Black Connections (Bconx)

Esteban Montejo (en Cuba). A man AGAIN.

2012-05-21T13:19:00.001-04:00

"…hands were swollen. I camped under a tree. I stayed there no more than four or five days. All I had to do was hear the first human voice close by, and I would take off fast.

I came to hide in a cave for a time. I lived there for a year and a half. . ..I was careful about all the sounds I made, And of the fires. If I left a track, they could follow my path and catch me. I climbed up and down so many hills that my legs and arms got as hard as sticks. Little by little I got to know the woods. And I began to like them. Sometimes I would forget I was a Cimarron, and I would start to whistle. Early on I used to whistle to get over the fear. They say that when you whistle, you chase away the evil spirits. But being a Cimarron in the woods you had to be on the lookout. I didn't start whistling again because the guajiros or the slave catchers would come. Since the Cimarron was a slave who ahd escaped, the masters sent a posse of rancheadores after them. Mean guajiros with hunting dogs so they could drag you out of the woods in their jaws. I never ran into any of them. I never seen any of those dogs up close. They were trained to catch blacks… When a slave catcher caught a black, the master or the overseer gave him an ounce of gold or more.

Truth is that I lived well as a cimarron, very hidden, very comfortable. I didn't even allow other cimarrones to spot me: "cimarron with cimarron sells a cimarron." For a long time I didn't speak a word to anyone. I liked that tranquility. …You live half wild when you're a cimarron.

I found out about the end of slavery from all the people shouting. . . They shouted, "We're free now." But I wasn't affected. To my mind, it was a lie… When I came out of the woods I started in walking, and I met an old woman with two children in her arms. I called to her from a distance, and when she came up to me I asked her: "Tell me, is it true that we're no longer slaves?" She answered me: "No, son, now we're really free." And, with that, as quickly as I became a cimarron… I stopped being a cimaroon. And became myself…a man…again."

[In 1963 at the age of 103, Estaban Montejo recounted his experiences to Cuban writer and ethnologist Miguel Barnet. Montejo had suffered the lash and toiled as a slave. He had escaped into the wilderness and lived for years as a Cimmaron/Maroon, and had fought as a soldier in the Cuban war of independence. His story is a rare and remarkable window into the history of Cuba.]

Unspoken Resistance & Drum Texts

2012-05-17T15:50:00.002-04:00

"In addition to being a space for African spirituality and ritual, the African Burial Ground was also a space for slave resistance on a number of levels. ...it was the principal location for the execution of slaves involved in the 1712 and 1741 disturbances. Furthermore, Burial #25 excavated on October 16, 1991, provides some insight into the end result of rebellious activities in eighteenth-century New York City. The twenty-two-year-old woman interred in this grave was found with a musket ball in her rib cage, significant blunt force trauma to her lower skull and a diagonal fracture along her right forearm. Based on a forensic examination of her skeletal remains, it appears that she was shot in the back, severely beaten, and then restrained by someone who twisted her arm-thus causing the fracture. Since the fractures on her lower skull and arm had not healed, she likely suffered these injuries in the last hours or minutes of her life. Whether she was one of the slaves killed during the 1712 revolt will probably never be known. It is plausible, however, that she died during some act of resistance to white authority. Physical anthropologists studying the remains at the site have found distinct signs indicating that in at least two cases individuals were burned to death-a capital punishment associated with enslaved Africans found guilty of arson, rebellion, or murder."

~Walter C. Rucker, Fires of Discontent, Echoes of Africa: Slave Resistance in Colonial. New York City

Mo nyinaa mma yenkaw kwan no

(you all should allow us to go on the path)

Mo nyinaa mma yenkaw kwan no

(you all should allow us to go on the path)

Nnipa dodo a yekawee, yemmae

(the multitude of people that went, they did not come)

Mo nyinaa mma yenkaw kwan no

(you all should allow us to go on the path)

~Akan drum text, Kwasi Konadu, The Akan Diaspora in the Americas

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click image for hi-rez)

2012-05-16T16:40:00.000-04:00

Babylon Dem da Letter A... "A" (PF5 to refresh)

2012-05-16T16:25:00.000-04:00

Here is an example of the Europeanization of an African phenomenon (click ea. image to see better):

Proto-Sinaitic* to Canaanitic

Canaanitic to Syriac (Phoenician)

Phoenician to Latin ('your' script from the angles & sajones)

The letter "A". Seen? A mere turning upside down and manipulation of. The letter J. Seen? Jesus.

Take any part of a life area: hospitality, law/justice, how the aged are treated. ...a mere turning upside down and manipulation of. AWO. See Baba Walter Rodney detail in mo fya from whey bak ova deah: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/rodneylib.html

*for those who scairt: AFRICAN mdw ntr or hierogliphics (if u Will).

New England: Emancipation-ish

2012-05-05T13:27:00.004-04:00

"The statutory servitude mandated by post nati ['born after', or gradual] emancipation was not, and was never intended to be, training for independent citizenship. What the gradual abolition statutes offered was a framework within which whites could enjoy abolition and slavery at the same time-just as they had always enjoyed personhood and property together in their slaves. Post nati emancipation hardly provided the context for the kind of transformation in imagination, practice, and language that freedom demanded."

~Joanne Melish, Disowning Slavery

Flying vs. Walking

2012-05-05T06:39:00.000-04:00

“I will give you an example of how race affects my life. I live in a place called Alpine, New Jersey. Live in Alpine, New Jersey, right? My house costs millions of dollars. In my neighborhood, there are four black people. Hundreds of houses, four black people. Who are these black people? Well, there’s me, Mary J. Blige, Jay-Z and Eddie Murphy. Only black people in the whole neighborhood. So let’s break it down, let’s break it down: me, I’m a decent comedian. I’m a’ight. Mary J. Blige, one of the greatest R&B singers to ever walk the Earth. Jay-Z, one of the greatest rappers to ever live. Eddie Murphy, one of the funniest actors to ever, ever do it. Do you know what the white man who lives next door to me does for a living? He’s a fucking dentist! He ain’t the best dentist in the world…he ain’t going to the dental hall of fame…he don’t get plaques for getting rid of plaque. He’s just a yank-your-tooth-out dentist. See, the black man gotta fly to get to somethin’ the white man can walk to.”
~Chris Rock

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click image for hi-rez)

2012-05-04T17:54:00.001-04:00

Struggle For, Even If Its Beauty

2012-04-23T08:36:00.000-04:00

'...You will come back. You will stay. Before that the spirits and our ancestors will hold a great meeting to discuss the future of the world. It will be one of the most important meetings ever held. Suffering is coming. There will be wars and famine. Terrible things will happen. New disease, hunger, the rich eating up the earth, people poisoning the sky and the waters, people going mad in the name of history, the clouds will breath fire, the spirit of things will dry up, laughter will become strange.'

He stopped. There was a long pause. Then he continued, frightening me.

'There will be changes. Coups. Soldiers everywhere. Ugliness. Blindness. And then when people least expect it a great transformation is going to take place in the world. Suffering people will know justice and beauty. A wonderful change is coming from far away and people will realise the great meaning of struggle and hope. There will be peace. Then people will forget. Then it will all start again, getting worse, getting better. Don't fear. You will always have something to struggle for, even if it is beauty or joy.'

~Famished Road, Ben Okri

Mi Hija: May You Understand

2012-04-16T09:52:00.001-04:00

"The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you."
~Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Artists. Don't Ever Lose Your Ability to Infect Another With Your Sincerity (art).

2012-04-15T19:58:00.000-04:00

“Art is what you give up,”

“Art is what you give up,” he says, “if you’re trying to hold on to cash.”
~SALIF DIABAGATÉ

Thus, so, was africa INDEPENDENCED

2012-04-15T16:28:00.001-04:00

"Whites reasoned that even if Africans had once had entitlement to themselves as free people, such entitlement did not extend to slaves born and raised in white families-persons never free, raised at the "expense" of their owners. But this reasoning implied that emancipating one's slaves conferred freedom upon them as a gift to which they were at best theoretically but never actually entitled. And in the view of most whites, since even the act of being freed represented the exercise of the owner's power over the slave, an emancipated slave could never become a "free" person but only a "freed" one- a person acted upon, not acting."

~Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and "Race" in New England, 1780-1860, Joanne Pope Melish

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click image for hi-rez)

2012-04-15T16:16:00.000-04:00

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click on image for hi-rez)

2012-04-01T15:28:00.000-04:00

Think For Yourself

2012-04-01T15:15:00.000-04:00

I was flying on a plan from Algiers to Geneva about four weeks ago, with two other Americans. both of them were white-one was a male, the other was a female. And after we had flown together for about forty minutes, the lady turned to me and asked me-she had looked at my briefcase and saw the initials M and X-and she said, "I would like to ask you a question. What kind of last name could you have that begins with X?"
So I told her, "That's it: X."
She was quiet for a little while. For about ten minutes she was quiet. She hadn't been quiet at all up to then, you know. And then finally she turned and she said, "Well, what's your first name?"
I said, "Malcolm."
She was quiet for about ten more minutes. Then she turned and she said, "Well, you're not Malcolm X?" [Laughter]
But the reason she asked that question was, she had gotten from the press, and from things that she had heard and read, she was looking for something different, or for someone different.
The reason I take time to tell you this is, one of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn how to do is see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself. Then you can come to an intelligent decision for yourself. But if you form the habit of going by what you hear others say about someone, or going by what others think about someone, instead of going and searching that thing out for yourself and seeing for yourself, you'll be walking west when you think you're going east, and you'll be walking east when you think you're going west. So this generation, especially of our people, have a burden upon themselves, more so than at any other time in history. The most important thing we can learn how to do today is think for ourselves.
~Malcolm X

Tired

2012-04-01T14:47:00.003-04:00

Tired
I am tired of work, I am tired of building up somebody else's civilization.
Let us take a rest, M'Lissy Jane.
I will go down to the Last Chance Saloon, drink a gallon or two of gin, shoot
a game or two of dice and sleep the rest of the night on one of Mike's
barrels.
You will let the old shanty go to rot, the white people's clothes turn to dust,
and the Calvary Baptist Church sink to the bottomless pit.
You will spend your days forgetting you married me and your nights hunting
the warm gin Mike serves the ladies in the rear of the Last Chance Saloon.
Throw the children into the river, civilization has given us too many.
It is better to die than to grow up and find that you are colored.
Pluck the stars out of the heavens. The stars mark our destiny. The stars
marked my destiny.
I am tired of civilization.
~Fenton Johnson

It Is Justice? (cudgel convictions and the poorly whitened)

2012-04-01T14:41:00.000-04:00

One day, the Black seized hold of the White’s neck-tie, grabbed a bowler hat, dressed up in them, and left laughing . . .

It was only a game, but the Black did not let himself take it as a game. He became so accustomed to the neck-tie and the bowler hat that he ended up believing he had always worn them. He made fun of those who didn’t wear them at all and disowned his father whose name is Spirit of the Bush . . . This is a bit of the history of the pre-war Negro, who is only the Negro before reason. He sits down at the school of the Whites. He wants to be “assimilated.”

I would gladly say that it is madness, if I didn’t remember that, in a certain sense, the madman is always “the man who has faith in himself,” and because of that saves himself from madness.

If assimilation is not madness, it is certainly foolishness. To want to be assimilated is to forget that nothing can change animal nature. It is to misunderstand “otherness,” which is a law of Nature.

This is so true that the People, elder brothers of Nature, warn us of it

every day: A decree says to the Blacks: “You are similar to the Whites. You are assimilated.”

The People, wiser than the decree because they follow Nature, shout to us: “Begone! You are different than us! You are only aliens and negroes.” They deride the “Black man with a bowler,” bully the “poorly whitened,” and bludgeon the “negro.”

I confess that it is justice, though unfortunate for the one who needs to be convinced by means of a cudgel that he can only be himself.

~from Negreries: Black Youth and Assimilation, by Aime Cesaire

put my foot in it

2012-04-01T14:34:00.003-04:00

For Sure

For sure I’ll get fed up

without even waiting

for things to ripen

like a good camembert

So until then I’ll just go

and put my foot in it

or grab by the collar

everything I can’t stand

In capital letters:

colonization

civilization

assimilation

and all that

Meanwhile

you’ll often hear me

slam the door

~from Pigments by Léon-Gontran Damas, translated by Franklin Rosemont

the step beyond HIStory

2012-04-01T14:31:00.000-04:00

Surrealism and Black African Art

The surrealist aspects of the African way of life, as well as the African implications of surrealism, have tended to be ignored for reasons already touched on. Instead of the alienating dualistic intellectualization that usually defines the headlines of European social practice, black Africans enjoyed the presence of the practice of poetry throughout the totality of their traditional social life. In Africa, that is, the living experience of surreality has since prehistoric times enjoyed supremacy over its theoretical justification. In the Western world, however, surrealism is the result of a long philosophical, political, scientific and poetic struggle to recover what the traditional African has never lost. A gainst all forms of indifference and misery, surrealism and black African art remain irreducible examples in the development of the complete unfettering of the mind. Surrealism and black African art show that History’s last step—the step beyond History—coincides with a return to first principles, which is also a return to primordial glory, involving nothing less than the systematic and definitive liberation of the whole of human society and of Nature itself.

