An Open Letter to my younger self, my, older self, and my other selves.
Dear, brother,
It says a tremendous lot about the decimation of our culture as Africans in the diaspora that our young have to re-learn what our elders went through, and they often learn it stubbornly, unwillingly. I speak from experience, but I am not speaking of the data on the timeline. I think we all pretend to know that; I am speaking of the implications.
Let's put aside for this letter that most of the fault lies with white civilization, which took you from your home, made you and that home into something neither would recognize.
But part of this is the fault of our own elders who - unlike ANY oppressed people I know of - hand their own children over to the white racist society to grow into complete men and women, even though these elders know better. They know no other option than to hand over their treasures because they are so removed and disconnected from their source, so it follows that we would be just as hopeless.
And so we go about trying to blend in and do our best for these elders, who are no better than the African and Arab dictators installed by European powers: their values are one and the same; they answer to their bell ringing. It is not in their plan that we grow into men and women.
And Hawaii will not give that to us, though it HAS removed me from the mainland, and this is a good thing, because - maybe like you - it has allowed me to breathe.
Part of the fault in our being so lost lies with us, as adults. We keep seeing manifestations of what this white-settler state thinks of us, plans for us, but we simply refuse to believe it. We feel we cannot believe it because we "know" there is nothing else. And we "know" there is nothing else because we do not know we came from somewhere. It is this "knowing" that is the cornerstone of the government schools in which we were all sent to learn. Nothing.
I have to say: it must begin with us knowing we came from somewhere. This doesn't mean dressing it up in the archetypes of patriarchy [viz. "Great Kings and Queens of Africa"], which is bullshit to keep you tethered to a warped ideology. You cannot Africanize European Christianity and make things right.
Hawaii sovereignty will not replace our origins anymore than dabbling in Buddhism or getting an MBA from Harvard will, which are just some of the things we do to distract ourselves, but the sovereignty cause does shed light on how white capitalism works [for them], and why MY homeland of Bioko Island and Cameroon are further along down the same toilet that occupied Hawaii will go. Hawaii is just South Central LA and Ferguson, MO. in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaii is the Pine Ridge Reservation with a beach.
I say this in this particular way because these manifestations of white supremacy and imperialism are to be studied, to illuminate who you are and where you came from and how you got here, but they are not diversions.
When I got back from my first trip to Cuba, several small magazines and newspapers asked me to write about it. I could not. For the life of me and the need of money I could not. Then it dawned on me that I could not because it wasn't Cuba I learned about; it was the United States of America.
[I had to go back then and re-read James Baldwin's "The Discovery of What it Means to be an American"]
Brother, if you have friends taunting you and calling you names for speaking about the racial issues of the day; if you have boyfriends calling you "nigger", I say it's way passed time to stop and look around because it's going to get worse.
When Polonius tells his son Laertes in "Hamlet": "TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE ..." he's not telling him to be whoever he wants to be. He's telling him to know where he came from, and remember his ancestors.
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