Source: PYMCA / Getty
The pandemic lockdown hasn’t slowed Noname down one bit. This week, the Chicago native revealed that she’s building an official brick-and-mortar headquarters for her “Noname Book Club.”
According to The Grio, the announcement first appeared on Instagram Stories where she shared images of an empty retail space undergoing construction on Monday (March 1).
“Everything provided in this space will be FREE,” she explained on Instagram. “We service the community. We cannot wait for Biden or any other white supremacist political to provide for the people. Capitalism doesn’t end by itself. We have to start building a worker-led solidarity economy. The government would rather bomb Somalia than pay your rent.”
In another photo, the rapper shared that the physical space will provide political education classes, book drives, a radical community library, food drives, book club meet up, tent drives, free art shows, and free film screenings for the community.
i love @noname so much 🥲♥️ pic.twitter.com/z7ifo0CSPv
— sam (@vegansomali) March 2, 2021
The Noname Book Club has come a long way since its origins from a smoking session when the rapper, born Fatimah Warner, was really high while talking to fans on Twitter about a book she was reading.
“I was reading this book called Cooperation Jackson about cooperatives, specifically one in Jackson, Mississippi, and someone tweeted me ‘Yo, let’s be pen-pals, we’re reading the same book,’” Noname said In her interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show With Trevor Noah last year. “I was high and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I should create a book club,’ so yeah, I created a book club. I smoke a lot of weed.”
At the end of every month we’ll be taping a podcast to discuss the books!
— Noname Book Club (@NonameBooks) July 14, 2019
Since then, the organization has blossomed into a community outreach program and an activist network with over 172,000 Twitter followers and local chapters in cities across the country, including Washington, D.C., San Antonio, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston.
There’s also a Patreon page that provides a tiered subscription plan for fans to subscribe to their preferred membership level. Profits earned from the platform help fund the book club’s efforts, including the newly erected headquarters.
In the past, Noname is mostly known for appearing in headlines from her critical hot takes on high-profile figures and government policies instead of her music and poetry. For instance, last month she refused to join the soundtrack for the Fred Hampton biopic Judas & The Black Messiah because the film told the story from the informant’s perspective while failing to depict his “radical communist politics” accurately.
it was shot beautifully, the acting was amazing. but it’s a movie about an informant. fred is secondary and his radical communist politics are centered, at all.
— 🌱 (@noname) February 9, 2021
During the release of Black is King the rapper called out Beyoncé for creating an African-centric project that exploited people on the “continent whose daily lives are impacted by u.s imperialism.”
She also went viral after going toe-to-toe with J. Cole after the rapper called her out on “Snow On Tha Bluff,” which was a direct response to her tweets against the rapper.
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