Author: kamaurashid

Multidimensionality

Humans are multidimensional beings. We can think of this in several ways. One way that comes to mind is based on Michio Kaku’s theory of Hyperspace, wherein humans inhabit four dimensions of space-time (three spatial and one temporal dimension). From the experiential view, our existence is bound within the dynamics of physical space and the arcs of time through which we traverse. I argue that to actually know the human requires a comprehension of this four-dimensionality, as we are in a constant state of becoming.

We can also look at multidimensionality from the vantage point of African deep thought in two distinct ways. One way is with regards to the human scale, the other is with regards to the scale of the universe. I will offer two examples that address this concept on the human scale, and in a later work will examine this on the cosmic scale.

We can think of the human being as reflecting multiple, coalescing, distinct yet integrated facets. The Swahili and Bakongo concept of moyo illustrates this, as moyo has dual meanings. Its most basic meaning is the heart, while its deeper meaning is the life force or the bio-energetic dimension of the human.

Among the Yoruba we find at least two conceptualizations of multidimensionality. First is with regards to the mind itself, or most specifically the head, which is conceived in its most basic sense as ori. Ori is the head, but more than this, it represents the Yoruba idea of destiny, is the seat of the human personality, the locus of one’s character. Each human is believed to select their own head prior to their journey to Earth. Despite this act of agency, the heads are of varying quality, and the journey to the world reveals the imperfections of each ori. While taken literally this might suggest that humans are bound to a fixed unalterable destiny, however the Yoruba’s deep thought reveals that such is not the case. The Odu Ifa states that “If one’s destiny is unfortunate, perhaps one’s internal wisdom is not sufficient.” This suggests that human fate is malleable. Thus just as one might grow in knowledge, or improve one’s character, so too can one’s destiny be amended.

In addition to its role as a center of human consciousness, ori is also an orisha. If orisha is conceptually identical to nTr (netcher) in the culture of kmt (Kemet), which one might define as the totality of all things, then one’s ori represents both the consubstantiality of the human being–that is that humans are inseparable from the universe, not simply residing in the world, but being a fundamental expression of it. Therein ori also reflects the potential of the human being, one’s capacity, via struggle, to achieve one’s full potential, to fulfill one’s destiny. Thus ori, as orisha, represents one’s highest self. In this way, the Yoruba offer a compelling example of multidimensionality with regards to the human being. The human, or eniyan, is simultaneously corporeal and finite, yet inextricably transcendent. Thus in both the Swahili/Bakonogo concept of moyo, and the Yoruba concept of ori, we see the conceptualization of the corporeal and non-corporeal, the physical and the metaphysical, or perhaps the situatedness of human beings within the world and beyond its spatial bounds as an energetic quality.

Pongezi kwa kazi nzuri (Congratulations for good work)

Pongezi (congratulations) to the Indigo Nation Homeschool Association graduates. Your determination, commitment to excellence, and cultural grounding is an important lesson for us all.

For the parents, we are carrying on tradition, driven by the idea that teaching our children is not simply an option, but a matter of necessity. Many of us have collectively recognized that education is, at its core, a maintenance institution, one that seeks to affirm and sustain a particular social order. In this society, one where African life is devalued, we have to ask the troubling but urgent question of what social order are our children being prepared to perpetuate? And after finding the answer unsatisfactory should further query, what type of world do we envision, and how can our children be socialized so as to maximize their capability of contributing to this enterprise? This is no trivial matter.

Carter G. Woodson reminds us that many of our people, having been the recipients of miseducation, are resigned to frustration and despair as their educations have not prepared them to solve the vexing problems of their people (the eradication of the systems of white supremacy and rapacious capitalism), nor are they permitted to join that social order of their oppressors as equals. Thus the educated African, Woodson states, “…becomes too pessimistic to be a constructive force and usually develops into a chronic fault-finder or a complainant at the bar of public opinion. Often when he sees that the fault lies at the door of the white oppressor whom he is afraid to attack, he turns upon the pioneering Negro who as at work doing the best he can to extricate himself from an uncomfortable predicament.”

On Monday we celebrated those who are seeking to create and become a new generation of leaders for our community, rather than the endless churn of serfs which the dominant institutions succeed in producing. Thus for many of us, our charge, quite simply, is nation-building. Education for liberation, because our future requires no less.

Post-academia?

We need a new way of thinking about intellectual work which de-centers the academy and sees the community as its center. We must find ways to make this work compelling and viable for those of us who see our scholarship as more than a path to the awards of the university (i.e., tenure and promotion), but as ways of illuminating the hidden, awakening the dormant, enlivening the nascent, and ultimately reassembling our shattered humanities in the wake of the interrelated systems of white supremacy and capitalism. This also means that our teaching must be imagined and enacted, not as mere performativity, but as incubating the emancipatory potential of our students and ourselves.

