Slavery stole people, erased languages, wiped out entire tribes, killed at least 5 million people of color (the journey, the diseases, the beatings, the killings, uprising, ECT), broke up families, eradicate religions, and obliterated cultures. As a descendant of slaves, the thing I want more than anything in the world is a culture. I want to know who my people were. My blood does not come from this land, despite how much it bleeds here.
I watch every other person of color have culture. I listen holding my breath to my friend's 92 year old grandmother tell me about Ganesh and other Hindi stories. She tells me about how her customs are different than her son-in-law's who is from the east while she is from South India. I'm entranced as my friend's aunt tells me her town is near Maya ruins and she can trace her traditions back to them. That there were different cultures even with in the Mayans. How each subculture has a variation of the same food, like a tamale, and that's a good way to tell them apart. I go to the public communal gatherings of Illinois's Indigenous People, their music and dances pasted down for generations. I am jealous of my Eritrean friend's traditional habesha kemis.
I spend my time learning about as many cultures of people of color as I can. I live vicariously through these culture. With the knowledge and time that people spent teaching me, I'm as proud as I'm allowed to be. It's a love and pride by association. I feel at home on boats from learning from Filipino people as well Iroquois. I can dance to several different south African drum beats. But none of it is mine. They might take me in but it's not my homeland. I'm a culture refugee. I have to be let in I can't just walk in the door. It's a privilege to be allowed in. I know that the same access can be denied at anytime. What if they decide to kick me out? Tell me to go back home? Where is that?
There is black culture in America but it's so young. I want more than what currently exist. The problems we face have never been faced before. We don't have a history of how to handle it. We don't have a cohesiveness either. No holidays, no religions, no system that organizes us, no medicine, no land and no customs. We are constantly undermined by a government, by a country that always oppressed us. They are constantly erasing our history and destroying any foothold we get at establishing ourselves. We have a common enemy, music, food, dance, a bonnet, and an emerging language. I've studied it all. When/ If Black America ever makes it as a culture where will we be from? This land isn't ours. We will be homelandless. Will people still be on this planet long enough for us to establish the culture? We will the white people stop robbing us of culture? I want to appreciate my culture not be part of creating it.
I long for something already established not something trying to grow. Plus, I had culture, it was somewhere in Africa. But it's gone and so I'm just suppose to create a new one? What about the centuries lost? There has to be something that survived? The kicker is even if something survived slavery destroyed so many unique cultures that we wouldn't know who it might belong to. It's not like slavery just wiped out the Incas, 1 large unique nation. Slavery wiped out a lot of particular nations without recording any data. Cultures that had mostly oral traditions and not a lot of written or permanent documentation. Just imagine finding a ancient grave site in the area where the slave trade was. Who are those people? We may never know because we erased their lineage's culture from history. There's a permit gap in the middle of the story that we will never get back.
I want a chance at having a story. One that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the middle of story has been ripped out and burned. The story has to continue. But how are we supposed to write an ending? Can an author finish an epic with no knowledge of its past? The cohesive timeline has been destroyed so does it even matter? With the middle missing no reader will ever be able to make heads or tails of it. It almost impossible to write an end that would make sense anyway. So I understand the desire not to try. But we can't start a new book. We have to continue the current one. I would think one would rewrite the middle. And maybe that's what we're doing as best we can. As much as we long for the earlier additions to the saga they have been destroyed. So we mourn for what's lost and we rewrite as best we can.
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