The Lineage and Language of A Liberation
By TAVP Writer-in-Residence Faylita Hicks
“I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men.
We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields.”
— Queen Mother Nana Yaa, warrior and powerful spiritual leader, 1900 quote during the war of The Golden Stool
Scrolling through Twitter, the headlines tease the overturning of Roe v. Wade, slip in notes about the ongoing book bans and bad critical race theory takes, sighs with the announcement of another mass shooting. Infographics, charts, and memes punctuate the ceaseless course of bad news as I sip my tea and try to remember what joy feels like, quickly clicking on the first essay or article to pop up with “love” or “liberation” or “pride” in the title. Hungry for the language of a time without terror, I scroll, looking for any sign of change.
***
My African Goddess Rising Oracle Deck is the first one I turn to every morning and the last one I turn to at night. In it are the words of my mothers and my ancestors, barely lit memories glimmering in the back of my mind. Looking for love, again, I flip the first card onto my friend’s spare bed, the face of Queen Mother Nana Yaa, as “Queen Yaa Asantewaa,” looking back up to me, along with the words “Level Up.”
Already encouraged, I glance at the accompanying booklet’s page about Queen Yaa Asantewaa and read: “A quantum leap feels drastic and huge. But the secret is that quantum leaps happen little by little.” A small but encouraging wisdom.
Queen Mother Nana Yaa was an Ashanti politician, human rights activist and warrior alive after the semi-emancipation of North America’s enslaved. Born in 1840, she led a rebellion against British colonists before dying in exile in the 1920s. Her story is quite remarkable, though what stood out to me most wasn’t the way she lived, but the familiarity of one of her quotes.
“I shall call upon my fellow women. We will fight the white men.
We will fight till the last of us falls in the battlefields.”
My whole body tingles when I read this manifesto, a battle cry that felt like it was plucked right from a Roe v. Wade op-ed in the New York Times. Maybe I had heard elements of it while getting coffee over at the local shop and while grocery shopping. Perhaps I had seen it on Facebook or overheard it at the bar, I couldn’t be sure. But something about the specificity of the subject, the uprising of women — of Ashanti women — against white men in a fight to the death, stirred something inherited deep within me. A truth about the power of language that had previously been more esoteric but seemed to be evolving quickly into a concrete idea.
Maybe, just maybe, the angry chants of those with wombs flooding the steps of Congress were more than chants. Maybe they were memories resurfacing.
I know. I get it.
It’s hard to imagine that the little gossip session you had with your co-worker in the back of that cheap bar down over on the River Walk could in any way impact the Presidential election — but it’s true. The stories we share between ourselves, behind closed doors or while waiting at train stations, all of these contribute to the larger national narrative we see being outlined and delineated ceaselessly via the 24 hour news cycle. Every day, when we greet each other while picking up the toddlers from daycares or hopping onto Tik Tok to drop the latest trending whatever, we are communicating via fashion, music, employment, transportation, food, décor, housing, religion, and so much more, what it means to us to be operating, successfully or unsuccessfully, in this society. From the foreboding attack on the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment via the Supreme Court’s expected overturning of Roe v. Wade to the tame arrest of mass shooter and domestic terrorist Payton Gendron that took over the timeline earlier this month, the stories we tell each other about who we are as individuals, as community members, and as a country, contribute directly to the design and implementation of our local, regional, and federal policies. What we have told ourselves about who is inherently good or bad, who has the privilege of rights to personhood and bodily autonomy, who should be held accountable by whom, and how they should be held accountable — have brought us to this pivotal moment we are now all witnessing. This is why I believe that to prepare for and manifest a truly post-carceral world, we must begin transforming the way we use our language to engage our collective past.
By engaging our memories through storytelling, whether that is our recent memory or the testimonies of people long past, we mimic the natural processes of our world. The land remembers what has happened to it — as we know by way of the agricultural method known colloquially as “slash and burn” or as evidenced by the wonderful return of lavender after hundreds of years — so why shouldn’t our bodies also hold these same types of memories passed down through our ancestors, elders, grandparents, and parents? Studies have already proved this, though the mechanics of it and the potential use of this knowledge sometimes leave us lay folx behind. But let me suggest this: What if the words we chose to use in our daily lives, via conversation or testimony or storytelling, emphasized non-carceral notions?
***
The Oracle Deck is waiting for me to finish my pull. Shuffling the cards, I try to relax my shoulders and focus on my questions. “What more do you have to show me? What else do I need to consider?” Quickly, a second card jumps from the deck and hits the mattress. Tituba, the enslaved woman who miraculously survived the Salem Witch Trials. Beneath her image reads: “Feeling Safe.” I am already familiar with this card, having received it with almost every reading I’d done since receiving the deck. I murmur the card’s declaration to myself: “I am safe. It is safe to be safe.”
I’m sure, reader, I do not have to express to you how unsafe it feels in North America right now. An influx of mass shootings is only ever interrupted by an influx of announcements from on high about new legislation that is bound to put us in even more harms way and yet — Tituba.
