When speaking of White people and what they have done to the world using the power they possess, Mr Baldwin suggests that wielding White power would hurt more than - dare I say - slavery. Losing love for our children = losing love for ourselves, and a slave master is willing to enslave his own child for profit. If he didn't, the entire system would collapse on itself, and "chaos" would reign free.
A Black woman slave able to birth a master's child and then call that child a free man would be catastrophic to their way of life, and also it would put some kind of value on a Black woman and her ability to bear a Black and White baby as she is an exotic desire to her master.
Mrs. Giovanni at this time suggests that there is a danger, but not that it is definite - and this scares me. I believe that the danger is definite, and as we have seen since forever, the seeds sown by our oppressors have reaped innumerable fruit. So fruitful that we, as Black people, are the ones continuing to re-plant, maintain, and harvest. We have for sure gone down the wrong path, and I will be damned if I ever believe it to be our fault, but we do have to be aware of the consequences.
Ohh religion, religion, religion! How thou has infected and given hope and strength to generations.
A catch-22.
A paradox.
A hoax.
A community pillar.
A guide for the home and family systems.
A hangman's noose.
This is the one thing that could be argued to have failed in the destruction of Black people. It seems to be both a failure and a success.
It is religion as a concept that became a social system and then a way of life.
It enslaved and freed our people, cut us off from all that we knew, and gave us "new" knowledge and a mint identity.
I don't believe I was ever religious, I wasn't even raised through religion. The mention of God saving us or our lives depending on Him were never words used in my household. I find that funny because my older sisters were raised religiously by my grandmother and, sometimes, my mother. They happen to be religious and believe that God has a plan that we are somehow going to love when the good parts come into play, or when we hear the reasons for our suffering on judgment day, and they pray to him whenever and in their way. Compared to other Christian folk, they are semi-religious or even somewhat wishful to be Christian. They don't go to church and they read the Bible semi-regularly, they don't pray traditionally or urge their children to pray. But they do have a digital Bible and they post quotes around the Bible to their social media spaces, they audibly ask God for strength and they use phrases like, "Modimo watseba!" - translating to "God knows!"
Somehow all of it just feels like family, like my family. All the stories of when they were kids ditching church because our grandmother forced them every Sunday, the fact that our mother grew to be the same semi-wishful Christian my sisters currently are, all the times I tried to be Christian and pray to God and read the Bible - all of it are things that I would never change about my family and the communities I grew up in. Just these parts of my life are evidence of how Christianity gave us a medium of expression, a place where we could lay our burdens and not feel like a burden, a point of strength, permission to be weak and cry, a Father to guide us in our ongoing epidemic of fatherlessness, and a way to raise our children and run our homes, a way to smuggle information through communities, a signal for the execution of a plan, a reason to wake up and dress up on Sunday morning, a reason to make Sunday lunch with all the family, something that reminds you of gratitude for all the things you hold dear and gives hope and momentum to continue - all of this because and while we were put in a position of being less than human, less than an animal, less than a living being. Who would not appreciate something like that when they have less than nothing?
With all of that said, I will not naively sit here and make it seem as if we did not possess tight-knit families with social communities and even more before Europeans and Arabs conquered Africa and deeply oppressed all of its people. I don't think religion, but something flexible, free, and interpersonal. What my story is trying to prove is that we, as Black people, once again created a space for ourselves and gave life to the White man's religion. A tool meant to oppress us, we made it into the tool that fights for us and reminds us of our humanity. Now, granted, religion is a step down from our freedom of expression but it is a step out of us feeling and treating ourselves as less than a people. We have used religion to hide ourselves and loved ones, used it to feed nations, used it to house families, used it to aid revolutions. We continuously create and exhume energies that the world lives and thrives off of. And as much as I am not religious, I love what Black people have created through religion.
The music, the prayers, the witchcraft, and magic that heal people and gives hope to generations. We are truly phenomenal beings, and more powerful than any God who wishes to be feared and/or worshipped.
We have more love than any being and the capacity of our love seems to be endless. It's heartbreaking to be sympathetic and have understanding for your oppressor and - as Mr Baldwin put it - their spiritual disaster. The action of acknowledging them as humans that did wrong instead of things or monsters that lack all kinds of human relatedness is exhausting and forces you to look at your own self, to see your monsters and your wrongdoings.
For someone of my generation, we may begin to feel pity for the price White people will eventually have to pay for their wrongdoings, some even use words like 'past' and 'rainbow nation'. It makes my blood run cold, but it also moves in sync with it because from what I understand, being Black is to forgive. We give what we didn't have, and we look to create good for all.
The love we possess for ourselves - what do we say to that?
How are we supposed to react to love when we carry so much trauma and represent the successes of our oppression?
How do we love our fathers and mothers for not being able to be the heroes in our stories?
How do we forgive? Forgive our reactions, forgive who we have become amid our reactions and oppression, forgive our rejection of healing and love, forgive our rejection of others healing and loving, forgiving our rejection of change caused by our revolutions, forgiving our anger towards our revolutions, forgiving our inactions to cause change for the better because of the fear instilled in us that grew to be us, forgive ourselves for toeing the master's line, forgive ourselves for giving away our children, forgive ourselves for abandoning our children, forgive ourselves for becoming monsters in our family's eyes and hearts.
How do we forgive the innumerable counts of crimes committed to us and by us? Spiritual, emotional, physical, psychological.
How do we live with the knowledge of the past not holding us back in our present and tainting our possible futures?
How do we arm ourselves with history without burdening our children with it?
How do we find pride in all that we have become and created using our dark times in history? How do we strengthen our love?
Yorumlar