Ancestral Memories

A poem to start your week.

I’ll be real with you, I’m over black excellence
I don’t have to see myself in pharaohs
I don’t have to proclaim to have been royalty
I don’t have
to need
to be exceptional

The first curse of our existence seems to have been this
division, grasping at exception
A primordial fear of the human condition
That one will stand out too much or too little
We spent lifetimes trying to make ourselves fit in cages from our scattered bones

I’ll be real with you, the more I think about it
the sillier it seems
this double consciousness
the need
to question
Am I African or American
or both?
When I am everything and nothing at all

My being transcends the annals of identity
I am not a political subject,
I am a matter of fact, a memory alive,
a breath moving in resonance with all the breaths taken before mine
and all the breaths beating after my own
I am eternal

What is identity if not the momentary constriction
of a soul far too boundless to be categorized?
Why would I bother with contemplating what it means to be a political subject when I am the fragmented
particles of exploded stars
when I am from cosmic dust older than time, older than the prescriptions of this nascent violent system

I’ll be real with you,
I am everything and nothing at all
I am the whole and the absence

The veil I wear is one of my own making

And I refuse a bisected consciousness

and the illusions of a system set to kill us all

One that wants you bifurcated,

Split open

and always unsure of your existence.
Am I African or American? This or that?
Deserving or underserved,
Belonging or longing
Did I come from the part of Africa that is revered?
Can I drape myself in the specters of a lost timeline, in garb adorned by history as worthy or excellent enough to matter?

My ancestors believed
We are conceived knowing who we are
But forget at the moment of our first breath,
We spend each day henceforth working our way towards our exit
a lifetime spent grasping at the corners of our knowing, trying to find ourselves again
They say the only absolution we are guaranteed is that we will all one day be somebody’s ancestor

And if that’s the case, the only crisis of contemplation I deem worthy
Is not if I am this or that,
but would I rather die on my feet, standing for what is righteous, or live and die on my knees begging to be recognized?

See, I’m over black excellence
I don’t want black billionaires or icons
I don’t need my work in halls lined with gold stolen from somebody’s ancestors
Or a seat at the table where they’ve been carving up somebody’s ancestors for 500 years

What I want is every indigenous artifact returned to the people they belong to
What I want is every child to know they don’t have to be exceptional to matter
What I want is all of us knowing we don’t have to define ourselves or our worth by systems bathed in blood
any longer.