a prayer

not here, not this, but something different elsewhere

It feels right to end here, at this point, as we stand at the close, hoping with a childlike wish in our hearts that it isn’t over, that somehow, this will go on. This is a feeling we all know, it is instinctual, natural, embedded in our muscle memory, and in our very essence and being. An irrational ideal, to keep moving without stopping, to never have to anticipate the end of the day, and to just continue on with what fills our hearts with content. It is a hope that the Black radical tradition was built on, a beautiful prayer for an endless trail of beginnings and no ends. Why? Because it was necessary to start from a point of possibility and not loss. To read their story as one of resilience and not abjection. To see their history as one that is not rife with despair, but alive with promise.

The Black radical tradition, to me, is a new Enlightenment, a Black Renaissance, which left behind in its wake a place for everyone. It is a movement that focused on the deconstruction and reordering of the world on different terms. On magic and enchantment, rationality and irrationality, on love but also loss, for the dead and the living. It sought to create a world that did not exist in binaries, but multiplicities; to render each, the black, the white and the grey their due. And in many ways to simply see the world very much through a child’s eyes; benign and uncorrupted by the logic of power.

It is imbibed with a certain ethic, in tune with the idea of a world that is for everyone and so speaks through a secret code, one that is unclaimed and undiscovered because it belongs to everyone and therefore, does not exist in one form. It exists for all of us. The Black radical tradition communicates in a language that does not emerge from violence, but from a place of innocence. Like a prayer, it does not have a definite form, it can be a string of consciousness that speaks exactly as it feels, unfiltered and free. It can be disjointed and eloquent both at the same time, it can defy logic and reproduce it, all on its own terms. But in each case, its form is representative of the larger project, which is not to redefine the world according to a specific structure, rather, to open the world to more than one form of expression.

So then, like when a child is born in to this world and a prayer is said for them, that the world be kind to them, and create a space for them where they can unapologetically be themselves; that world, the multi colored black world, the world of Morrison, Lorde, hooks, Fanon, Cesaire, Du Bois, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and so many more; that is the world the black radical tradition leaves behind to us. A world where you are not a problem, where you can see through the veil that seeks to blind you, where the color of your skin does not determine your destiny, where your anatomy does not limit your horizon, and where you don’t have to worry about who is better than you, but rather, worry about how you can become the best version of you. A world where you can simply just be. 

And so, as we began with a prayer, let us end with one;

I am. We are. And that is enough.