Kwanzaa 2016 Reflections

KWANZAA 2016 Contemplating Black Futures

KWANZAA 2016 Contemplating Black Futures The daily meditation was on imagining your ideal future and applying the principle of the day to accomplishing that future. A light dinner was served with a time of ceremony, remembrance, and contemplation. This was an open-house/free-standing invitation, with participants free to come over one day or everyday, as their schedule permitted.

These are my personal reflections.

The Nguzo Saba The Seven Principles

UMOJA UNITY Last night I had a great time with my friend girls, we discussed talking with wypipo about race and our dreams for decolonization: a lot of it had to do with communal living. For me unity means same/similar goals, purpose, and values. Moreover, I see that best expressed by communal living for the purpose of fellowship and supporting the community. How wonderful would it be to have a house of women who are living together, growing together, and volunteering/creating programs that serve the community? I don't know that everyone has the vision for this and definitely seems more common amongst other cultures but I'm praying for this drive and desire to grow amongst Black woman and other women of color.

Unfortunately, I don't always feel unity with those I am around now.

I think we are going in fundamentally different directions that lead u away from each other and the strain of it is hurting our current relationships. There's similarity but no unity.

KUJICHGULIA SELF-DETERMINATION When I imagine a Black future in which self-determination is present, I see cooperative communities that operate by Black values in a healthy fulfilled iteration, even in the Church. A part of selfdetermination is naming oneself and one’s community having the steering wheel of how things operate, what culture and traditions are created. For me, that means more Black churches and Black churches that are forward thinking when it comes to creating rituals, traditions, and ways of living that reflect our culture, even in the embodiment of our relationship with Jesus. While Black churches do currently exist, the problem with most of them seems to be a tie to tradition and respectability politics that doesn't allow growth. Somehow this inability to grow, change, and to respond to the needs of the times undermines self-determination (it weakens the institution because those it’s supposed to serve end up leaving and allows those with outside interests to remove the church or bend its operation to its will). I want to see strong thriving youthopen but family-centric Black American churches that are evangelizing, that are doing benevolence, that are not just responding to the times but creating change. The Black church not stuck in the past and irrelevant but determining its own future by being in tune with the Holy Spirit and creating witty social, economic, and spiritual/theological inventions.

UJIMA COLLECTIVE WORK & RESPONSIBILITY

This night has been hard for me. There wasn’t as much response to my open invitation and I actually felt very alone. I kept wondering to myself, “How do I create a future that values collective work and responsibility when I don’t have people to work alongside?” My own mini depression spiral exaggerated some of this but it is also something I’ve been thinking about for a while. It’s so hard to get people together to work toward a common goal for any extended period of time. Everyone has their individual ideas for their future, their own values, and even where those overlap with someone else’s, the two have different concepts about how to accomplish their shared vision. Nevertheless, I went about cleaning the house, cooking, lighting the candles, etc. as if someone were coming to join me anyway. Though I had finished eating my roommates came into the living room from their day’s activities and we had a discussion along the same lines that was incredibly refreshing and rejuvenating. The conclusion of the day seemed to be a sign that even where collective work and responsibility doesn’t seem possible, continue as if it were the case, as if that which you hope to create already exists. Then the space for it to come into existence is created and your hope can come to fulfillment. I am not the only one who’s heart longs “to build and maintain our community together and make our brothers and sisters problems our problems and to solve them together.”

CONTINUED 

UJIMA COLLECTIVE WORK & RESPONSIBILITY

The efforts of all of us who do long for Ujima can only come to fruition if we continue and don’t lose heart as best we know how, even if it seems disparate and the opposite of collective.

UJAMAA COOPERATIVE ECONOMICS My vision for the future is every person being able to sustain themselves, their families, and more through the work they do every day. I hope to see more Black businesses opened and thriving to the point of hiring others and the profits of the businesses used to support Black artistic and scientific endeavors and Black spiritual and educational institutions. I want to see interconnectedness between local businesses and HBCUs to the point of offering services, being contracted vendors, offering internships, supporting scholarships, etc.

Personally, I want to start a business selling homemade natural and organic tea blends. I want to partner with ----- in making bread, maybe even with others selling their backyard crops. I would like to use this business to support myself to live AND to support benevolence in ----- at my church (eventually leading to supporting a single women’s house? Idk). I also want to start buying Black as much and as often as possible.

