By Carolyn Brown
For the Valley Advocate
Growing up in western Massachusetts, local musician and “artivist” Indë Francis, who performs mononymously as Indë, lacked role models who could help them understand their identities. Now, with their new album, they’re honoring elements of their life story and their path to becoming the Black queer role model they wished they’d had.
Indë’s new album, “Role Model,” will be released with a launch concert at Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity in Florence on Saturday, March 21 at 7 p.m.
“There were no queer Black people in my community, and there were hardly any Black people,” they said. “It was just my dad, who himself is an immigrant, so I didn’t have anyone to learn about African American culture from. It was really isolating, and I had to go through a lot of cultural and identity strife to find myself.”
In a high school English class, for example, Indë referred to a piece of text written in African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as “grammatically incorrect,” to which their teacher replied that AAVE uses its own grammatical structure, distinct from that of standard English.
