My archives, your archives, our archives. But by archives I’m not thinking of musty or air conditioned rooms, almost inaccessible, tombstones of some stalwart’s art. I’m speaking of archives of so(n)(g)(er)und, of memory, archives of the oral, archives of spirit, the library as mbira, the thumb piano, on which you play the troubles and the travails of your soul. Archives of ownership, of reclamation, of record, of discovery, of yourself in a strange land, by the still or turmoiled waters, where you lay down and weep, where you lay down and dream, where you become free, to the oral moment here as text becoming, the oral moment hear as text becoming. I mean a slave knows that the slave is free when he or she has reclaimed these archives. This is the magic and the mystery of the slaveship— triumphant passage of the middle passage. I mean we come with freedom archives. Without the printing block, without the roman alphabet. The plantation does not encourage libraries and achives, it doesn’t do that at all, it has always not done that, it always inhibits freedom. But the archive of our people…
When my eyes rendered light from the dark/when my eyes rendered light from the dark my battlesong opened into a solitaire’s moan/I became most knowing, and forever-alone. And when my training was over, they circled my waist with pumpkin seeds and dried okra, and sold me to the traitors, all my weapons within me— I was sent, tell that to history.Â