My goals in 2017 1. All makeup and haircare from Black-owned companies 2. Support more Black artists 3. Go to ----- Farmer’s Market 2ce/month and get veggies+ 4. Sell at ----- Farmer’s Market starting in the Fall/August

NIA PURPOSE I have some issue with the wording of the principle of Nia: To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness. Mostly, my problem is with the idea of our people (I’m assuming Karenga means here Black American people) returning to a traditional greatness and the ahistoricity of that statement. The reality is that Black Americans and Black American culture don’t exist with slavery. While we have built our own culture in response to this cataclysmic event so that we are *more* than that, we don’t exist as a people group without it. As a people group we were born in the Americas. There is no one African culture to which a Black American person can trace their ancestry, because of the purposeful mixing and attempted destruction of all traces of Africanness, and therefore no particular traditional greatness to which we can be restored. The problem with the phrase “in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness” is that it relies on a constructed African past the erases the individual people groups, nations, and cultures that make up the continent and doesn’t acknowledge the reality of the Black American situation. Therefore, any solutions offered from such position will invariably erase current African peoples and their needs and concerns and undermine the very concept of Pan-Africanism.

CONTINUED 

NIA PURPOSE Also because of this need to restore Black Americans to a traditional greatness that does not collectively exist for us, any solutions offered will not address our actual needs or be truly viable as it refuses to acknowledge the reality we in which we live.

If Karenga was speaking broadly about all African people, this makes more sense and leaves room for each nation, people group, and culture to determine what traditional greatness means for themselves. However, I fear that many Black Americans interested in Black liberation do not interpret the value of Nia this way AND also subscribe to this ahistoric view of Africa and African culture.

What we Black American logically *can* strive to do is end white supremacy and complete the project of decolonization while addressing the anti-Blackness within that cross-cultural project. I think and I hope that such conditions will allow Black Americans to develop even more of healthy thriving culture without the surveillance, thievery, and constant undermining of white supremacy and that such a culture would be understood as part of the Pan-African project.

KUUMBA CREATIVITY Accomplishing all of these things, even on a personal level takes creativity (and faith). Kuumba is something I find myself praying for often, both for myself and for my people, as I referenced in my day-two reflection on Kujichagulia—“witty social, economic, and spiritual/theological inventions.” New ways of seeing and doing that allow Black people to be healthy and prosper in spite of oppression and forward our movement to remove that oppression. A few nights ago, my roommate and I were discussing corporate and governmental surveillance and how impossible it seems to escape it, especially if we are unable or unwilling to totally give up access to technology. Though we agreed on the situation or reactions were different, to her: hopeless, to me: I knew there was some way even if we haven’t figured it out yet. This infringes on tomorrow’s reflection but perhaps that is appropriate: without faith and hope we lose the will for creativity. We must do what we can, how we can and trust that, as we continue, the solutions will arise.

Kuumba will be even more necessary under this new administration.

I’ll be honest, I don’t know for sure how these witty inventions, this new technology of survival will be created, but I do know that community is the fertile ground and hope and faith the needed water.

CONTINUED 

KUUMBA CREATIVITY My own ideas for survival seem so far-fetched that I’m not sure how useful they are and I often despair of even writing the stories, because what can a story do? But like Octavia Butler and Audre Lorde have given this generation not a blueprint but a hopeful vision for the future, I hope my own future-writing does the same.

Who knows where it may lead?

IMANI FAITH Therefore do not throw away your confidence, which has a great reward. For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God you may receive what is promised. For, “Yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay; but my righteous one shall live by faith, and if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him.”

But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the people of old received their commendation.

(Hebrews 10:35-11:2 ESV)

CONTINUED 

IMANI FAITH That is why it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his offspring—not only to the adherent of the law but also to the one who shares the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all, as it is written, “I have made you the father of many nations”—in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist. In hope he believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told, “So shall your offspring be.” He did not weaken in faith when he considered his own body, which was as good as dead (since he was about a hundred years old), or when he considered the barrenness of Sarah's womb. No unbelief made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was “counted to him as righteousness.”

(Romans 4:16-22 ESV)

Who am I?

I am Marie Annetoinette. The daughter of my mother and father. A believer in Jesus Christ and a lover of God, a Black woman, a Queer woman, a Southern woman, a one who cares for justice and peace on the earth

Am I who I say I am?

Am I all that I ought to be?

Not always. At times, I have hidden my nature out of fear or selfishness, or proclaimed myself to be that which I was not yet ready to embrace.

But I am have become more of myself and intend to continue doing so. This is the only way forward.

KWANZAA 2016 Contemplating Black Futures