“On
the seventh day, beginning at daybreak, they marched around the city seven
times in the same manner; on that day only did they march around the city seven
times. The
seventh time around, the priests blew the horns and Joshua said to the people,
“Now shout, for the LORD has given you the city. “ Joshua 6:15-16
Continuing from the previous entry, we
shall contemplate, once again, the reality of “Sankofa” as it describes one
aspect of the performance of Africana culture.
Presented here are two very different images of the Sankofa Bird, which
is always used to embody the principle of "return and get it" – the symbol of the importance of
learning from the past, and bringing what has been learned into the present.
The first illustration, is a wood carving of the bird, reaching into its
back to bring forth the nourishing egg of knowledge. The positioning of the
carving replicates the Kongo Cosmogram, first mentioned in the Sankofa Muse
entry, “Little David, Play on Your Harp” (May 16, 2014). That circle
“describes” – simultaneously -- the movement of the sun from east to north to
west to south; and the stages of life: birth, adulthood, elder status, and
status of the “living dead” or ancestors.
What might not be considered of significance is that the movement of the
cosmogram is counter-clockwise. The tension in that movement is found in many
other performances of Africana culture. Worth
noting here is that this push, this resistant struggle, against our western
cultural norm of linear progress is also found in one of the foundational
repositories of African American religion: the ring shout. The dancers move counter-clockwise; beginning
slowly and, over time, dramatically increasing the tempo of the singing,
dancing and percussive accompaniment. Until they are possessed by spirits.
The multi-colored depiction of the
Sankofa Bird, shown here, presents a shape that establishes a clockwise rhythm. This reversal of the traditional flow of energy has implications that deserve attention. One of the persistent worries nagging my soul at what I see happening in our communities, our country, our world is that those of us who have “moved around our circle of life” and have, chronologically at least, achieved the status of elder, all too often have earned the judgment that we have failed to hand on the vital lessons of our past to our young people who stand at the intersecting axis of the Cosmogram -- where they must make decisions about how they will act, for the benefit of the “beautyful [sic] ones yet unborn” and in keeping with the traditions that have guided the community for untold generations. What distresses my soul is the mounting evidence that some who should be teaching this have made, perhaps, too many concessions to the larger world in which we negotiate our survival; and have either not learned the lessons from our own elders and ancestors, or some of us have decided that much of our past can be worn as decorations and can be ignored as keys to unlock the power of our own history. Have we become existentialists in our intellect, believing that there is little in our past that needs to be protected? Coming into the field of Black Studies when I did, I learned that we who choose to study the struggle that marked the old ones -- and that marks us still – do indeed have a useable past and we have an obligation to be agents of Sankofa: bringing forth that which is necessary for today.
As must be evident to anyone who has
spent any time reading these entries, or reading any other of my writings, or
anyone who is even minimally familiar with my professional focus on Africana
religion and culture, Black Sacred Songs (“The Negro Spirituals”) are, for me, sacramental texts. The songs carry
within them “the power to make things happen” (as one of my great influences,
Robert F. Thompson, defines the concept of àshe).
The struggle against the power of enslavement, oppression, abuse and
degradation that was waged by those who chose to survive the disruption and
dislocation that was the Transatlantic Slave Trade – the lessons learned from
that struggle are the foundations of what we should be teaching under any form
of Black/African American/Africana Studies.
But in order to know that we have a past worth retrieving, we must first
humble ourselves sufficiently to recommit ourselves to knowing that “the
struggle continues.” The lives we live
must be praise-songs to our elders and ancestors.
The songs and stories of the
ancestors carry messages that have been found useful, over and over. But what
has happened in the last half-century, to turn these coded strategies of
defining ourselves against the systemic effort to suffocate our souls, to turn
these vessels of redemption and liberation into decorations. Reversing the rhythm of the dance has
far-reaching consequences. No time will
be spent on restating the challenge that can be found in another entry of the
Sankofa Muse that deals with the embarrassing and demeaning misuse of one of
the great claims of peoplehood and covenant – “Come By Here” (December 31,
2013).
What forces this meditation on Yoruba
power and Catholic grace, are the murmurings of some of the culture’s elders
who see nothing of our tradition in the Black Lives Matter movement that has
been gaining in “wisdom and in grace” (as was said of the child Jesus when he
had to teach the teachers in the Temple; Luke 2:46-50). A disquieting example
of this phenomenon of chastising our young ones when we should be moving among
them, bestowing blessings and nourishment for the tasks ahead of them is found
in a column published by the Washington Post, on August 24, 2015 by Reverend
Barbara Reynolds. http://wapo.st/1JORYD
Rev. Reynolds sees little that is redemptive or culturally consistent in
the actions of the Black Lives Matter participants. Establishing her status as an elder in the
“Civil Rights Movement,” she scolds the BLM generation as being ignorant of
their past, contemptuous of those who would lead them and guide them, and unmindful
of how they present themselves in public.
