20 December 2014

When I think of Home I think of a Place




Imagine for a moment that you were adopted by a decent, loving family who had their hearts in the right place, who fed and clothed you, sent you off to school, and did their best to encourage your development in every way. You know they had heart for you, but as you get older you are also always aware that they are not your kin, that their family name does not give you a history. Family dinners and family reunions impress upon you your actual role as an orphan.

Still, you grow up. Then one day you decide to do some arduous, painful research and find your birth mother, maybe meet her or confront her if she's still alive. Mother, why did you give me up? You just want to know your place in the universe, and that you have a place other than as someone who was abandoned and picked up by kind, loving strangers.

After years of research, you find your birth mother, and you locate the state and town where she lives; you see she has brothers and sisters and cousins. You get an address. You buy a plane ticket. and you fly there to connect with your own roots.

When you arrive you find the address is that of a maximum-security, open-air prison of a feudal epoch, and most of your surviving kin, these brothers and sisters, are housed in it with life sentences. You pick up a local newspaper that details some sketchy but horrifying facts about life in the prison, the conditions, the bad food, the lack of plumbing, the rampant diseases, and maybe some slow-moving lawsuits to get things improved.

You read praises lavished on the local police forces  for their sternness and refusal to coddle "these people."

 ... I have written lately about the DNA results I've gotten over the last few years, first from my father, which was restricted to just Africa, and my own DNA tests, which covered anything there was to uncover.

I have noted that more than 70% of my DNA comes from Africa, specifically West Africa, and specifically the area that comprises modern-day Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon, the Bubi, Tikar, Hausa, Fulani, and Tsogo Peoples. But more specific to that, the results tell me about my strong ties to Bioko Island, the homeland of the Bubi Peoples, off the coast of Cameroon but part of the nation of Equatorial Guinea.

As my awakening to what the United States really is as an adoptive parent has grown, this has steadily lead me away from the delusions and mirages that white-settler culture offers in abundance and toward finding my birth mother. And in doing that, I find this birth mother, Africa, in a dungeon of horrors worse than Guantanano or Abu Graib.

I find myself between a rock and a harder place, between a white-settler nation-state in my adoptive home and the land of my birth weaponized by the same white settlers.

The police in this narrative - the African governments which can very loosely be called governments, because they do no governing at all - all carry arms manufactured by Western nation-states, Western nation-states who are essentially the social workers who facilitated my adoption in the first place. These African police states have, at best, a cynical view of their captives, whom they allow to exist somewhere between abject misery and starvation.

The reality of this more than washes over me but is like a deluge through which at first I cannot see a direction.

I wonder: what is my purpose here all along? Because as I have pretended to grow in this adopted home - by which I clearly mean the Western hemisphere, my birth mother has faced a worse brutalization that was kept from my knowledge. My adoptive parents did not tell me. My schools did not inform me.

The Western flag I was to pledge allegiance and was alleged to symbolize all that was modern and good and civilized was in fact making vast swathes of humanity untried prisoners of torture in chambers of horrors and concentration camps.

When I get beyond looking at Africa as a spiritual home, the Mother Continent, or whatever religious relic many trifling Negroes try to make of it, a stand-in for the Garden of Eden and Heaven - the actual, daily terrors in our homes cannot be hidden.

It cannot be hidden in a place like Equatorial Guinea and Bioko Island, the land of my ancestors. It is no home to go and be nurtured or to reconnect with long, lost family. It is not a place to have a family reunion. It is not even good enough to be a place for privileged, white Europeans to go and have a ClubMed vacation and be waited on by poor natives. It is a place in dire, dire need to be liberated, as any political prisoner would be, and by any means on the table. These are places that need revolutions.

Having this knowledge I know it must have been in the strategy of the white settlers as they broke their African captives to totally disassociate their knowledge from their homes and their families. Hell has been let loose in steady infernos on that continent, and its children in the diaspora are, on the whole denied the outrage due them, and therefore the inkling to do something about it, as the Irish were in regards to British occupation of Ireland; or the Jews still are in defending the nation-state of Israel. The little-discussed Vietnamese community in Southern California is a Republican constituency just as anti-communist as their Miami counterparts. But, by design, as the late John Hendrik Clark said repeatedly, "Blackness" only describes what you look like; it does not tell you where you're from.

In "The Whiz," Dorothy sings "When I think of home I think of a place where there's love overflowing ..." before she clicks her magic shoes and returns to New York City. The joke is on us. My ending would have had her wake up with a gun in her hand, a copy of Che's manual, "Guerrilla Warfare" at her side, and in the land of her ancestors ready to organize the people and drive out the client class and Euro-kiss-assers.

Now, imagine you were kidnapped by a family who did not have your best interest at heart and essentially did the same things to you ...

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