Queen Goddess {Best Selling Author}

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WALTER MICHOT/MIAMI HERALD STAFF 01/03/07 ============================================================ =============================================== ============================================================ =============================================== AT HOME: Queen Goddess, an author, poet, and natural hair stylist, holds a copy of her book, 'The Dark Sides of a Woman.'
There are photos of Malcolm, Martin and Marley. A poster that lists all the great black inventors. Photos of Africa.
Plenty of posters, too, of the various ways that hair can be tamed in its natural state.
This is the place where Goddess Queen Princess Laneisha U-Ahk -- known affectionately to many as Queen Goddess -- twists the locks of South Florida's growing community of natural hair enthusiasts, those who shun chemicals and hot combs and prefer twists and dreadlocks.
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CLIENTS
-- include Miami City Commissioner Michelle Spence-Jones -- are reflective of the region's multi-ethnic heritage: Panamanians, African Americans, Jamaicans, Dominicans and Cubans. She was once crowned the best locks-twister by the alternative weekly, The Miami New Times.
''Queen is just a very special human being, with unusually good vibes, with an amazing entrepreneurial spirit that should be encouraged,'' says Spence-Jones.
She is a single mother to 7-year-old Tykima Zawadi Gyasi and 16-year-old RasJahwara Alimayu, a student at William H. Turner Tech with tall talents. He's had small roles in several movies and television shows. He models, interns with the city of Miami Beach television station and is studying television/film production.
Queen Goddess, 44, Harlem-bred, Brooklyn-raised, stumbled innocently into the world of being a ....loctician.''
The intricacies of hair are not her only calling, though. Queen Goddess is also known for her passion for the oppressed, for women, for organic foods and for her fervent belief that blacks must embrace their proud heritage.
''My goal is reclaiming what we once were, our ancient great heritage, to inspire and encourage black people of color,'' she says. It's the reason she had her name officially changed years ago. ============================================================ ===========================================
She's also an author.
INSPIRATION
Her collection of short stories, The Dark Sides of a Woman, published this month and available at Barnes & Noble and at www.thedarksidesofawoman.com, explores topics from lust, love, racism, betrayal, domestic abuse and incest.
''My goal with this book is to inspire self-esteem. To uplift women . . . '' she says.
Her fictional stories have inevitably been shaped by the conversations she's heard perched atop the stool from which she twists away countless locks. Shaped, too, by some of the not-so-sunny experiences she's encountered since her move here.
It is not that she, a black woman, touched by the civil rights movement, who grew up around the firebrand speeches of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers, has not known racism in other places -- or faced tense moments or plain rudeness because of cultural divisions.
Indeed, she is fluent in Spanish, she says, because of it. She was with a friend on a New York City subway years ago when her friend overheard a nearby group of young women complaining about black women and vowing to spit on the women as they exited the train. The friend spoke Spanish and warned her just in time.
....I vowed from that day that I would learn to speak Spanish.''
It has proved a survival tool in Miami, where Goddess says language too often divides people unnecessarily.
''I'm routinely ignored in a store if the clerks are Spanish speakers -- until I speak in Spanish,'' she said.
Queen Goddess' experience is, unfortunately, sometimes a part of the reality of living in Miami, says friend Arianne Traverso, 26, a Peruvian American. Traverso, a graphic designer, is bilingual and says her company routinely relies on her Spanish-speaking skills.
''There's a huge advantage to speaking Spanish here, but I don't think Queen or anyone else should be disrespected if they don't,'' says Traverso. ....I think we can all benefit if we try to learn each other's language.'' ============================================================ ==================================
GETTING INTO HAIR
Queen's passion for hair started two decades ago.She stopped adding chemicals to her own hair in 1986: ''It was time, plus it was breaking, falling out all over the place. Going natural felt like the way to go,'' she says.She soon set up a cultural shop at a local mart in Harlem, selling incense and bracelets and wrote freelance for the hip-hop magazine F.E.L.O.N -- From Every Level Of Neighborhood.Then Ras' father, a Jamaican who Ras says believes ''having 15 jobs is a requirement,'' asked her to manage his culture shop/natural hair salon in Brooklyn while he established a similar shop in Miami's Liberty City.She had no experience -- beyond styling her own hair -- but a customer asked her to do his hair so, 'I figured, ..Why not?' ''He was impressed. So much so that he asked her for fliers, anticipating requests.Business grew, she took a few courses, vowed to shun the black gel and beeswax often used in the trade for more natural products like aloe vera and shea butter.Change was in the wind. New York's spirit, that energy that makes people walk faster than they need to, changed soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she said. It was time for a new beginning. Miami seemed like the perfect place. She moved with the children in 2003.Queen says she is less bitter about the slights than she is about the missed opportunities, the conversations that never materialize when language is used as a wall to discourage dialogue.And, so, as she weaves the locks of her clients, her conversations invariably touch on the ways in which Miami can learn to celebrate its differences, learn to speak with each other and how she can participate in that dialogue.Ultimately, ''I'm a sister about world peace and love,'' she says. A sister who wants people to read and learn about about the painful things that women -- irrespective of their nationality -- have experienced. ============================================================ ====================================== Author/Poet/Hair Stylist ============================================================ =================================================== ============================================================ ===================================================
Queen GoddessQueen Goddess has impressed many people with her talent as a spoken word artist and a natural hair stylist. Now through a compilation of short stories and poetry, she is prepared to introduce the public to her first book, The Dark Sides of a Woman.Goddess credits the multi ethnic environment in which she was raised with sharpening her world view. “When you live in New York, you live with everybody. I’ve been around all races of people,” explains the New York native. “Living in New York you’re like in a melting pot. You’re around everybody.”However, once Goddess moved to Florida, she was in for a bit of culture shock. “There was a whole different mindset of the women [in Miami] than in New York. Miami has different vibrations. It was like we went back in time,” she says.Inspired to uncover the struggles between women of different races, Goddess decided to record her observations on paper. In the midst of working on her project, Miami was hit by Hurricane Wilma, leaving Goddess without electricity. “We were without lights for about three weeks. [When] one of my clients got lights, I would go to her house and charge my laptop, and [then] I would come back home. At night we would have candles or flashlights and I would just write. That showed me that [I could] weather any storm,” she explains. “You have to go from darkness to light, and in order to get to the light, you have to get to the root of the darkness.”
============================================================ ============================================== –jamana jamison rolling out magazine 04/03/07 ============================================================ ==============================================

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