#congress2017

“Nothing radical is happening if a baby is not in the room” she said. I sit, nodding my head and humming in agreement, in understanding and I feel the same hum of agreement coming from Black people in the atmosphere around me. I thought of how it is always mothers who are the strongest fighters. I think of how it is love that leads mothers, particularly Black mothers, to strive for freedom even though they aren’t, knowing deep down that the progress they’re fighting for isn’t something they will ever taste or see in their lifetime. Deep in my heart, I feel angry. I feel like a scab somewhere was picked at and something within me aches a little. I think of how many times I was told that I needed to do something about an injustice somewhere and how those same people actively work to harm me. A mule; we are expected to work, haul, reconstruct and repackage the emotional luggage these people carry with them. To be the benevolent caregiver and never need anyone, to be strong, to be the backbone.  

She tells a story about how she learned love through stories, that it was women in her family laughing and being fully themselves, in imagining and bringing to life stories, how fully-into-themselves and how loud and joyful their energy was. I think to myself about how this is also true for my family, how the only place I truly felt myself is was during Storytime, less Robert Munch more Anansi the Spider, mahmahs and fables that teach us life and love lessons. She shared how she viewed what I interpreted to be a soul; an internal world that is encased by our bodies, she said, that story-telling helps to illustrate, heal and nourish.

Love was always personal for me, communal and familial. Love, as I understood it, gave me capacity, strength and made me tired. Scared me and at the same time helped bring me peace. Love to me was always in association with forgiveness, with apology and responsibility. Love is political, she said to us. I pause and I don’t understand fully. Yet the truth of that statement, the honesty of it made me hum in the way one does when one hears a line of a poem that is so raw in its truth it makes you nod your head and snap your fingers. I felt my perspective shift and I felt like I was walking through a mental doorway of understanding that I felt I always had within me. I felt like her language shaped the key I needed to bring my subconscious knowledge to the conscious.

She tells us of how children living in Palestine connected with youths in Ferguson, sharing tips on how to navigate state-sanctioned violence [read: genocide]; how to make cardboard shields, how to make home-remedies for tear gas. She tells us how communities under siege love, live, eat and share joy in similar ways. How young girls in Palestine use hip-hop as a medium to express themselves; reminding us that the reason why hip-hop is so popular is because of it’s true origins in telling stories that are routinely silenced by those in power. Hip-hop gave these young girls in Palestine a loudspeaker on which they can tell their own stories, much as it did for Black youth in the 80s and 90s. I hear in my head all the anger and pain that resonated with me as a child, how deeply “this album is dedicated to all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothing, to all the people that lived above the buildings I was hustling in front of that called the police on me when I was just trying to make some money to feed my daughter” resonated with me, 17 years old, angry and remembering being told that college wasn’t for me, maybe I should try an apprenticeship. How I believed that so deeply; that I was smart and how hopeless it made me feel. How I got used to my friends being stopped in the mall at lunch, asked to empty their pockets…even though the shop owner described blond not black.