Posts tagged afro world view
finding and pambana
[re]claiming revolutionary musings
Kwame Turé (formerly Stokley Carmichael)…
answered his phone with the greeting: “Ready for the Revolution!”
i have a lot of memories of being indoors and outdoors. i remember climbing trees in harare and planting maize for the summer. i remember sitting as a teenager on sidewalks and playing in the sprinklers of inwood park in nyc to keep cool in the sticky heat. i remember my grandfather telling me stories of the kkk and taking over the farm my great grannie had been sharecropping in virignia since the days our people were fighting enslavement. visiting my father’s family in rural kenya for the first time since he was exiled and eating small sweet bananas and sleeping under mosquito nets, unlike all my cousins who new how to live in their home without them. hearing story of ovens dug into the ground by friends’ relatives in méxico. spritzing at plants in harlem apartments. there are many many reasons why us Afro folk have had a tenuous relationship with the land: being taken away from our homeland on this continent or that; being forced to work on the land, land stolen from Brown folk, to benefit the whites; being commodified just as land was within oppressive capitalist sytems; being denied the fruit of our labours on the land, or time to walk leisurely; fleeing and fearing our footprints in the soil; and also dreaming of flying home; singing in the fields; sharing ancient afroknowledges of cultivating rice, being part of growth; learning from Brown folk of the berries and moons. understanding the problematic connections made by the euroworldview- we are not more natural or animal. this is us exploring that Black people overstand ancient and deep meaning, both metaphysical and material, within the earth. the toxic worldview constructs lies of dichotomies and divisions: human/nature, white/Black, man/woman, intelligence/animal brutishness, beauty/ugliness, to maintain toxicity and domination. in Brown and Black worldviews there is the radical to-the-root-to-the-stars understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings and elements-creating new spaces in which the non human such as plants, air, stars, and all humans are valued and important.
Portrait of Audre Lorde by Robert Alexander, 1983. Jackie Kay writes,
Audre Lorde dropped the y from Audrey when she was still a child so she could be Audre Lorde. She liked the symmetry of the es at the end. She was born in New York City in 1934 to immigrants from Grenada. She didn’t talk till she was four and was so short-sighted she was legally blind. She wrote her first poem in eighth grade. The Black Unicorn, her most unified collection of poems, partly describes a tricky relationship with her mother. “My mother had two faces and a frying pot / where she cooked up her daughters / into girls … My mother had two faces / and a broken pot /where she hid out a perfect daughter /who was not me”…
After her mastectomy, she chose not to have prosthesis, opting for asymmetry instead, and wore one dangling earring and one stud for unequal measure. From the little girl who loved those matching es, she’d come not exactly full circle but a revolution and a half.
(via darkjez)
Dust Tracks On a Road: liquornspice: notime4yourshit: This book is the first extensive survey...
This book is the first extensive survey of African-American gardening traditions in the rural South.
Richard Westmacott has recovered valuable data for those interested in African-American material culture and the history of vernacular gardens…
