Anthem

My experiences in this life, from being raised around America to my international endeavors to Canada, Costa Rica, and China, have led me to unshaken belief that the destinies of all human beings are tied together on this one Earth and—more alarming to my young mind—that a globally-manifesting mentally-ill desire by many to distort this fact has been established to justify centuries of violent means. There is no need for oppression really, we all have a shared stake in this life. James Baldwin (1924-1987) and Toni Morrison (1931-2019) remind us that oppression must feel good to somebody, since it’s so wasteful and still persists in today’s society. It is we who have allowed oppression to be of use (and to continue to be of use) in this country. As someone born in the penultimate year of the 20th century, I have grown increasingly convinced that America is not reading (for many reasons, systemic and personal) for if so wouldn’t we cease to claim the comfortability of ignorance that perpetuates this oppression, this violence that moves with silence masked as one’s innocence? Wouldn’t we understand that to be an American is to be a product of generational violence? And yet more than that, we appear to lack an inquisitive desire to understand what it means to have a neighbor, to have a brother, to have a sister, to see another’s life reflected in the humanity of our own; we lack the necessary practice of questioning the content, the shape, and the packaging in which information has been given to us; and our lack of questioning proves to be how language curated by power fanatics fixes social realities that prove to be more limiting than physical prisons. As a student of African-American literature and American history this is baffling, for we seem to be caught in a rut that if exists is kept there by our collective imagination. There have been many prolific communicators and prophets, Black writers of ages past whose words are echoes for the present whom we have silenced, quoted when convenient, or all the more ignored as if there life doesn’t demand the attention it deserves for the intense labor wrought to create the liberating literature and readings absent from their own world: Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784), Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897), Frederick Douglass (1818-1885), Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907), Josephine Brown (1839-1874), Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Richard Wright (1908-1960), Ralph Ellison (1914-1994), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), Alex Haley (1921-1992), James Baldwin (1924-1987), Maya Angelou (1928-2014), Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), Toni Morrison (1931-2019), Audre Lorde (1934-1992), Sonia Sanchez (1934-), Amiri Baraka (1934-2014), June Jordan (1936-2002), Samuel R. Delaney (1942-), Nikki Giovanni (1943-), Angela Davis (1944-), Alice Walker (1944-), August Wilson (1945-2005), Octavia Butler (1947-2006), Ntozake Shange (1948-2018), Gayl Jones (1949-), Rita Dove (1952-), Elizabeth Alexander (1962-), Colson Whitehead (1969-), and Ta-Nehisi Coates (1975-). These are the writers Americans must engage if liberty is what we truly seek in this country. I’m afraid and yet steadfast in belief that we do not want this future for ourselves or our children and this troubles me deeply. 

“Once upon a time,” Toni Morrison writes in her Nobel lecture (1993), “there was an old woman, blind but wise.” To her, the old woman she knows is the “daughter of slaves,” which upon hearing immediately prompted within me the question: Who is in my “once upon a time”? Where does my own story begin? This question was transfixed into a familiar question as I wrestled with its demand on me: “Know who you are,” my father’s mantra for his children. In this world there is a desire to identify, to name, to describe things and if one doesn’t do this for themself, the world has proved faithful in doing so in one’s stead. Naming myself a ‘writer’ three years ago felt naked at a time and naming myself a ‘Black writer’ adorned clothes in an attempt to accurately situate my voice, to acknowledge those whom I write among. Much like the yearning of pride in the socially-imposed Black identity I was seeking home, a place with which to stand upon that was mine to claim and a tradition I could daily remember since to be an American is to be a member of a country absolutely clear on what it does not want people living on its land mass to claim—freedom. I was first named after my father whose own father is the third son of a Mattaponi woman and whose mother is the oldest granddaughter of a Chickahominy woman. Before the American labels “savage”, “Colored”, “Negro”, “Black”; before all these racial classifications that have worked as intense distractions to the fact that on this one Earth we are one people, before all of this there was a community of my people that knew love’s infinite breadth. This is a world I knew in my one household and the households I knew growing up, and it was something I was disappointed to not find in the spaces I moved in upon leaving home.