How did Tituba survive the events that would become the namesake for “witch hunt”? How did Tituba survive a series of testimonies and faith-based jury trials that consisted of what we can only guess were half-truths? What did she say? We might never know. All we do know is that she lived, the others did not.
***
The simplified definition of carceral state is that a society or community emphasizes the policing and punishment of the few as opposed to the whole. This “policing” and “punishment” at the local level might look like anything from security guards in predominantly Black or Latinx schools to telling a little Black girl that she’s “ghetto,” a term that has been used to devalue and demean people from lower-class communities since before WWII. It might look like Black girls who are told they got that straight “Good Hair” — a phrase from the days of paper bag tests meant to measure a Black person’s proximity to whiteness aka moral goodness. With that in mind, let’s talk about something more recent and familiar.
You text your best friend a meme of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock and write “Oh my god! I’m dying with laughter!” or “This killed me!” There are several ways in which this type of communicative energy could be transformed into something slightly less carceral. One, the evaluation of a Black man hitting another Black man for the misogynoir comment is going to be left for another convo — let’s just focus on the act of the hitting in the first place. Violence for entertainment is nothing new, but violence related to the mockery of a marginalized person is, in my opinion, an issue of carcerality. It’s the microlevel event that is deeply informed by a lifetime of microaggressions, direct aggressions, racist and sexist social standards, and more. A slap like this isn’t just a slap, it’s the outcome of compounded events, many of which still might be considered on the periphery of our daily awareness.
If the wrong words, said in jest, can incite physical violence — what can the right words do? And who determines what words are right and wrong? Where do we even begin to make a list? I think we start with liberatory memory work. We start by looking at the language that has already been used to devalue and demean, discourage and disinter, abuse and destroy — and actively develop a lexicon that does the complete opposite. We look to our ancestors, recent and not-so-recent, and dig into the stories they’ve shared. We listen to interviews and pull from testimonies, letting the people tell us what has hurt or harmed or blocked us from liberation before and what could change going forward. We are already seeing examples of how this might work with the grassroots liberation movement.
The use of the term “transformative,” as opposed to “restorative,” has been on the rise in the last decade. A direct result of our legislative leader’s overuse of “restorative justice” to mask the true intentions of legislation and misdirect the people at large, the linguistic change marks a change in approach towards work done at every level of liberation. It’s true that “restorative measures” sometimes reads as “progressive change.,” But I’ve always wondered:, what does it really mean?
Restoration is defined as “the action of returning something to a former owner, place, or condition.” Transformation, however, is defined as “a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance.” If we are to be literal about these definitions, which we are when talking about changing the quality of life for marginalized people, then we have to ask ourselves:
What are we restoring in the United States?
Do we want to legislatively restore a county to its idyllic pre-emancipation state?
Or do we want to legislatively transform the county to care for and celebrate the diverse communities that already exist there?
The words “restoration,” “vintage,” “classic,” “traditional,” and so on, all carry with them the connotations of a return to a time and place that benefited the system we now refer to as White Supremacy, a time in which only a portion of the people were protected by the law and benefited from their work. The global recognition of these underlying connotations might explain why we’ve seen an uptick in the use of words like “transformative,” “disruptive,” “innovative,” “catalyzing,” and “pivotal.”
Every industry and country has sent out one call or another for some new idea or approach to living, which is to say, humanity feels the weight of the moment. To determine how we will move forward, we need to look back. History, the unabridged version, is chock full of lessons and highlights. We can begin looking for new language by investing more time and funding into liberatory memory work — the collection, dissemination, and analysis of personal narratives that radically shift how people from marginalized backgrounds have been impacted by the country’s legislation. By reframing the context for legislation, which is only to say the structures that make our current quality of lives possible, and developing our awareness through personal narratives, we can set a precedent that more holistically and equitably responds to the needs of all people in America — as opposed to the few.
***
“Not everyone is meant for every season.” I have no idea who said that first, but it’s the first thing I think about when I pull the card for Nana Buluku. The word “Seasons” sits square in the middle of the card, snow, brown leaves, blooming flowers, and sun surrounding the tree-like figure. The Yoruba people call her Nana Bukuu, which only makes me think of “buku money,” which may or may not be related. Again, without glancing at the Oracle Deck’s guide book, I know the meaning behind the meaning of the card — a new season is upon us and it is time to accept the energy this change brings.
We cannot force change before something is ready to change, just like we cannot stop change that is natural and inevitable. I cannot ask the sun to turn it down a little or tell the volcano I’m just not feeling like lava today. I cannot force every police officer to see me as a whole human being or convince the President to cancel all student debt out of the goodness of his heart. What I can do, though, is quantum leap. I can take small, measurable steps in the direction of liberation. I can patiently examine the lexicons that have come before and imagine/co-create with my community new lexicons that match the kind of life I want. I can go with the flow of time, knowing that every single word that comes out of my mouth is one word closer to life of joy and…love.
Language is a form of universal love, a commitment to communicating and being in community with others. It is an energetic act that requires dedication, time, and practice. And yes, like all energy, it is bound to change.