In only one quotation that will be
used here, Reynolds says, “The baby boomers who drove the success of the civil
rights movement want to get behind Black Lives Matter, but the group’s
confrontational and divisive tactics make it difficul. In the 1960s, activists confronted white mobs
and police with dignity and decorum, sometimes dressing in church clothes and
kneeling in prayer during protests to make a clear distinction between who was
evil and who was good….But at protests today, it is difficult to distinguish
legitimate activists from the mob actors who burn and loot.”
Just as Rev. Reynolds was publishing
these reflections, we were commemorating the 10th anniversary of the
destruction of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. As far too
many people have proved, it was not the hurricane that destroyed that city, but
the aftermath, when the levees failed even the minimum requirements. And the
levees failed in communities where time and again, political leaders confirmed
the people’s understanding: Black lives don’t matter. We are commemorating the
60th anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till (August 28,
1955). Till, whose death galvanized the
generation to which Reynolds and I both belong, was horrific proof that nothing
the present generation faces is new.
As I was wrestling with my
disappointment with this scolding from Reynolds, demanding decorum and church
attire, I flashed on something else from the 1960s “freedom movement” that I
doubt Rev. Reynolds would claim as part of her standard of resistance. On June 28, 1969, in Greenwich Village, New
York City, after yet another demeaning and dehumanizing (and “legal”) raid on a
social establishment catering to a gay and lesbian clientele, the patrons of
the Stonewall Inn finally said, “Enough is enough. Our lives matter.” And when (as the reports note) “three drag
queens and a lesbian” were arrested, a crowd of over 600 people responded with
frustration, fearlessness and focus. “The Stonewall Riots” are still celebrated
every year as an example of how change actually takes place in our society.
Every so-called “riot” in the United
States in the 1960’s was part of the “civil rights” movement --- and those
eruptions of frustration and rage were anything but civil. But each and every
one of them whirled, shouted, flung decorum to the winds and said, “Here, in
this cesspool to which we are relegated, we know that our lives matter. And to
prove it we are willing to lose our lives. But attention will be paid.” An
aside (of sorts): did the Black Panthers dress for Sunday school? Did the young contemporaries of Barbara
Reynolds who walked all over the South dressed in jeans and boots and wrinkled
shirts get lectured because they were not in business attire?
Reading and reflecting on how a
cohort of Black Elders chastise our young, I could not help but also “read” the
great song of liberation, “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” The originators and curators of that song
radically revised the biblical account. The problematic thrust of the original
narrative – the story of an invading crowd of migrants and refugees convinced
that they had a God-given right to appropriate the land of others – becomes a
holy remembering of how the history of an oppressed people – any oppressed
people – can provide a strategy for confronting whatever oppression looms in
our present circumstance. The singers of
this song choreograph resistance through thoroughly African rituals. Moving counter-clockwise – the song is a Ring
Shout – the singers become the historical Israelites. But they are not claiming
the territory of others; they are unleashing the power to make their own sense
of the godhead within manifest in the world.
Dangerously other, problematic in their silence – except for the horns sounded
by the priests, the “children” circled the walled city of Jericho, day after
day, for six days. And, then, Oh, Glory! On the seventh day, they marched
around the city seven times, while the “lamb/ram/sheep horns” were sounded. And
then following the injunction of the God they were discovering, “Joshua
commanded the children to shout. And the
walls come tumbling down.”
Even if Black Lives Matter
participants don’t claim the song – and since they most likely were never
taught the power inherent in the performance of the song, why would they make
it theirs? – they are nevertheless reaching far back into their past and
disrupting the order maintained by the privileged. They are teaching their
elders how to remember their own past with much more complexity. And they are
restless to claim the crossroads.
The Sankofa bird, much like the dove
that descended upon Jesus at the Jordan, brings the power to make things happen
to the young ones.
We professors of Africana Studies far
too often avoid dwelling on the uncomfortable legacy that is locked away in
these songs and stories. It is not that we are “unchurched,” or that the songs
are far too simple to withstand the intricacies and sophistication of our
theoretical gaze. Rather, even more simply, do we only teach that which we
understand; not that which makes us personally uncomfortable. But at this time, more than any time of our
recent history, we need to return and fetch the power to transform this desert.
And we also need to see that the children may have learned it anyway, because
our culture can never be hermetically sealed away. The more we talk to each
other, the more we have a responsibility to find silence within ourselves and
let the voices of history possess us.
We who think that we have now gained
some measure of stability and respectability are charged to renew our mission
to educate our children with the “true truth” and to give the greatest gift
imaginable: our trust that they are exactly where they ought to be on the
circle that defines our people.