We are, many of us, constrained by a university system that commodifies our knowledge, reduces the import of our teaching to its most superficial forms, and seeks to mine our bodies and minds for profitable ideas while paradoxically devaluing our labor through instruments of surveillance. In short, we need spaces that seeks to serve the unfettered ends of liberation. Moreover, I believe that we have models of this work emerging out of the social movements of the last half century which might inform this work, models which emerge from the grassroots rather than the centers of power who have so effectively redirected many of us from revolutionary struggle to the toil of survival and the banality of “victim analysis”.

We have failed to hold the “contested zones”. We are left with the task of creating new liberated zones, and making these the center of a new way of being.

Duplicity in the opportunistic embrace of Black motherhood

Send in the moms

As if America has ever had any regard for Black folks or Black mothers. The subtext of this is that the current Baltimore rebellion and protests are devoid of legitimacy, and that the participants are unruly thugs bereft of sound parenting. That “safe negroes” would patiently wait for the proper authorities to deliver justice for Freddie Gray (something that we all know will not likely occur). I’d love to see the mother of one of Gray’s violent killers berating him or her publicly. But of course we’ll never see that. Agents of the state, even when they are murderers, are always given the benefit of the doubt. Their violent actions are dismissed as “lapses of judgement”, or worse, they are portrayed as isolated actors, aberrations of an otherwise functioning system.

This cover suggests that order needs to be restored. Rather than positing that the true source of disorder is the state, which daily meets out physical and psychological violence against Black people, it invokes the image of Black youth. This is why I argue that Black youth are viewed as a social malignancy. We see this in the schools, the streets, the media, and prisons. This mother then becomes the imagined antidote for that condition. She is juxtaposed to the unseen, but still symbolically present “bad mother” who supposedly births violent criminals.

I won’t weigh in on the debates that either champion, critique, or explain this mother’s actions. I will say that this event, and those that have proceeded it teach us that youth are the makers of revolution. We need to seize the fervor of this occasion and direct it towards both confronting this social order and actualizing a new emancipatory one. Therein this young man’s energy would be well served, and perhaps this mother’s love/fear/anger might be purposefully directed toward building a better world, rather than simply attempting to shield our children from the existing one–the one that seeks to obliterate them simply for existing.

Institutions and Identity: Reflecting on Decolonizing Methodologies

I listened to a lecture by Linda Tuhiwai Smith on Decolonizing Methodologies while cleaning the refrigerator. It was rather stimulating. She addressed the ways in which other peoples are grappling with the same issues of identity, political power, cultural reclamation, and survival as are Africans globally. Two points resonated with me most: the imperative of independent institutions and the utility of sub-group identities (so-called “tribes) as units of social organization.

With respect to number one, we have sought to address this since the 17th Century, though I suspect that most of us have greater affinity with and knowledge of how this has played out since the 1960s. This imperative remains. There is no cultural institution (which is any all institutions, since culture is the totality of everything that humans produce) that exists outside of our purview that seeks to restore us as Africans to who and what we were prior to our encounter with Europeans. No matter how well-meaning or “charitable” the stewards of these alien institutions may be, we are culturally colonized. What’s more, most of the institutions under our purview do not see the necessity of our cultural restoration. We (and by “we” I mean those of us who are engaged with this “culture work” or perhaps more appropriately this Sankɔfa process of re-Africanization) are mining for fragments among the ruins and foraging for food in barren lands, while simultaneously seeking to reconstruct ourselves from the best of our collective past. The only effective vehicles for the expansion and intergenerational sustainability of this work however are our own cultural institutions, those institutions that are unambiguously committed to the reclamation of our culture and the restoration of our sovereignty in the world.

With respect to the second point, we spend far too much time seeking to explain ourselves to people who are hostile to our work. While I am all for educating and building bridges to members of the African community who are like-minded or sympathetic, we need not expend precious time or energy trying to convince people who are what Baba Mwalimu Baruti calls “lost souls” of the merit of our project. To use Ayi Kwei Armah’s analogy, no amount of water diverted to the desert will make it a wetland. Such changes are often illusory and short-lived. Our work should be to maximize our structural capacity, building those systems which have the greatest potential to both establish and expand our freedom, but also to educate our people and ourselves in the actual work of nationbuilding. We need a smaller unit of analysis than the approximately 38 million Africans that exist in the U.S. We need to create viable models of what our vision for our people looks like on the scale of dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and so on. We need to cheapen talk by demonstrating in word and deed our execution of our collective charge. We should anticipate an ever-widening circle of affinity, but make no mistake about it, at the center of that circle is the arduous toil of liberatory struggle. No amount of impassioned rhetoric, whether it is delivered oratorically or textually will suffice as a substitute. Those of us who consider ourselves nationalists, Pan-Africanists, socialists, and the like can ill-afford to believe that our works can only manifest themselves once they have gained the assent of the masses. Maroons freed themselves, fought the enemy, and created sovereign communities whilst the masses were in chains. We need to embrace maroonage as a living modality of struggle in situations where we constitute a numeric minority within a larger body. We need to embrace the cunning, work ethic, resolve, and objectives of the maroons–accepting nothing less than unfettered self-determination.

Abibifahodie!

