Blog

Sunu – Our

I took my first trip to Africa. It still feels like a novel and mysterious and holy thing to utter. The door of no return greeted me with the loving words of the Senegalese people.

“Welcome home. With your return to this place we are transcending the understanding of the colonizers. No longer is this the door of no return because you and so many more of our people have come back to this place. Perhaps generations later, but still, here you are, shining.” 

At that place on Goree Island I learned that they sent the slaves who rebelled and wouldn’t break to Haiti and Jamaica. And just like that I received contextualization for my identity. I come from rebels, I come from warriors. I come from the persistent, resilient overcomer.  I come from people who know and knew who they are and were and who will not allow me to forget who I have always been. 

Gal – Boat

In my travels to Dakar we attended Dak’art, a biennial arts festival whose theme for the year was “The Wake” based off of Christina Sharpe’s book “In The Wake” in which she coins the term “wake work” as the repetitive work we as black people must do to reclaim our identities in the wake of the violences of colonization, white supremacy, imperialism, patriarchy, capitalism and slavery.

Needless to say, the work we encountered was gut wrenching and necessary. Agitations toward a system of oppression, calls to come home into a remembrance of our pre-enslaved lineage, dreams for futurities not yet encountered. All of this and more decked the multitudinous rooms in L’ansien Palais de Justice and in buildings across the city of Dakar. 

I was perhaps most stricken by the resonance of the presence, the hereness, of the African diaspora. The ways in which we collectively turn an unflinching eye toward the harsh realities of our modern zeitgeist, while tenderly holding and nurturing the reality that transcends the zeitgeist into the eternal nature of the substantiality of our existence. Which is to say, the ways in which we confront our oppressors without forgetting our own identities that transcends language of blackness or, even, Americaness. 

Uncommon Sense

And still I must acknowledge my positionality as a first-generation Haitian-American. And the ways in which this positionality influences my understanding, my perspective, and my ability to relate. There is a voyeuristic principle that lives in the American gaze. A perspective that divorces us from the understanding that each human is, in fact, our sibling. Whether here or in Africa or anywhere else. A perspective that has one experiencing life out of their body as if watching a movie or play rather than directly engaging, relating and thus, transforming and maturing into the beings we were meant to become. It is this perspective that allows such falsities as the inability to change to run rampant in our internal narrative. When change is in fact a founding principle in all of creation. This delusion allows for hopelessness in the midst of darkness to settle in, as we succumb to the false reality that nothing will change, that history will always repeat itself. And indeed it will, if we continue to allow voyeurism and a theoretical abstract approach to take the seat of honest relation. 

This fact is perhaps best imagined in the image of our Air Bnb in comparison to the home of our tour guide and dear, new friend and family Abdoul Sow. Our Bnb was beautiful, it had a lawn, which in Dakar, is unheard of. It also had gates and a 24hour guard on duty. It remained oddly still in time in the midst of a bustling city.

Compared to Abdoul’s home in a suburb of Dakar where most people live. The doors wide open, people running in and out of each other’s houses, unannounced. One can imagine how one is surrendered to the flow of life in such an environment. How one is not shielded from either calamity nor great connection. And how one is ever in the pulse, the stream, the sea of life itself.

The sterilized, gated environment, depicting a false image of life, is what we are used to. But life itself is messy, arrives unannounced, and is often out of our control, for the betterment and maturation of our humanity. 

Full Steam Ahead

Going to Senegal was just the insemination point of my remembrance. I eagerly anticipate what this seed will sprout.

Even now, ancestors and predecessors call my name. As I walk this path, I feel myself walking on firmer and firmer ground, rooted and grounded in a love that transcends the world as we have known it. And even as the ground gives way to tide and land becomes sea, I am more confident in my vessel because I am learning who is on this ship.