D.jeloni

Happy Janet Day! 🥳

It’s the incomparable Queen of Pop and Eras’ 57th bornday. 

If the soul spins back into flesh, send me again through melanin. Send me where the sun leaves fingerprints. Send me into a body that remembers the Dogon mapping Sirius before white men discovered curiosity. Send me into Nile-blood, into hips that hold pyramids, into tongues that learned God through drum and fire and river.

I would choose the blood of Timbuktu, where libraries rose like temples, where knowledge slept in ink and stars, where Black hands mapped the heavens while Europe still feared the dark. I would choose the spine of Mansa Musa, who walked gold across deserts like prophecy, who made the world remember that Blackness was abundance before it was a wound. I would choose the courage of Harriet, who turned North into scripture, who heard God in the language of footsteps and called it freedom. I would choose the defiance of Assata, who taught exile how to breathe, who proved that even cages can’t kill a mind that remembers itself. I would choose the moans of the spirituals, coded like constellations, where “Follow The Drinking Gourd” was not just a song but a map, where heaven meant Canada and God meant go. I would choose the church mothers who laid hands on generations with prayers thick as a pot of collard greens, who turned sanctuaries into hospitals for souls with no insurance.

Do not offer me escape as lighter skin. Do not offer me safety as erasure. I will not reincarnate into forgetting. Our ancestors turned cotton into gospel, turned pain into polyrhythm, turned lynching trees into meeting places with heaven. They learned how to talk to God without needing a language they could steal. They crossed water so we could cross thresholds. They learned silence so we could learn song. They bent time so we could stand upright in it.

I would choose Black even knowing the cost. Even knowing the bullet loves us. Even knowing the law confuses us. Even knowing grief wears our faces often. Because I have seen what we make from ruin. Because we build beauty in the mouth of disaster. Because we dance in funeral clothes. Because we laugh in a system designed to choke the sound from us. I would choose Black again because my ancestors did not survive
for me to arrive as something else.

Because we learned to survive without permission to be human. They say our history began with ships. But my blood remembers kingdoms. My spine remembers ceremony. My hair remembers crowns.

So if the universe asks me again, “What body will you wear?” I will say: Give me the one that carries suns. If am reborn a thousand times, let me come back with this lineage of light. With this sorrow-forged joy. With this fire that knows how to forgive without forgetting.

Give me Black. Again. Again. Again.

I would choose Black in every lifetime because somewhere between chains and constellations we learned how to touch God and call it music. And I do not want a heaven that does not sound like us.