So I write (it). I pronounce it this way, because I am thinking of little children who are right now growing up thinking of what they will do with their lives. In our culture, there is alot of attraction fostered and monetization established for life disciplines that generate distraction to the real evils in society. In my own education the acknowledgment of an issue too often sufficed for resolution and this pseudo-addressing of the problems further perpetuates the notion that we should accept “it’s always been like this” or that “there is nothing new under the sun” (yes, there is nothing new under the sun and we must do something about what is under it now). This consideration never seemed to be the predominant conversations in my secondary and collegiate education, places boasting to produce world leaders. We simply were not taught to handle the largest problems facing us as human beings, chiefly our own violence to the land we live on and the underlying implications of such a vain and harmful approach to living. What world are we moving toward? What language exists in that world which we can create to liberate lives from oppression that our ancestors have already endured and wished for us to not endure? How do we stop the temptation to feel like the way things are are the way they should be or will continue to be? I am ferociously protective of you little children, because you are our future. This world is yet to be free, which is to say there is a world that’s been cultivated for millennia and a country cultivated for centuries where you may find yourself limited by the limiting imaginations of limiting and often limited people. Do not listen to these voices. You can do whatever you put your mind to, and if you choose to pick up a pen, then I want you to know that you have chosen something that you may loathe and terribly love. You will hate the pen because it is a scalpel, exposing your most inward parts so viscerally that it can take days, weeks, months, and sometimes years to sow it all back up (that’s if you want to); sometimes it’s not your own surgery, but the surgery on humanity itself, your friends, your family, your country and these can also leave you temporarily silent, hesitant on the stroke, or steaming straight ahead in fury; and despite this hate you will love the pen because it is a chisel, molding overtime to the exact manifestation of your own creation, and finding the right word to describe something that is at its core about love is what language was first for, twas the first thing Adam did for the beautiful beasts of the Earth. Language is what this is all about, this life, your existence, this community, your purpose, this journey, your vision, this country, your politics, your education, your decisions; it is all language and has consequences to the issuer of language and its recipient.

Language was abused to initiate the erasure of my personal history. The Racial Integrity Act (1924), legislation written by the racist Walter Plecker and adopted by the Virginia General Assembly, forced classification of ‘white’ and ‘colored’ on birth and wedding certificates leading to the castration of tribal affiliation from many people, forced people to lands north and south which had yet to disrespect their heritage, and exacerbated the conflict between themselves and African people forced across waters unknown, laid in spoonfed fashion to arrive to another’s homeland and suffered hate from all others, a history that continues to play out today where the Pamunkey tribe is yet free from their Black Laws. Given this history, there rises a language coalescing to describe what it means to know the psychological terror racism imposes on children across this nation and in the world and to dwell in the memory of my Enslaved ancestors and the pain and suffering that accompanies examination of the erasure that took place of name and land and home; and further to know that my Indigenous ancestors were people slaughtered, raped and kidnapped and were the ones who first met the violence those who chose to call themselves “white”, a vain attempt to bleach over and justify all the pain and hurt that was caused by their hands. Each time I pick up a pen, I feel the weight of this history. I am not twenty-one years old old; I am 400-years old. I live fifteen minutes from where Pocahontas, the daughter of a Mattaponi woman, was kidnapped and raped. I live ten minutes from where enslaved Africans were brought, bought, and sold in the first colony of America. When I look at the trees I see the bodies hanging. When I look at the water, I see the bodies floating. The only thing I can look at in nature that doesn’t conjure up feelings of deep hurt and dissonance is the moon, which gave light to my liberated ancestors and is one I trust who knows the loneliness I feel on this land when I walk around and see perversions of my peoples’ memories displayed on corners and boulevards with the truth masked under lies of comfort. This House is mine because my foremothers’ and forefathers’ blood paints its corridors, their bones outline the foundation, their skin the upholstery. And yet this land, the land that the American house sits on, is also my home—no matter how much it has been perverted to tell me otherwise.

I remember the feelings of dissonance I had among friends of varying cultural backgrounds, many first- or second- generation Americans who adorned flags to represent their heritage in ways that solidified their identity outside of this country’s history, a country we all despised because of its obsession with our death. Yet, I was in their presence unaware that long before European boats made kidnapping voyages, my ancestors were here. This distinction between the country and the land is forever clear. When I lived abroad, I was not only moving toward new experiences, but away from damning old ones that gave birth to the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, when I think of leaving this country, to live in a place where I feel wanted, where I feel my life is valued, and bring my family with me, I know that I cannot. This is my home. And so I write, and in writing I trust, like the many writers who have come before me, that I will lay a roadmap telling me how to take it all back and, more importantly, liberate it.