Giwwe dat o'

Cultural Workers...in the world the slavers made.

Cultural workers intent on laying the groundwork for an African future need only start by stating the historical truth: the history we have shared with Europe has been a tale of pillage, massacres, dehumanization.  That Europeans want to interpret it as a civilizing mission and an aid expedition to rescue us from barbarism is natural.  What is unnatural is that we should want to repeat their take on our history.  There was a time when African intellectuals who knew our history were too beaten down to speak up, and when those trained to speak in the world the slavers made knew only how to repeat their teachers' words.
   Now some of us have finished our mimetic training, made contact with the silenced voices uttering our history, and are ready to tell our story on the basis of our historical truth.  A politician speaking truth in the present dispensation will quickly be helped to a premature rendezvous with our ancestors.  Europeans will plan the murder, and since we are poor and do not know how to make money from creative work, they will find many of us willing to execute it for a few thousand dollars, francs, marks or pounds.  Cultural workers do not pose a clear and present danger to our oppressors.  If our work is any good, we will suffer only the milder kinds of murder: character assassination, financial destruction.  It's a price cultural workers throughout history have paid for real work.  If we wish to do the necessary work, we would be foolish to want to avoid the consequence.  The best we might do is to create networks guaranteeing improved chances of our survival.  That is what all living beings do.
   What, with this focus on historical truth, might cultural workers contribute to the construction of an African identity?  Our contribution to the future might begin with a hard-eyed look at the shaping structures we inhabit.  It is possible to date these structures.  It is necessary that they be acknowledged as dated.  Beyond that, we need to think of the nature of human movement on this continent before it was divided up into the slave pens Europeans called colonies then, and unimaginative Africans are urged to call nations now, to our constant detriment.
~p240, The Eloquence of the Scribes, Ayi Kwei Armah

Process of Less Hoarsely

"As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely."

~Frantz Fanon

You Still Watching Lindsay?

"Oh, you don't know, man?  About they programs?
You still watching Lindsay, you don't see that low hand?"

:)

Deprive It of Oxygen

"What can we do?

We can hone our memory, we can learn from our history.

We can continue to build public opinion until it becomes a deafening roar.
...We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair - and their allies - for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are.

We can re-invent civil disobedience in a million different ways. In other words, we can come up with a
million ways of becoming a collective pain in the ass.

When George Bush says "you're either with us, or you are with the terrorists" we can say "No thank you." We can let him know that the people of the world do not need to choose between a Malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs [ or Obamney-ia ].

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To
shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance,
our sheer relentlessness - and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones
we're being brainwashed to believe.

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling - their ideas, their version
of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way.

On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire
Porto Alegre, Brazil
January 27, 2003

Lamentations (Happy)

Happ.  He taught me how to make a frame from scratch...to sit and listen and where necessary gently even humorously bring in the history of a thing to the learning...to accept those younger than me...to respect those older and wiser than me.  He taught me to walk up and look...to laugh softly but in freedom.  He taught me that sometimes You must swim, and keep swimming and to remember where I came from.  He taught me how to tell a story...how to hold space for, ready that African/Native-point of emphasis; the learning-moment-of-say.  He taught me how to take curiosity of life and how to give it back.  Thank you grandfather.  Love and Peace.


Yes Jerusalem is lonely.

Fought As Well As They Could

"In 1730, for instance, newspaper accounts and a letter written by a Royal African Company agent at Cape Coast Castle all reported that the Africans rose and killed all but three of the sailors on board the Boston ship William.  No mention was made of the fate of the Africans, and although the vessel was later reported to have run aground at Anomabu, there is no reason to believe the victorious Africans did not either jump overboard or take the William's boats, ultimately getting ashore and reclaiming their freedom.  In January of 1747, a Rhode Island ship underwent a revolt off of Cape Coast Castle, and the entire crew was killed except for two mates who jumped overboard and swam ashore.  Taking its information about this revolt from a letter, one Boston newspaper wrote that "what became of the Vessel and Negroes afterwards the Letter does not mention."  Even though this incident occurred in a busy slaving shore, and it is not at all unreasonable to presume that at least some of the Africans succeeded in escaping inland.

…the possibility of revolt also helped earn Africans a grudging respect from those whose business it was to enslave them.  As one sailor was compelled to write of a revolt in 1790, after more than one hundred slaves had taken possession of a French slaver as it was at anchor off the African coast, "I could not but admire the courage of a fine young black, who, though his partner in irons lay dead at his feet, would not surrender, but fought with his billet of wood until a ball finished his existence.  The others fought as well as they could, but what could they do against firearms?"