~Cheikh Tidiane Sylla

Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion, no. 4 (1989) (original emphasis)

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click for hi-rez)

2012-03-24T16:39:00.000-04:00

Sun and Soot

2012-03-24T16:07:00.000-04:00

UTTERANCES

of my lamp and my emotion

provoked along the way

and of my truth

on the surface of the cloak of mourning

and the ponderous dignified rings

of the horseman with the bell

ringing from his elbow

artful, the pastel

of sun and soot on my wall.

~Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude (1912-1971)

Elevations

2012-03-24T14:54:00.000-04:00

"... i grieve for our gone."

2012-03-24T13:49:00.000-04:00

When one cannot influence a situation it is an act of wisdom to withdraw*
Every Black woman in america has survived several lifetimes of hatred, where even in the candy store cases of our childhood, little brown niggerbaby candies testified against us. We survived the wind-driven spittle on our child's shoe and pink flesh-colored bandaids, attempted rapes on rooftops and the prodding fingers of the super's boy, seeing our girlfriends blown to bits in Sunday School, and we absorbed that loathing as a natural state. We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it because we had to, or die of it. Old King Mithridates learned to eat arsenic bit by bit and so outwitted his poisoners, but I'd have hated to kiss him upon his lips! Now we deny such hatred ever existed because we have learned to neutralize it through ourselves, and the catabolic process throws of waste products of fury even when we love.
I see hatred
I am bathed in it, drowning in it
since almost the beginning of my life
it has been the air I breathe
the food i eat, the content of my perceptions;
the single most constant fact of my existence
is their hatred . . .
I am too young for my history**
It is not that Black Women shed each other's psychic blood so easily, but that we have ourselves bled so often, the pain of bloodshed becomes almost commonplace. If i have learned to eat my own flesh in the forest - starving, keening, learning the lesson of the she-wolf who chews off her own paw to leave the trap behind - if i must drink my own blood, thirsting, why should I stop at yours until your dear dead arms hang like withered garlands upon my breast and i weep for your going, oh, my sister, I greive for our gone.
~From Eye to Eye: Black women, Hatred, and Anger by Audre Lorde

*From The I Ching.
**From "Nigger" by Judy Dothard Simmons in Decent Intentions

What Makes A King?

2012-03-19T18:27:00.000-04:00

Woah all you nations

A question.

What makes a king?

What makes prospering?

ooh you rebellious

Evidence stands of events facts

Don't leave it unsung

Jah is merited

All eight names in atlas yoke

All earth descendants and influences

Him on earth who maintain the grid

Of togetherness

Specializing in snowballing perceptions

The gathering mass come tumbling

Witches and sorcerers they label them.

In immediate society

Look within

If it isn't true,

Then go fix the wrong way

You made people think.

Things worth of distance

As one gone with

Everlasting Contempt

And everlasting Glory

As they resurrecting in

The current model of excess to be living in

respect the indigenous people in a where they live

redeem the villainous infamy of how you rob and kill

as minimum obligation just freely give

as minimal redeem

please teach rethink

with whips who broke our names right out of our links

and broke civility to animal instinct.

The predetory instinct of take to win,

The seeds of jealousy cultivated,

And shut us galore born out this thing

What of the structure the ends constructed

Purpose full directives

For each one functioning

Soldiers of the long wall

To protect her in eee ee

Just to protect her in

Selassie I the power of the holy trinity lives

He is. He is.

Ooh you nations

A question,

What makes a king?

Ooh you nations

What makes prospering

oooh you rebellious.

Don't leave it unsung

The Emperor is merited

All earth descendants

And influences

Him who on earth

Protect the grid

Its he who on earth protects the sociological grid

The how we are all

related.

OOh all you nations

What makes a king

speak from the secret place of heart?

What makes a king?

What makes a king?

Repost: Praise Jah

No Ocean Bottom Community SIMILAR

2012-03-18T17:12:00.001-04:00

IN HONOR OF AFRICAN ANCESTORS AT BOTTOM OF THE ATLANTIC

Vicissitudes Underwater Sculpture - Grenada, West Indies
Artist Jason de Caires Taylor, with Johanna Fernandez , Ari Merretazon and Tina Varick

yut ah.

Pictures Speak 172,000 Words (click on image for hi-rez)

2012-03-17T14:38:00.000-04:00