Introduction
At two years old, I packed up my dolls, sat them beside me in the back seat of my mom’s Nissan Altima, and set my sights for Africa. When the car stopped, I stepped out and walked confidently toward a nearby field of bluegrass. My mother asked me where I was headed. I replied, “I'm going back to Africa to see my Dad.” This would be one of the many times I would prepare for, what was in my mind, a straightforward and walkable journey from Kentucky to Africa. In my childhood, the vitality of my father's presence and whereabouts felt just around the corner. These statements I made were expressive of a specific notion of Africa, one that was intertwined with how I was grappling with the death of my father who I grew to know through stories and the undercurrents of grief that surrounded my life. In this absence, my father and Africa were both consequences of the storytelling that shaped my understanding of my ancestry and heritage. I experienced these cultural retentions as hauntings. These early moments were my first encounters with folklore and the ways that stories can determine and express reality.
My father was a jumbie story in my family. His life was a sensitive topic, often shared passionately and always carefully. Unanswered questions defined curiosities that grew with me. I studied the sublimated expressions of people who looked for him in me. I turned my own glimpses of awe toward the objects dispersed from his life, an archive of art and artifacts where he can speak for himself. Blackness permeates throughout his curation of garments, cassette tapes, and his writing. My father’s deliberate embrace of his Blackness demonstrates pride in himself and the powerful history that he embodies, that we embody together.
I grew up surrounded by stories that dignified my father’s life. I pursued my curiosities about him - at one point typing his name into an internet browser, looking to fill in the blanks. I encountered newspaper clippings about Black life, Black death and Black bodies that shared his name. After encountering these abstracted passages, I understood how sacred the stories of his life are. I have come to appreciate the importance of loving tales that uphold the liveliness of my father. The semi-presence of my father, rendered by the term African-American situated the developing consciousness of my youth within a distinctly diasporic notion of Africa. This notion does not necessarily describe the contemporary continent of diverse ecological regions, countries, and communities that together speak up to two thousand different languages. The Africa where I understood my father to be, the concept of Africa that I notioned in childhood was a result of private and public narratives surrounding Blackness in the united states, a narrative in constant re-negotiation over the past four hundred years. Slavery is the foundation of the united states and the event that incited contemporary constructions of Black american identity through the forced transportation, labor, and alienation of African peoples. To white slave owners, Africa was weaponized to validate the necessity for chattel slavery and after emancipation was idealized and sold back to free Black folks as a means to intercontinental segregation. In the Black imagination, Africa is a memory sustained through collective meaning-making and in response to violent displacement. Africa signifies pre-colonial prosperity and continued self-determination as these systems of white-supremacy progress. This perception of Africa and Black historical position rejects contemporary disparities in power because their validity requires a radical redistribution of material power and illegitimizes white americans as the beneficiaries of resources generated through slave systems and its variations. Despite impossible circumstances, African cultural retentions survive and continue to guide Black identity and consciousness. These continuities are evident through the crafting of beliefs, traditions, and creative expression.
My father expressed himself through the written word, bending and breaking language to realize the breadth of ebonic play. My Father’s entries were dynamic, spontaneous, and carved into legal yellow notebooks with a range of motivations, sometimes to practice his skill in rhymes or to write himself into the culture, and sometimes to pray. His skills in writing, listening, and speech were deeply influenced by his Guyanese rearing. He was raised by his grandmother who had spent her life in Georgetown, Guyana before moving to the States as a senior. Ma cooked and cared for her grandchildren. She educated them about the world around them and she told them stories about her life in Guyana. She spoke with a self-assured voice that intercut words and remixed grammar. Her Broken English set the standard for my father’s relationship with language and grounded his explorations in Black vernacular. This was his medium of choice for self-expression, to speak for himself within a framework of Black oral tradition
In my upbringing, I studied every story I heard about my father’s life. I knew these oral histories like I knew my mother’s face, and in the mirror, I could see their stories of rebellion and intimate trust collide. I made sense of what it meant to be alive in the body that I have and in the world I was born from and into. Through his body of work, material objects, and the oral histories surrounding his life, I understand that his life is inseparable from the Black traditions and histories that guided his identity and mine. To me, the artifacts that my father left behind are his body, expressing an expansive range of care for his Blackness. I intend to reciprocate this care for him and the Black traditions upheld in his work through a remapping of the Black Body that draws from a constellation of personal histories, material objects, folklore stories, and sciences.
