The story of African people and how they arrived in America is an opera, tragic in its simplicity, a true story which remains unexamined, its descendents trapped in memories too horrific to speak, yet speak we must. The Maafa Reader Project is interested in these stories.
The Maafa or "the calamity" in the Kiswahili language, is a part of a larger vision, one where Sankofa - Africans "going back to fetch it," fetching resources and guidance from the ancestors celebrated in the Maafa ritual," and Ayaresa - "health and well-being," also have equal value. If a people do not remember and celebrate their past-- Sankofa, they really have no sense of who they are and cannot effectively move forward with Ayaresa.
Is closure a possiblity? Why? Why not?
The book project is a means to establish a dialogue, a conversation between descendents of enslaved Africans who had to create a new life when everything familiar was taken away.
The book will be divided into sections: At Home, Taken, In Transit, Disconnected, Lost, Found. Each section will begin with a preface, written by the editor, which sets the tone for the selections to come - from the artists and scholars whose work was accepted.
This book will also discuss this need for acknowledgement. How else can one explain the simultaneous creation of Maafa rituals throughout America in Oakland, Southern CA, New York, Galveston, Chicago, Seattle, Detroit, Montgomery, and New Orleans. Something is definitely in the air. The Reader will explore these phenomena.
Akintiunde Kofi Camara, creator of Eintou, a unique African merican poetic form and African American historico-cultural philosophy with the musical strategies of the blues and jazz, writes in a submission to the Maafa Reader Project:
Were I a reader of African humanity,
upon whose pages
was inscribed the wisdoms of the ages,
then the Maafa would be a 350 paged chapter
of diatribes on my lowest, darkest hour,
during which white power soured the sweet taste of liberty,
and his greed lead blindly to chains, whips
and sordid quips about colored skin..
Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz writes in "Hush Child Hush," another submission to the Maafa Reader Project:
In May 1991, the United States General Services Administration began preliminary work for a federal office tower at Broadway and Duane Streets and the former gravesite, stretching five acres, was unearthed. The land had been allocated to the city's black population, some free, most enslaved, in the late 1600's when even cemeteries were segregated. With the passage of time, the original intent of the land became memory until the excavation more than a decade ago. I knew we wouldn't always be forgotten.
Kenneth McManus writes in his submission to the Maafa Reader Project:
Memory is key
In the recounting of past woe
And no mark
Serves as a better guide
Than the road map of keloid
Tissue
On my great-great grandmother's
Or great-great grandfather's
Back
Nothing raises up
Those memories
Like that
terrible
scar tissue
Linking one beating
To the next . . .
Those keloids
Tell a keen story
And make my tender back
Concave
To avoid
The next anguished slap
Of leather . . .
Mwatabu S. Okantah writes in his submission: "Pilgrimage: Home to Africa,"
. . . I come home to Africa to reclaim our untold story and to sink my spiritual roots into native soil. I come to Africa to journey into our collective black Self. I was in Senegal because the winding river or my poetry had emptied into Afreekan ocean, where along the battered coastline of our endurance stood Cheikh Anta Diop, a towering lighthouse, guiding the wandering and the lost into safe shores. He provided us with the means to restore the historical continuity, and dignity, in our lives. Late in the winter of 1988, I had been commissioned to write an epic poem in his honor.
The European Slave Trade begun by the Portuguese in the 1490s, then extended into a North American market by the Spaniards in November, 1526, followed by the English in August, 1916, not only disrupted the lives of African people, it shook the world at its foundation, a slippery and unstable precipice all nations, especially those initial western nations still retain at its foundation.
The Maafa, a tragedy and catastrophe of enormous consequences affects all of us in ways imaginable and unimagined. The Editor(s) hope the Maafa Reader Project will bring those hidden variables to the forefront: the humanity issues, the social justice issues, the mental and physical health issues, the historic issues, and the reciprocity issues.
The ordeal legally ended on January 1, 1863, by President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, did not address the bigotry and hatred that would fuel a race and class war that continues into the twenty-first century, a war that denies African American citizens their human rights, as spelled out in the United Nations Charter, not to mention equal rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Civil Rights Act of 1965 and subsequent laws, while addressing some of the legal inequities that directly impact African Americans, have not touched the psychological and economic aftermath of this great calamity or Maafa on the African American citizens here in this United States, not to mention Africa and the rest of the African Diaspora.
The Maafa Reader Project will look at the broad spectrum of this history-African history which is American history through, as previously mentioned: poetry, prose, scholarly research, photography and other creative genres.
The goal is a greater understanding of this period in world history and its impact on society in cities like Oakland, California and parallel developments elsewhere like Johannesburg, South Africa.
