By: Salihah Aakil
Dear Ancestors,
What made you strong enough to endure what they did to you? How did you continue to enjoy life? How did you find time to create this beautiful culture and still manage to stay alive? What made you want to stay alive?
How can I ever thank you for staying alive?
When did they give up trying to kill you and start tormenting you instead?
Can you teach me the resilience you had, teach me to be the sun, the earth and the shadow between them?
Did you ever want to be more than ⅗ of a person if people acted like you masters did?
Did you ever truly believe they were your masters, that they were born with something that made them inherently better?
How did you stay so strong while they told you that you were weak, march on while still standing on your own two feet?
Who are you, I don’t know your name, your face, laugh, your pain, they made a point of acting like you never existed. They are the best actors they even like to play black folks sometimes. They even like to act like they're broke sometimes.
Can you teach me.. everything, like all the languages that drowned on the middle passage, all the music and dance you used to pass messages?
Can you tell me the stories of how the trees blessed our hair and made it look like them, how we rubbed sunlight and kisses into our skin and became golden children?
Can you tell me how we died, with warrior, hope and pride we died. Became queens after the sun set, became soldiers that they mistook for slinking shadows, like Sandra, like Trayvon, like Emmet, like Eva, like Tarika, Michael, Tanisha, Eric, Miriam, Shelly. Can you remind us how to die brave again, like you did?
Like - like how you did, like how you looked down at your heart as you bled and smiled about how black your blood was. Said,
“They’ll forget us when the sun’s gone but we’ll still be here, still staining their white walls black, still night time.”
All of my people are the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of slaves be we don’t know how to be brave like you were. Can you teach us how to be brave like you were? How to fight even if our only struggle was breathing.
Sincerely
Me
I like the changes you made since the descriptive review. I think the closing is very powerful!
ReplyDeleteHi, Salihah;
ReplyDeleteI found your letter to the Ancestors to be a very powerful piece. I would like to mention that your piece really inspired me to take a pause to reflect on the sacrifices that all of our Ancestors made that brought us to where we are today. I was especially intrigued by the line in which you write;"can you teach us to be brave like you were?How to fight even if our only struggle is breathing.Keep I would be interested to see how you could expound on this topic.
Thanks Larry, I think you just inspired a whole new piece.
DeleteThe line "Can you teach me.. everything, like all the languages that drowned on the middle passage" gave me chills. Such a heartbreaking way of invoking the vastness of tragedy and lost knowledge. I also love the way you communicate being at a loss for words when you repeat "like - like." It made me think--how do you even begin to find the words to address your ancestors? How do you begin to ask the thousands of things you'd like to know? How do convey the immense respect and gratitude for everything that came before you? Very powerful.
ReplyDelete