 ~Eric Robert Taylor, If We Must Die (p. 135-6).

What could they do? ...they could fly away home & knew it.    Awo.

A man called "No. 3" and a woman called "No. 4"

"Norris kept a captain's log for his ovyage in the Unity from Liverpool to Whydah, to Jamaica, and back to Liverpool between n1769 and 1771.  A week after weighing anchor at Whydah and setting sail to cross the Atlantic, Norris noted that "the Slaves made an Insurrection, which was soon quelled with ye Loss [of] two Women."  Two weeks later the enslaved rose again, the women once more in the lead and therefore singled out for special punishment; Norris "gave ye women concerned 24 lashes each."  Three days later they made a third effort after several "got of their Handcuffs," but Norris and crew managed to get them back into their irons.  And the following morning they tried for a fourth time: "the Slaves attempted to force up ye Gratings in the Night, with a design to murder ye whites or drown themselves."  He added that they "confessed their intentions and that ye women as well as ye men were determin'd if disappointed of cutting off ye whites, to jump over board but in case of being prevented by their Irons were resolved as their last attempt to burnt the ship."  So great was their determination that in the event of failure they planned a mass suicide by drowning or self-incineration.  "Their obstinacy," wrote Norris, "put me under ye Necessity of shooting ye Ringleader."  But even this did not end the matter.  A man Norris called "No. 3" and a woman he called "No. 4," both of whom had been on the ship a long time, continued to resist and died in fits of madness.  "They had frequently attempted to drown themselves, since their Views were disappointed in ye Insurrection."

~Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship (p. 32).

The FOR REAL Don't Stop, Can't Stop, Won't Stop.  (BA homing impulse.) Awo.

Esteban Montejo (en Cuba). A man AGAIN.

"…hands were swollen.  I camped under a tree.  I stayed there no more than four or five days.  All I had to do was hear the first human voice close by, and I would take off fast.

I came to hide in a cave for a time.  I lived there for a year and a half. . ..I was careful about all the sounds I made, And of the fires.  If I left a track, they could follow my path and catch me.  I climbed up and down so many hills that my legs and arms got as hard as sticks.  Little by little I got to know the woods.  And I began to like them.  Sometimes I would forget I was a Cimarron, and I would start to whistle.  Early on I used to whistle to get over the fear.  They say that when you whistle, you chase away the evil spirits.  But being a Cimarron in the woods you had to be on the lookout.  I didn't start whistling again because the guajiros or the slave catchers would come.  Since the Cimarron was a slave who ahd escaped, the masters sent a posse of rancheadores after them.  Mean guajiros with hunting dogs so they could drag you out of the woods in their jaws.  I never ran into any of them.  I never seen any of those dogs up close.  They were trained to catch blacks…  When a slave catcher caught a black, the master or the overseer gave him an ounce of gold or more.

Truth is that I lived well as a cimarron, very hidden, very comfortable.  I didn't even allow other cimarrones to spot me: "cimarron with cimarron sells a cimarron."  For a long time I didn't speak a word to anyone.  I liked that tranquility.  …You live half wild when you're a cimarron.

I found out about the end of slavery from all the people shouting. . . They shouted, "We're free now."  But I wasn't affected.  To my mind, it was a lie…  When I came out of the woods I started in walking, and I met an old woman with two children in her arms.  I called to her from a distance, and when she came up to me I asked her: "Tell me, is it true that we're no longer slaves?"  She answered me: "No, son, now we're really free."  And, with that, as quickly as I became a cimarron… I stopped being a cimaroon.  And became myself…a man…again."

[In 1963 at the age of 103, Estaban Montejo recounted his experiences to Cuban writer and ethnologist Miguel Barnet.  Montejo had suffered the lash and toiled as a slave.  He had escaped into the wilderness and lived for years as a Cimmaron/Maroon, and had fought as a soldier in the Cuban war of independence.  His story is a rare and remarkable window into the history of Cuba.]

Struggle For, Even If Its Beauty

'...You will come back.  You will stay.  Before that the spirits and our ancestors will hold a great meeting to discuss the future of the world.  It will be one of the most important meetings ever held.  Suffering is coming.  There will be wars and famine.  Terrible things will happen.  New disease, hunger, the rich eating up the earth, people poisoning the sky and the waters, people going mad in the name of history, the clouds will breath fire, the spirit of things will dry up, laughter will become strange.'

