life work is relearning what existence looked like for our people before colonialism and figuring out how to uplift us now, from right where we are.
We are willing to step outside the box to see another perspective in order to reach a goal. When I see RVs, skoolies, or van life media it doesn’t center around people of color which didn’t make sense to me. I feel like the skoolie lifestyle could be a great way to get rid of debt and live a life that’s truly free.
We are currently working on a crowdfunding campaign to garner support from the community as we embark on this epic endeavor of uncovering positive black history across the country. Our goal is to raise enough money to buy a bus, renovate it into a mobile live-in studio, and travel North and South America as healers, Griots, and community advocates. We’ve grown out of the pride associated with being afraid to ask for help. The way we see it, the success of one ensures the success of another. As long as we continue to sow into each other with positivity, our community will continue to thrive.
Contact Info:
- Website: dirtysouthspring.splashthat.com
- Phone: 770-737-1686
- Email: nomiads.travels@gmail.com
Image Credit:
Damian Lockhart, Sha’Tori Larkins-Graham
Getting in touch: VoyageATL is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
