Learning Our Writes/Rites/Rights

A Black History Month Meditation that will Probably Be Tomorrow's Sermon

The African that learned to read and write English was not originally dangerous, because they only read white instructions and wrote within white ruled lines and called their co-captives by their white-ledgered names. But Africans, the African-Extracted, and the African-Enslaved in the Americas, who began to describe something called "Africa" in something called "English", began to find and create words like "systemic" and "inside" and "outside" and "memory" and "pre-coloniality", that described the intellect, spirit, leadership, gender, power, kinship, tribe, culture, astronomical, and other ways of knowing before when "before" wasn't bound by the Transatlantic Slave Trade, or understanding that oppression always starts with disorientation and near-drowning, "before" is also pre-life and after-life and third time and double-timed and seeds stuck in teeth, that we contraband and crop. You see, when Africans began being the word "dirt" because it reminded them of home, colonial forces gave it negative meaning, said "dirty". Oh and then "post-coloniality" and one day if not in body, in thought, in prayer, or in word, we would always know that we have been sending a word back— have never been linguistically unlinked from the continent, but when within English we remembered, "We used to call that love"; When we knew and felt the vibrating, the attunement and not the atonement with the Onomatopoeias — The God Who Has To Become The Formation of The Word — The One Who Has To Shape The Godself By Imitation of the Sound We Make — The cries, the laments, the joys, the orgasm, the yell, the scream, the holler; The One Who Is Both Referent and Reverent; Yes, then we dangerous. The mastery of English has never been about impressing upon the oppressor that their oppression is still in our mouths. The mastery is in the confoundment, the obfuscation, the gib and jive, and the glossolalia. Yes, the move from mimetic to mnemonic. Now you can't shut us up. Or take the pens out of our hands or the words out of our mouths. We write our way back. We write our way ‘til we remember our way.  We write until something click. And something unlocks. We write until we are unwritten.