   He stopped.  There was a long pause.  Then he continued, frightening me.

   'There will be changes.  Coups.  Soldiers everywhere.  Ugliness.  Blindness.  And then when people least expect it a great transformation is going to take place in the world.  Suffering people will know justice and beauty.  A wonderful change is coming from far away and people will realise the great meaning of struggle and hope.  There will be peace.  Then people will forget.  Then it will all start again, getting worse, getting better.  Don't fear.  You will always have something to struggle for, even if it is beauty or joy.'

~Famished Road, Ben Okri

Mi Hija: May You Understand

 "The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you." 
~Ben Okri, The Famished Road

the step beyond HIStory

Surrealism and Black African Art

The surrealist aspects of the African way of life, as well as the African implications of surrealism, have tended to be ignored for reasons already touched on.  Instead of the alienating dualistic intellectualization that usually defines the headlines of European social practice, black Africans enjoyed the presence of the practice of poetry throughout the totality of their traditional social life. In Africa, that is, the living experience of surreality has since prehistoric times enjoyed supremacy over its theoretical justification. In the Western world, however, surrealism is the result of a long philosophical, political, scientific and poetic struggle to recover what the traditional African has never lost.  A gainst all forms of indifference and misery, surrealism and black African art  remain irreducible examples in the development of the complete unfettering of the mind. Surrealism and black African art show that History’s last step—the step beyond History—coincides with a return to first principles, which is also a return to primordial glory, involving nothing less than the systematic and definitive liberation of the whole of human society and of Nature itself.

~Cheikh Tidiane Sylla

Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, no. 4 (1989) (original emphasis)

What Makes A King?

Woah all you nations

A question.

What makes a king?

What makes prospering?

ooh you rebellious

Evidence stands of events facts

Don't leave it unsung

Jah is merited

All eight names in atlas yoke

All earth descendants and influences

Him on earth who maintain the grid

Of togetherness

Specializing in snowballing perceptions

The gathering mass come tumbling

Witches and sorcerers they label them.

In immediate society

Look within

If it isn't true,

Then go fix the wrong way

You made people think.

Things worth of distance

As one gone with

Everlasting Contempt

And everlasting Glory

As they resurrecting in

The current model of excess to be living in

respect the indigenous people in a where they live

redeem the villainous infamy of how you rob and kill

as minimum obligation just freely give

as minimal redeem

please teach rethink

with whips who broke our names right out of our links

and broke civility to animal instinct.

The predetory instinct of take to win,

The seeds of jealousy cultivated,

And shut us galore born out this thing

What of the structure the ends constructed

Purpose full directives

For each one functioning

Soldiers of the long wall

To protect her in  eee ee

Just to protect her in

Selassie I the power of the holy trinity lives

He is.    He is.

Ooh you nations

A question,

What makes a king?

What makes a king?

Ooh you nations

What makes prospering

oooh you rebellious.

Don't leave it unsung

The Emperor is merited

All earth descendants

And influences

Him who on earth

Protect the grid

Its he who on earth protects the sociological grid

The how we are all

                                   related.

OOh all you nations

What makes a king

speak from the secret place of heart?

What makes a king?

What makes a king?

Repost: Praise Jah

No Ocean Bottom Community SIMILAR

IN HONOR OF AFRICAN ANCESTORS AT BOTTOM OF THE ATLANTIC

Vicissitudes Underwater Sculpture - Grenada, West Indies
Artist Jason de Caires Taylor, with Johanna Fernandez , Ari Merretazon and Tina Varick

yut ah.

Bread With Dignity (...to grow on liberated land awo, yuta)

Mental Sag: we ARE this.

 "WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS!"
Hmm.  (We are better than this.)
We are better than this?
Hypocrisy of the first order.
You are a part of we.  You are not better than this.
Greatest lesson of 'U.S. civil rights' activism: to be approximately right > exactly wrong
We are better than this?
You are exactly wrong.
You left these kids.  You left the community.
If not physically, then certainly Mentally.  You (left) leave it in your mind every day.
...and posters like this soothe your conscience that tells you it was not worth it
to follow the dream (hollow mock) taught to you (to pursue at the cost of yourself) by the not-We.
You didn't listen to your Ancestors.  (for they are only dead to you).

