I love to see black men speaking….
“The Negro Digs Up His Past:” Archaeology and the Black Experience
University of Florida: The Institute of Black Culture
Black Thought Lecture Series
March 16, 2012
Glottal Stop
Here I sit, upset with grievance. You must understand how vulnerable I feel: like raw skin around the cuticle after it’s been picked and peeled and bitten from nervous habit or simply because it was flawed to begin with and had to be removed…but neither reason causes less pain when this flesh becomes exposed to the air, stung by wet, warm saliva. I want to argue with your reasoning and show you why it is unreasonable to have made yourself open to me. To make yourself a vessel/tomb in which I can encrypt my life, secrets, fears upon your boundless walls. This relationship’s founding principle is RECIPROCITY. I take the necessary preparations to make myself your vessel, to entomb you like a warm womb where you can also write upon my boundless walls…yet I am denied. Your grievance, just as, if not more complex as mine own, is for you to bare alone. And I stand back to assess the empty void of my expanses while also observing the delicate curvature of my encryption upon your inner walls. I am known while I do not deserve to know. I realize the selfishness in my thoughts: that I should have the audacity to be upset by grievance who does not wish to share their burden with me. Does not wish to allow me to be for them what they have been for me. Slashing marks through the (re) in our reciprocity. I reel back from the unintentional blow, feeling silly for even considering that I should be upset or slighted. I have written myself upon another’s wall while my insides lay barren…
Black History Month fact #13
The Game of Chess originates in Africa.
In Kemet, games were part of spiritual life. Their most popular game was Senat in which counters, or markers, were moved around a game board. Winning the game came by one player removing all of his/her pieces before the opponent did (Hawass,Tutankhamun, p235). It symbolizes the struggle between good and evil as well as stands for rebirth and resurrection. A wall painting on the tomb of the Egyptian queen Nefretari, wife of Ramses II (1304-1237 BC), shows her playing Senat^.
The game Senat originates from the Ethiopian game of Senterej. Dr. René Gralla has done an interesting piece on a version of chess called “Senterej” which originates in ancient Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Gralla contends:
Historians and experts in cultural studies always look towards India, Persia and Arabia – and some even turn to China, more recently – when they search for the origins of chess. But with regard to Africa it is a sobering fact that up to now the science of chess has stubbornly ignored that continent which is the cradle of mankind.
I’m sorry world.
(Source: kemetically-afrolatino)
After going down this list to check my own dependency upon these products, I am extremely happy to say that I DO NOT USE ANY OF THESE PRODUCTS!!! I’m proud of myself as someone who has become more health conscious due to my own weakened immune system (as I write I am combating my second to third fever of the school year). Also, as an avid science fiction reader, I believe that my lack of dependency upon these products has well prepared me for the economic Apocalypse heading our way: I’ve got my guns ready for the end of capitalism -____-
“my rights as a freeman were secured by my own right arm”
—William Parker
In 1851 this courageous ex-slave successfully led an armed band to drive off SLAVE CATCHERS in the town of Christiana (located in the FREE state of Pennsylvania)
Black people in the Diaspora are not people of African descent. We are Africans. White people are people of African descent.
—Mutabaruka and Runoko Rashidi (via africansunset)
IN COMMEMORATION OF OCTAVIA E. BUTLER
-This day marks the 6th year of her departure from this world, but I am almost sure she has written herself into an alternate universe…nothing is lost
“I’m a 48-year-old writer who can remember being a 10-year-old writer and who expects someday to be an 80-year-old writer. I’m also comfortably asocial — a hermit in the middle of Los Angeles — a pessimist if I’m not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
I’ve had ten novels published so far: Patternmaster, Mind of my Mind, Survivor, Kindred, Wild Seed, Clay’s Ark, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago, and Parable of the Sower, as well as a collection of my shorter work, entitled Bloodchild. I’ve also had short stories published in anthologies and magazines. One, “Speech Sounds,” won a Hugo Award as best short story of 1984. Another, “Bloodchild,” won both the 1985 Hugo and the 1984 Nebula awards as best novelette.” —Octavia Butler
Tiffany’s First Haiku: in preparation for Sonia’s Arrival
Words complicate this My expressions for being I Please let silence sound
BODY
When I transitioned out of you I wanted to be a small tightly wound womb. I wanted to be so small that nobody would notice me. Hiding under beds, tucked away in a corner leg with lamp and book in hand for warmth. I read myself in Peaches with the voice of Nina Simone spiced with onions (defiance to deceptive sweetness) “Bring my daughters into this world to have them ripped from my bosom, from the warmth I had to offer them. And offered to man. Offered to him in a womanly fashion though they were but children. No breasts to feed their own. I could not warm them as I struggled to find it within myself.” So I cried because it was all too real to me This is a time to write. To let you know. There was a time when I was similar to you, paralleled in how I held my body parallel against others. A succubus seeking out warmth. Anemia broke down my blood cells and I wanted so badly to be warm. I remind myself of You, in a past tense. Ashamed, Defeated, Yearning, Wet. And you don’t see yourself mirrored in me, because you didn’t know me when I didn’t know me. When I couldn’t tell why I wanted to be warm so badly, holding on to strangers when I should’ve sought out warmth within you. But the warmth of kinship I had come to know was perverse, not of the mother’s bosom to comfort her child. For I was never a child. I was You. I was born of/with voice, and lips, and sway in hips. Why don’t you know me?
My Eyes Will Be Watching God
I think I love that boy, mystical and illusive as he may seem. I’m in love with the thought of loving him and the thought resonates throughout my body filling me with the energy to move the world for him. I think I love that boy for keeps. I think the best parts of my days are spent in anticipation of when he will show up before my eyes, magic negro. I think his looks make him easy to love but his mind will capture you in an intellectual vacuum where every specimen of life is colored some shade of Pan Africanist Black. I think I’m crazy enough to hurt for him or be hurt by him. He is in my head, attuned to every discomfort and pleasure about these lovely bones. I think my gaze will never be stilled upon anything else but his kaleidoscope eyes, I like to observe them when he is not aware and watch as they change corresponding to the mood of the day. I think, for the first time, I want to stay where I am, perplexed and intrigued by his very existence. I think he loves me…for more reason than one. I think he loves me for what I may become.
