“Self-liberation from such superficial aesthetic confines is the mold into which we pour the gold to fashion our crowns.”
“In late antiquity and the early common era, sibyls mourned aryan destruction of the civilization of the dark mother, covering the known world with their lamentations —-libyan sibyl of Africa, delphic sibyl of Greece, cimmerian sibyl of Italy, erythraean sibyl (Cassandra) of Babylon, sibyl of Samos, Greece, cumean sibyl of Magna Graecia (south Italy and Sicily), hellespontic sibyl of Troy, phrygian sibyl of Asia, canaanite sibyl in Sicily, and the tiburtine sibyl of Rome. Eurocentric historians would later refer only to sibyls of Ephesus in Asia, Samos in Gree, and Cumae near Naples in Italy, omitting the african sibyl of Libya an omission that may mark the beginning of historical obliteration of the african origins of world civilizations. ”
“And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
+Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth”
“HOME IS THE UNFORGIVING AND UNBEARABLE METAPHOR that nonetheless is perhaps the cleanest motivation for an artist: to find a place for herself, a place to belong, which is also finding herself. I do not mean this in an uncomplicated way: the act of belonging is concurrent with the undoing and unraveling of belonging (and its impositions on the self) such that belonging is tussle and fray and soothe. Home is tenuous at best, especially for the Black woman whose artistic legacy is to leave home, literally or figuratively. Further, the idea of home, of a land to belong to, remains a struggle for this Black woman artist, particularly because ‘home’ and ‘land’ and ‘nation’ have been put to use in colonization, war, genocide, terms of nationalism that are irreconcilable to her sense of herself not only because they evoke and enunciate patriarchy and white supremacy but especially because they do not speak to the home she is longing for. She cannot give up on the idea of home, of a place to belong, but she cannot merely accept what other people have deemed home to be. Hence home, like its distant relative language, is in need of repair.
+ Kevon Everod Quashie,
Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject”
“...the Black body is condemned before it even acts; it has always already committed a crime...the Black body is not born free, but is imprisoned by ideological frames of reference that reduce the Black body ontologically to the level of a criminal. Even in the womb, the Black body is already against the law.
+George Yancy”
“PETRO WAS BORN OUT OF THIS RAGE. It is not evil; it is the rage against the evil fate which the African suffered, the brutality of his displacement and his enslavement. It is the violence that rose of that rage, to protest against it. It is the crack of the slave-whip sounding constantly, a never-to-be-forgotten ghost, in the Petro rites. It is the raging revolt of the slaves against the Napoleonic forces. And it is the delirium of their triumph. For it was the Petro cult, born in the hills, nurtured in secret, which gave both the moral force and the actual organization to the escaped slaves who plotted and trained swooped down upon the plantations and led the rest of the slaves in revolt that, by 1804, had made of Haiti the second free colony in the western hemisphere, following the United States.
+Maya Deren”
“You can be a thousand different women. It’s your choice which one you want to be. It’s about freedom and sovereignty. You celebrate who you are. You say, ‘This is my kingdom.’”
“...many Haitians in the contemporary United States perceive themselves to be living nan djaspora, ‘in the diaspora,’ defined against Haiti as an essential location of its own, regardless of whether they live in Miami, Montreal, Paris, or Senegal. Haiti itself is real, tangible, and, in fact, often a place of partial residence. From local points ‘in the diaspora,’ Haitians live transnational lives. That is, they live embedded in international networks, sustaining social relations that link their societies of origin with their new settlement (Basch et al. 1994). Haitian transmigrants typically work jobs in New York to support homes in Haiti, keeping their children in Haitian schools until they are young teens. They return to Haiti during periods of illness or unemployment; for vacations; for important family events like baptisms, marriages, or funerals; and sometimes for national celebrations like the inauguration of a president, the yearly Carnival or Rara, or the pilgrimage to Sodo for Fèt Vièj Mirak. After decades in the United States, the elderly may return to spend their last years at home. Family roles shift between the two countries, so that children come of age and migrate north, and old folks retire and return southward to home. Both opportunity and tragedy can be the occasion to janbe dlo, or ‘cross over the water.’
”
“WHAT IS TENDER, undeniable, fluid, like winter, memory, or hunger: this practice of pairing with an/other and oscillating between states of (dis) identification yields a liminal identity, a subjectivity that is material and corporeal but which also transcends the limits imposed by corporeality, visual culture, and colonization—a selfhood that challenges the normative constructions of ‘self.’ This liminal subjectivity is not exactly an achieved state; instead, it is a series of uncovering—like the ever outward concentric circles made by a pebble’s break of pond surface, circles that also progress ever inward. What is uncovered is not a new identity but, instead, a self that was always there: the girlfriend subject in her full humanity had always been a multiplied subject of remarkable depth, and her practice of coupling with an/others is subjectivity as revelation. These revelations mark an/other part of the ‘waiting’ self, the self that was and is always there, a self that was, is, and (un)becomes.
+Kevin Everod Quashie,
Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory: (Un)Becoming the Subject
”
“The idea that African religious traditions, ritual practices, social customs, divine prophecy and fundamental beliefs once dominated both the secular and non-secular world in ancient times, seems hard to imagine. Even more, the notion that African women, the oldest human beings on the planet, laid the theological foundation for Judaism, Hinduism, Christianity and Islam under the auspices of the black matriarchs seems even more incredible. ”