Kheper and Maat: The Kemetic conception of the consubstantiality of the cosmos and humanity (an excerpt)

Yet we are reminded of Dr. Carruthers’s thinking about centrality of Maat as a governing principle in the affairs of humanity. Maat provided the basis for Kemetic governance, established the form and character of Kemetic deep thought, established the conceptual framework from which the Kemetyu (people of Kemet) studied the cosmos, and so on. Thus Maat’s role in the terrestrial (ty gbb or Earthly) sphere, like her role in the celestial, was the establishment of transcendent order. This is even apparent in periods of calamity or social upheaval, where Maat is invoked as the natural condition, which subsequent to the expulsion of isfet (disorder), must be restored. The ontological significance of this point cannot be understated, for while Maat is the antithesis of isfet, Maat is the natural and optimal condition of the world. Isfet is an aberration, one that can only be corrected via Maat’s reascension.

Just as Kheper represents an iterative cycle, this cycle is bound within the ethical and cosmological framework of Maat. And while the disruption of Maat may occasion the dominance of isfet during periods of crisis, isfet was always perceived as an ephemeral condition. This view was based on the worldview of the Kemetyu which viewed time on both the cosmic and social scales, cosmic time pertaining to the grand scale of happenings since the sep tepy, and social time pertaining to the affairs of humanity. These were not opposing temporal frameworks, as the sep tepy was frequently invoked as a standard via which Kemetic society could be measured. This is also evident with the invocation of weheme mesu (the repetition of the birth), which like the invocations of sep tepy called for a restoration of Maat in national life. This circumstance offers the greatest profundity with respect to the significance of these ideals for African people today.

Taking the easy way out: White saviors and Black education

Black children don’t need White teachers who believe that they are saviors. Black children need the system of White supremacy to be annihilated so that problem of structural racism can be addressed definitively. Sadly people are more interested in being domestic missionaries in Black communities than dealing with the system which creates and sustains conditions of oppression. This is, after all, much easier and much less dangerous than confronting White recalcitrance, privilege, and hostility.

To put it more clearly, Black folks are quite capable of solving our problems. We are, unfortunately, beset by a system which has worked in wondrous ways to constrain our capacity. One fine example of this is the assassination of Black leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His death is hardly anomalous, but is merely an echo of the global tyranny rained down upon Black leaders who have had the audacity to insist that African/Black land, labor, and resources were theirs to use as they would; that Black folks have, like all other people, a basic right to self-determination. These assassinations were the opening salvo for more destructive campaigns which have effectively crushed movement after movement for self-determination domestically and around the world. It is the height of hypocrisy to revere Dr. King, while failing to recognize the call for radical social transformation that he advocated for when he said, “The dispossessed of this nation – the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.”

Again, Black folks don’t need White missionaries. We need liberation, and White folks desirous of “making a difference” should start by dismantling the system that benefits them and hurts us so greatly. Their unwillingness to collectively embrace such a struggle is proportional to their irrelevance to our efforts.

Imani (Faith)

 

There is an African proverb that says “We must act as if it is impossible to fail.” This means that we cannot allow fear and doubt to diminish our spirit. Success is not just a matter of physical action, but it is also a matter of mental clarity and spiritual resolve. By mental clarity I am referring to the quality of a mind that is at peace, untroubled. Spiritual resolve is the intense focus of one’s entire being, an inner resonance that delivers a sense of affirmation that one’s actions are just, one’s path true. Faith therefor is our ability to both overcome the fetters that might sap our will, in addition to our capacity to cultivate a character of determination. In this sense, faith is not simply a matter of belief, but is also a living practice, the elimination of doubt, fear, worry, disbelief, and the like through the regular engagement with and affirmation of reality.

For us this reality is quite simple. Watu wetu ni katika vita! Our people are at war, and have been since the beginning of the Maafa—the interrelated processes of slavery, colonialism, and their aftermath. Imani or faith provides the resolve and clarity to press on, to carry on struggle, to thrive to succeed despite the seemingly impossible odds against us. Imani is a belief in our highest potential, a belief that nothing can stand against us. It is a belief that we, when fully determined, are incapable of failure.

Heri za Kwanzaa.

Kuumba

Each of us, no matter how small, how young, how old, and so forth possess unique talents, gifts, insights, and abilities that if directed towards the aim of our liberation provides a rich and valued contribution. This is part of Kuumba, acknowledging that we all have role to play in our struggle, and dedicating ourselves to this. Some of us will contribute as storytellers, musicians, and poets. Some of us will contribute as architects, scientists, and doctors. Others will contribute as lawyers, educators, scholars, and so forth. Ultimately, whatever the form of our contribution, we must all aim to leave our community better as a result of our efforts.

This is particularly significant if we look at the principle of Kuumba historically. When Marcus Garvey had assessed the paucity of African power and determined to change this by creating the Universal Negro Improvement Association, this was applied Kuumba. His example is notable because he sought to build all of the social systems needed to ensure the survival of African people. We would do well to study the legacy of Garvey and the many others who have applied their genius to solving the malaise of the African World Community.

Kuumba is the application of creative intelligence to the transformation of the African world.

Heri za Kwanzaa (Happy Kwanzaa)!