What are these kids doing?
What are they (who is a part of 'we') SAYING with their clothes?
Do you have a clue?  Have you taken a look?  (Yeah Yeah, jail culture blah blah blah...).
Try it yourself.  Try doing what they do.  Try to make your clothes look like they make.
Walk in their shoes.  For real.
Can you, you Fool?
What is happening?  You are making one body part longer, taller (spine, backbone)
at the expense of legs (legs -forward motion-are expendable).
In the society (of global 'no-love' power tradition) in which they walk (live), THEY FEEL SHORT.
THEY FEEL they've no BACKBONE.
Uprightness-Stability is even forsaken, they only want but to know BACKBONE: taller (human) feeling.

Do you now see what YOUR (civil rights & post civil rights generation) is working with?
Sankofa yourself.
The last (national) person/group to show us our backbone where our wishbone currently lies was MLK, Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (NOI and Tupac for a moment).  
The same powers that eliminated them know too that 'WE' seeing a picture of the Obama family is a milisecond of backbone 'feeling' in the deep desert of our wishbone lives. ...curbs the want to get TALLER.  

"UP YOU MIGHT RACE!" (Baba Garvey/Mama Harriet full-cry to us).
"We are better than this!" = "Up you sagging pants!" = all that you have to give?
Please.
How can you make that YOUTH feel TALLER (or tall enough) in and of himself?
Can you truly help him fight the meaning of the pants sag?
Or can't you see?  Can't you hear?  Or don't you want to?

Courage.   (the civil rights generation had PLENTY of this...if not misdirected).

Hear WE.  Hear 'your' kids.  YOU RAISE THEIR PANTS.  YOU RAISE THEIR IMAGE.
...and not with your fake ass education, fake ass jobs and fake as status.
You grinning American slave.
I bet you thought the billboard was a good investment of money.
(Was the money even yours? ...earned with clean hands?)
Your brain sag PUT the sag in their pants.
YOU tied up the youths feet (movement) with your POSING.
Can't blame them for saying F--- YOU and F--- YOUR 'BETTER'
in a way that no other younger generation has said to an older generation.

Its ok.

All of that is to say, if you love your own, (if you can love your 'we'), then LOVE THEM.

damn.




ref: http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/03/teach-negro-child-60-ways-to-despise.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2011/05/seen.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/07/energy-in-us.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/05/cuffs.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/04/sister-knowknew.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/03/ch-art-er-whey.html
http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/08/is-this-fair.html

Flight (for May Ayim r.i.p.p.)

Christ have mercy on all sleeping things!
From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road
to when i was a dog on these streets;
if loving these islands must be my load,
out of corruption my soul takes wings,
But they had started to poison my soul
with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl,
coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole,
so I leave it for them and their carnival --
I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road.
I know these islands from Monos to Nassau,
a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes
that they nickname Shabine, the patois for
any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw
when these slums of empire was paradise.
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.

~Derek Walcott (1984), The Schooner "Flight" -excerpt
(fist tap la)

HeLa = Selah. Awo.

The indispensable & immortal "Hela Gene" means Henrietta Lacks

Those who are dead are never gone,

they are in the breast of the woman,

they are in the child who is wailing,

and in the firebrand that flames.

The dead are not under the earth;

they are in the fire that is dying,

they are in the grasses that weep,

they are in the whimpering rocks,

they are in the forest, they are in the house,

the dead are not dead.

                                                ~Birago Diop

Happy Born Day MLK (King on Jerusalem Slim)

"We have the power to make the church that institution
that even the young people who feel temporarily separated from
and even get them to have a new loyalty
because they'll know that we're on the battle line for them.

And they'll come to see
that jesus christ was not a white man.
...christianity is not just a western religion.
We can make the church recapture it's authentic reign,
we have the power
to change America
and give a kind of new vitality
to the religion of jesus christ."

(don't be afraid...you and i were meant to die).

King On Ybp

Keep It On The (Download)

& one mo'gin (repost): http://bconx.blogspot.com/2010/03/teach-negro-child-60-ways-to-despise.html

Still Here

Still Here

I've been scarred and battered.

My hopes the wind done scattered.

Snow has friz me, sun has baked me.

     Looks like between 'em

     They done tried to make me

Stop laughing, stop loving, stop living-

     But I don't care!

     I'm still here!

~Langston Hughes