At two years old, I packed up my dolls, sat them beside me in the back seat of my mom’s Nissan Altima, and set my sights for Africa. When the car stopped, I stepped out and walked confidently toward a nearby field of bluegrass. My mother asked me where I was headed. I replied, “I'm going back to Africa to see my Dad.” This would be one of the many times I would prepare for, what was in my mind, a straightforward and walkable journey from Kentucky to Africa. In my childhood, the vitality of my father's presence and whereabouts felt just around the corner. These statements I made were expressive of a specific notion of Africa, one that was intertwined with how I was grappling with the death of my father who I grew to know through stories and the undercurrents of grief that surrounded my life. In this absence, my father and Africa were both consequences of the storytelling that shaped my understanding of my ancestry and heritage. I experienced these cultural retentions as hauntings. These early moments were my first encounters with folklore and the ways that stories can determine and express reality.
My father was a jumbie story in my family. His life was a sensitive topic, often shared passionately and always carefully. Unanswered questions defined curiosities that grew with me. I studied the sublimated expressions of people who looked for him in me. I turned my own glimpses of awe toward the objects dispersed from his life, an archive of art and artifacts where he can speak for himself. Blackness permeates throughout his curation of garments, cassette tapes, and his writing. My father’s deliberate embrace of his Blackness demonstrates pride in himself and the powerful history that he embodies, that we embody together.
I grew up surrounded by stories that dignified my father’s life. I pursued my curiosities about him - at one point typing his name into an internet browser, looking to fill in the blanks. I encountered newspaper clippings about Black life, Black death and Black bodies that shared his name. After encountering these abstracted passages, I understood how sacred the stories of his life are. I have come to appreciate the importance of loving tales that uphold the liveliness of my father. The semi-presence of my father, rendered by the term African-American situated the developing consciousness of my youth within a distinctly diasporic notion of Africa. This notion does not necessarily describe the contemporary continent of diverse ecological regions, countries, and communities that together speak up to two thousand different languages. The Africa where I understood my father to be, the concept of Africa that I notioned in childhood was a result of private and public narratives surrounding Blackness in the united states, a narrative in constant re-negotiation over the past four hundred years. Slavery is the foundation of the united states and the event that incited contemporary constructions of Black american identity through the forced transportation, labor, and alienation of African peoples. To white slave owners, Africa was weaponized to validate the necessity for chattel slavery and after emancipation was idealized and sold back to free Black folks as a means to intercontinental segregation. In the Black imagination, Africa is a memory sustained through collective meaning-making and in response to violent displacement. Africa signifies pre-colonial prosperity and continued self-determination as these systems of white-supremacy progress. This perception of Africa and Black historical position rejects contemporary disparities in power because their validity requires a radical redistribution of material power and illegitimizes white americans as the beneficiaries of resources generated through slave systems and its variations. Despite impossible circumstances, African cultural retentions survive and continue to guide Black identity and consciousness. These continuities are evident through the crafting of beliefs, traditions, and creative expression.
My father expressed himself through the written word, bending and breaking language to realize the breadth of ebonic play. My Father’s entries were dynamic, spontaneous, and carved into legal yellow notebooks with a range of motivations, sometimes to practice his skill in rhymes or to write himself into the culture, and sometimes to pray. His skills in writing, listening, and speech were deeply influenced by his Guyanese rearing. He was raised by his grandmother who had spent her life in Georgetown, Guyana before moving to the States as a senior. Ma cooked and cared for her grandchildren. She educated them about the world around them and she told them stories about her life in Guyana. She spoke with a self-assured voice that intercut words and remixed grammar. Her Broken English set the standard for my father’s relationship with language and grounded his explorations in Black vernacular. This was his medium of choice for self-expression, to speak for himself within a framework of Black oral tradition
In my upbringing, I studied every story I heard about my father’s life. I knew these oral histories like I knew my mother’s face, and in the mirror, I could see their stories of rebellion and intimate trust collide. I made sense of what it meant to be alive in the body that I have and in the world I was born from and into. Through his body of work, material objects, and the oral histories surrounding his life, I understand that his life is inseparable from the Black traditions and histories that guided his identity and mine. To me, the artifacts that my father left behind are his body, expressing an expansive range of care for his Blackness. I intend to reciprocate this care for him and the Black traditions upheld in his work through a remapping of the Black Body that draws from a constellation of personal histories, material objects, folklore stories, and sciences.