Hotep!
In the searing heat of life’s desert, there is a drive that keeps me forging ahead and not giving in. What drives me is a relentless urge to study peoplehood and hope. Peoplehood and hope coexist in our lives under the shroud of Blackness. To study Blackness is to study peace, freedom and hope, to study what we do, and what we have learned from what is done that makes us do what we do.
The ancient word “hotep” means “Be at rest, be at peace, and be free.” The symbol for hotep is a loaf of sweet bread in the center of a table placed as an offering at all events or gatherings.
The word “peace” causes the scars of history to itch. This scar on the collective consciousness of Black communities shows us the enduring wounds of a distorted notion of what is human that has been produced by another people from another psychic predisposition, a scar on the mind’s eye, leaving us blind to what has been imposed on us.
Cultural reconstruction, the building of connection with one’s culture of origin, reduces psychological pressure. Culture relieves us of our blindness and allows us once again to see who we are, who we have always been, and who we are meant to be.
Today, the problem of the future is a cognitive one, a problem of knowing. In the study that is my life’s work, my primary struggle is in knowing and being known not only in decisive direct visual form, but in the creator-bound knowing of who I am, and who my people are.
For the answer of who my people are I turn to historian David Blight speaking of the Jim Crow years as accompanied by the visual memorialization of the denigration of Black culture and Black people, and the uplifting of white supremacy through the monument building led by the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy explicitly linked carved monuments with their goal of teaching their people of all ages the romanticized versions of the enslaved Black “mammy” as a symbol of devotion to her Master’s family.
I was born in the Jim Crow South, and from Day 1 I was taught to speak the words of personal dignity and hope for building a better future. We were taught to memorize words such as rising, climbing, uplifting, and to be the self-determined image of moral instruction and intellectual excellence. Teaching spaces for memorializing image-making include beauty salons, barbershops, churches and dance joints.
For 81 years, my struggle has been to overcome, and I accept it. From outside sources, collectivities of people are often informed of their impoverishment and told that they have pain and suffering but that the pain and suffering is their fault. When this happens, the experience of pain and suffering becomes memorialized, dreams become nightmares, and dead creativity becomes collective paralysis.
I see my struggle in a broader context. In many teachings from many teachers across Africa, struggle brings maturity of capacity to self-regulate. The capacity to learn how to endure the throes of struggle. Struggle articulates the subjectivity of agency. Struggle awakens the great heritage of the endurance of the soul. The soul operates within a set of laws that is different from the laws governing the mind and the body.
Sam Moore, of the singers Sam and Dave, returned to our ancestors this month wearing the 89-year shroud of Blackness. Seven decades of sharing songs of overcoming limitations, Brother Sam sang and moved to the rhythms of knowing himself as” Soul Man.” Struggle calls on us to change, to transform situations. This brings about intuitive knowing, agency, and the capacity to know the way forward.
My study of the life and the death of George Floyd is relevant here. Movements for human rights and human justice are framed as ground zero for understanding the human condition in the wake of slavery. In this frame, Black Freedom becomes a prophetic vision. Mr. Floyd was positioned in the immediacy of change in the world’s view of a human being on a cell phone. Through a cell phone, the lasting ancient image of a Black man with thick lips and a broad nose is memorialized.
The site of this Black man’s crucifixion is now among the most important monuments in the world. Officer Derek Chauvin posed for a photograph of his mirror image in which the world could see themselves through his learned ease of practicing the legal killing tool of “knee on the neck” of a Black man. He places his hands in his pockets to show his perfect practice of this law in action.
Mr. Floyd’s living image is the haunting self-reflection for the people of the world who carry the awful terror inside their historical memory of their ancestors predesigning this practice. Historical memory is the door to the soul. I hear from allies in this movement forward to a future of harmony and their own sobering question “Who am I?”
When we attempt to imagine making freedom in the world, we are inevitably reminded that freedom in slavery’s wake on the shores of our present, we are met by the waves of our past. The destruction of a Black-anchored intellectual heritage of our people causes an awful terror because it distorts and tortures the existence of a self of origin.
The healing and health of our memory is our way forward, a shift of mind frame from generational survival to a new consciousness. We can build cultural healing practices that revolve around creative learning and ways of producing new knowledge. Community connections and building institutions have grown distant, and in many cases, individual disinvestment is reinforced because of this distance.
Leadership from the community is now emerging to restore the linkages between intergenerational knowledge sharing through the built communities and institutions. We can build partnerships in which cultural ways of knowing are respected as being integral to a person’s effective experiences, of keeping our roots. I propose a law and health policy to make Black healing and health happen.
Health is the extent to which a person or group is able, on the one hand, to realize aspirations and satisfy needs, and, on the other hand, to change or cope with the environment. Health is therefore seen as a resource for daily life, not the objective of living. It is a positive concept, emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacity.