The title and first few paragraphs will have you, dear readers, thinking I’ve lost my damn mind. But keep reading. This is one of the loveliest articles I’ve read in a long time.
teleSUR English is an alternative representation for world news. we focus on the people, the common citizen, stories untold by traditonal media. you will only find them at teleSUR.
Before 16 bars imprisoned words,
before rhymes were as predictable
as a cop’s nightstick upside your head,
my pen positioned itself
in the continuum of black words.
Shaka Zulu and Uhuru
are the main threads of my weave
so there’s no need for me to loom
larger than sacred life.
I’ll leave that to you and you and you
while my words through the needle go
attempting to be part of the quilt
reconnecting the unraveled threads of black life.
I’m not a superstar.
I’m just a star shining alongside my fellow stars.
Together, we illuminate what’s right
and I like it like that.
So you and you and you
can keep on masturbating to finger snaps
while I read ngugi
trying to decolonize my mind
so that my words can turn into wombs
breeding the fire next time.
In the Introduction to this series, I wrote about how I was fascinated by the Great Dismal Swamp. I didn’t include that I also desired to write a verse novel but I was intimidated for a variety of reasons: my limited poetic knowledge of the forms and techniques writers I admire (Derek Walcott) used for their verse novels/epics. Plus, my previous books length collections have been full of pieces that were created individually with no thought of the cohesion a novel type book requires.
But what I realized both on my own and after reading this article about Idea Debt. Simply put, Idea Debt is defined thus:
Idea Debt is when you spend too much time picturing what a project is going to be like, too much time thinking about how awesome it will be to have this thing done and in the world, too much time imagining how cool you will look, how in demand you’ll be, how much money you’ll make. And way too little time actually making the thing.
I’ve spent the past few years writing this in drips and drabs…and mentally engaging with it and its concept; to the point that I was allowing it to hold me back and stymie other writing projects in the works. After reading that article, I realized I was correct in publishing the pieces online so that they could move out of my creative space and thereby free it up.
I feel validated by the likes the series has gotten so far although some constructive comments would also be nice! So, thank you, reader for reading this and I hope you like where I take it (or it takes me!)
It was heady
the overheard talk
as one beast of burden
held another
for George
to ride to a Congress
where Henry was going
to wax poetic
about liberty and death
But I didn’t really need their talk
to know about freedom.
I just had to remember
what life was like before
on the Senegambia.
Life there was pagan
and imperfect
but it wasn’t chained,
branded or hobbled;
and my skin color wasn’t a disease
actively legislated against
by people who believed
in the Curse of Ham.
So when the British said
if we reach them, we would be free
I forswore being enslaved
to a future first president.
It wasn’t the first time I ran
but it was the first time
I was successful.
Related Links:
Cassandra Pybus – Epic Journeys of Freedom
1.
William Byrd married
a 21-year-old widow
whose dead husband
was the son
of a former governor
of Virginia.
She agreed
that William’s first son
would be named
after him;
a heritage the son wore so proudly
he went on to become
the future founder of Richmond.
2.
William Byrd, the son, married Lucy,
one of two daughters
of Daniel Parke
who holds the honor
of being the only British
colonial governor to be lynched
out of existence.
Lucy’s sister married John Custis
and they had one son
Daniel Parke Custis
the first husband of Martha Washington.
3
Daniel died and left Martha
17,500 acres, 300 slaves
and control of the inheritance
of two of their children still alive
and two years after he died
Martha married George.
When George was eleven
his father died
and he inherited ten slaves.
In the Virginian scheme
of things
ten was middling, minor;
certainly not enough to recast(e) him
into the upper echelons
of plantation society
Martha brought George great wealth
and George bought land and more slaves
before sailing across the Delaware
to a future first presidency.
What it was like, for me,
from my perspective,
didn’t survive; wasn’t deemed
worthy of documentation.
My vagina was turned
into a conduit for colonialism.
Colonialism went in
and when it came out,
I was pretty much erased.
Any remnant of remembrance
was converted to Christianity
and I ended up dying
so far from my home
so far from the people
who, despite letting me languish
a whole year and then some,
still would not have slept
on my grave.
This is their perimeter of peace.
This is why it’s personal
and why I, Pocahontas,
permute my personality
for the poet.
The poor Indians would have had less
reason to complain
that the English took away their land
if they had received it
by way of portion
with their daughters.
A sprightly lover is the most prevailing missionary.
If a Moor may be washed white
in three generations
surely an Indian
might have been blanched
in two.
Cento sourced from The Westover Manuscripts
That bewitching vegetable, tobacco
first came to England
by sir Walter Raleigh
that great ornament of the British nation
who, to his royal mistress,
could do no less
than make a present
of the brightest.
Whether that gentleman
ever made a voyage
to that part of the northern American continent
now under the dominion of the king
is uncertain.
However, thus much may be depended on:
Sir Walter invited sundry persons of distinction
to share in his charter,
obtained from queen Elizabeth
of ever-glorious memory,
and join their purses with his
in the laudable project
of fitting out a colony.
A modish frenzy
made many fond of removing
to such a paradise:
expecting their coarsest utensils
would be of massy silver.
Cento sourced from The Westover Manuscripts
On my book blog, I have written about how absolutely fascinated I am by the Great Dismal Swamp. I have started but not yet finished Daniel A. Sayers’ A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp; started but not yet finished Charles Royster’s The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington’s Time; started and finished Sylviane A. Diouf’s Slavery’s Exiles. All that starting and not [yet] finishing led to a bout of writing that turned out to be a series of centos that basically described the founding of Virginia, one of the two states which formed around the Great Dismal Swamp.
Even though I have not yet finished two of the books mentioned above, research detours led me to The Westover Manuscripts written by William Byrd, colonial founder of Richmond, Virginia. The source material for the cento part of the series is drawn from that document.
I have been playing around with how to present these pieces since, at this point in time, they won’t be in my next book. I thought of just putting all the pieces in one post and letting them be read that way. But that idea didn’t sit too easy, visually speaking. So I decided to kind of serialize them.
Click here to read the first in the series.
Tichaona Chinyelu 
You must be logged in to post a comment.