Love Letter to a Parallel and Proud People, the Falastin

I am perpetually inspired at the myriad of ways you resist absolution of your community, refuse to concede to osmosis, and rebuke the false narratives about your self determination. Your multigenerational struggle for freedom to live, love, work, & commune in your homelands mirrors my own. My people's right to self determination, autonomy, and the practice of our Ancestral cultures have been shackled, policed, pillaged, forced, criminalized, abused, and misconstrued. For 400 years, a contingency of my people have resisted in the same ways as you. While many of us have integrated into the dominant culture, drank the proverbial Kool-Aid and disavowed our history and the potential to win on our own terms, we, proud Africans of many tribes, displaced to the western hemisphere, still exist and thrive. This is the community I belong to. My blood family and chosen family. We stand ready to build a new world with you, Falastin. With your children, babas, mamas, aunties, uncles, sisters, brothers, niblings. 

I look forward to walking your land with you. Learning about what you grow to feed your families and what you grow that sustains the rest of the environment, alongside your needs. Conversing over a plate of molokhaiya and tasting what I imagine are the finest olives in the world. We can, and we will, regrow a world where our people can thrive. Where we can learn from each other's wisdom and devise and practice familial and governance systems that honor our Ancestors, celebrate our differences, ensure that our people have ways to learn who they are and how they can honor their needs and life's purpose while contributing to their community, and that deal with conflict and harm holistically. 

I am committed to ensuring our survival and that we thrive. As your sister, my heart and Spirit hurts to see you under siege by Israel and their international allies. I never imagined I would witness a genocide in my lifetime. The degradation of land and waterways. The blocking of aid to those whose resources have been stolen, controlled, and obliterated. This assault requires a strong spiritual commitment and faith in karmic justice, the bolstering of our minds and hearts with history re-membered by those who have endured, and material resources to sustain our bodies. My community wishes to send you prayers and funds to support your survival and the fight to rebuild your homeland. We stand with you, fight for the same causes, and know that oppressive regimes and empires are not insurmountable. We have seen the toppling of states that elect to bleed its people and degrade the Earth. The ones we resist today are on the same path. 

Keep the faith Falastin, you have allies in African people, an ally in me. We organize, rally resources, and vision for a greater world than this. Mama Assata Shakur’s chant echoes in my spirit, 

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom,

It is our duty to win.

We must love and support one another;

We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

One Month in the Upstate - Homemaking in South Carolina

This is not a Thanksgiving/gratitude post (albeit I have much to be thankful for, I won't do that in the name of a holiday set up to honor revisionist history).

This is an acknowledgement.

An acknowledgement that I have lived in Upstate South Carolina for a little over one month with the support and love of family, Ancestors, colleagues, friends, and the land holding me down.

Acknowledgement of the oaks, cypresses, firs, and the Blue Ridge mountains, of learning from those connected to them. Of the red clay soil I've dragged into my house on the edges of my jeans. Laden with the ghosts of time, Spirits from long-ago who toiled on the land Clemson University was erected.

Mugolio syrup from a friend who is the husband of my sisterfriend. A gift to my body and soul, composed of my oldest Ancestors on this continent, the pine tree. Flowing through my veins, I feel wrapped in love, gathered with joy at my return. The pines were indeed my first friends in life and spoke and played with me in my grandma's yard in Lake City, South Carolina.

My Egungun

I think of my friend's family and his community's estrangement from their homeland in Palestine daily. Their olive trees, their mallow plants, and the memories of their ways of being which are imprinted on the land they have been forcibly removed from time after time after time. The necessity of carrying the tools of memory, adaptation, and conservation to re-home inside of you, with community. The pain and fury of being denied the choice to go where you’re called (or remain where you’re rooted).

So much and so many have returned, transitioned, or been displaced. To their first home, an adopted land to integrate into as a home, or the realm of the Ancestors. It has been one month since I've returned to an old home, in a new region. The great pine elder that beckoned me to agriculture for liberation's sake, Baba Oduno Tarik, has also responded to the call home. He would call to Black people, on the campus of Howard University (and probably many other universities), at the festivals and conferences, on the streets of the DMV, and request a response. It was a call to investigate, a call to commit yourself in very specific ways to expanding back into the ecosystems we denigrated. A call to authentic reconnection, a call he gave unabashedly. He had many, many students respond in various ways. I call Baba Oduno's name, in honor of his transition home to his Ancestors and in acknowledgement of the catalyst he was for my own return home.

To be Indigenous to a place is not only to be a resident for 75, 125, 400 years. You can (and many are) still a guest even after several generations of living somewhere. It is to deepen a relationship with the place's many inhabitants and its foundations over the years. To know it intimately, love it, grapple with it, grow and change with and because of it. Cook, eat, and imbibe from it. Carry out rituals, using parts of yourself and parts of this place, that lay claim to who you are, who your people are, why & how you be. All further entwining you with the ecosystem. That is my process of homemaking. I am in the nascent stages of it in a less foreign land.

I call the names of the places and people that led me to this next chapter, to the formation of a new constellation of critical connections.  

I respond by living each day with curiosity and openness to the newness.