What is Africa to Me? (Ode to Countee Cullen)

Design by: Dawit Yitref – for afrodisiaticXpressions © 2013

Cullen’s question:

What is Africa to me?

Years pass
the question
still glaringly real,

sitting westwards
sprouted like wildflowers
in the summer
the circumstance
a different summer
self-removed from it sprout
its growing parts
its fertile lands
from where love molded its parts
yet still rooted deep
in its black sea
football fields
abundance of love scenes
copper suns
scarlet seas
in the imagination

living
outside the imagined ethos
reality
metaphorical dreams

I ponder

***

imitating Cullen’s chase, again,
I ask:
What is Africa to me?

Beyond the defined
Man-made contours
It is
the blood that runs
deep through my veins
nourishment
to the depth and breadth
of seas
of earth,
to indestructible roots

***

now
the answer
years later
to the question,
in another era
the chase
the question
miles away

how to be part of
Africa’s future.

Qara’if

“If you understand the beginning well, the end will not trouble you.”

Adornments and personal objects: living artifacts emphasize and affirm the existence of [a] culture or the process of how culture is constructed. They stand as markers. They become the lasting and sometimes not so lasting object(s). A direct link between the people and its culture, between the living and lived experience.

Wooden sandals were in use in East Africa throughout the 20th century. The carved wooden sole is held underfoot by the use of a thong – toe pegs embellished at the tip. It is said that this sandal type was “probably introduced to East Africa from the far and near east as a result of trade across the Indian Ocean.” It is also strikingly similar footwear to the Japanese ‘Geta’.

The presence of Islam, in Harar, much like Zanzibar and other parts of eastern Africa, is said to have had a profound influence on the region’s artistry. “Introduced to East Africa, along the coastal areas from Somalia in the north to Mozambique in the south, during the thirteenth century, it became established primarily. The Islamic presence manifests itself in a wide variety of modes, ranging from architecture to functional objects”.

This antique wooden shoe from Harar, the design of the Qara’if is bold and unusual. It’s functional property -worn only in the interior is unlike other shoes. The traditional wooden shoes could be worn between the door and the ‘needeba’ [entrance to the living room, with several raised platforms with multi-purpose].

Harar is Ethiopia’s famed walled city also known as ‘city of saints’. It’s home to “geye esu” [‘people of the city’] who call their way of life ‘the etiquette of the city’ and their language ‘the city language’ [Adare language, reflective of a strong oral tradition]. In this mystical city, rich creative ingenuity emerged in forms such as personal adornment and architecture, which is part of its spectacular cultural heritage and contribution to African culture.

Part of a series on Harar: the impact of its African and Islamic tradition as part of its character and uniqueness.

[My] heritage :: [My] inheritance

Tender Scalp, Tender Tone

(In celebration of Griots)

Proverbs are the thesis – they are the philosophical summary of deep wisdom.

Auntie Bintuo, a Fulani woman from Mali [Mandinka] is a tender tone to a tender scalp. As I enter her shop in Oakland, nostalgia for a missed continent is curbed. Her type of warmth and tender tone softens hard edges. She is soothing to a yearning heart, harmonizing and connecting the spirit to the centrality of cultural knowledge ‘one braid at a time’. More than a braiding sitting, similar to kitchen stories, it becomes symbolic to where women tenderly share hushed stories. The whispers can seem like sounds of a whistling wind — loud.

The schooling and wisdom in metaphor speech is more than one receives in the so-called modern classrooms. It can be filled with mysticism and informational ancestral wisdom and less on the indocrinating school type knowledge. Speaking on tradition, on this day, Bintuo eloquently weaved words like heroic praise poetry, as if oral narration is an inheritance from a family tradition. She spoke on pre-colonial Africa and gender neutrality in language. And how in most African societies gender pronouns such as ‘he’ or ‘she’ simply did not exist and still doesn’t in areas where gender neutral languages are spoken. The talk continued: on how colonialism domesticated women, the slave-master dichotomy, how religion gave men a place of power, cultural constructions and demands on African women — a woman’s body and place (body politics) — societal expectations on marriage, a mother’s pressure to marry off her children, the strain between modernity and tradition, demands people put on tradition, politics, the male gaze, inner beauty over external beauty, self-worth over beauty, traditionalism, etc. Through all the discourse and deep wisdom, Nollywood movies were on which made it a further pulling discussion. On the whole, braiding moments can be tender scalped moments of tender tones of proverbs, and the thesis of deep ancestral wisdom.

Names of Revolutionaries

Papa’s weary beard hair
mama’s imagination
coiled in her head wrap
all living in memory
of a revolution

now
days on the African soil
proverbial are the political revolts
a mere fantasy
dancing on illusion
hiding its pain in soil

like dreams and death
pregnant are words
before they’re birthed
cobbled together
paused like brief sobs

In narrow hallways
born to wings of fire
children of the revolution
rays of the sun
embers, sparks to lives
we all know their names
etched, they sing songs
of our lives.

©2013 afro’disiatic / amira.ali

Kitchen Poetry

Muted tones

hushed tales
women’s sexuality
nostalgic remembrance
deep traditional poetical tales
vibrant laughter
praises of poetry
chants of call-and-response

like music
thick and sweet
cultural aromatic stories
the kitchen
is the poets lyre

* * *

In the African tradition, particularly the tradition I grew up in, the kitchen is as intimate and sacred as the hamman –common bathing place for women where for centuries liberation is owned with frank ease and womaninity is embraced and exchanged in all its sensuality. It is where women and their poetic prosody is groomed. Generations of stories are born and hidden in pots, pans, and under sinks, wrapped in cuisines that are only passed down to those that have a place in the kitchen. It is where legends live; where women learn metaphors and similes; where their storytelling persona is molded. A space of rituals, it is where a young-woman is indoctrinated while the aroma of coffee brewing mixes with incense burning, to make a thick sweet smoke. With it all, while spirits invoke hymns and dance praises, others in the corner read coffee dregs. And all is harmonized to colorful silhouettes in coffee and incense smoke.

I know, I have seen where the bonds of womanhood is born to unbreakable. Where oral tradition, more than in a cookbook, is inherited and passed down through poetically blended recipes. A place where abundance gives solace to the heart, grooms the woman to her intuitional power as she’s taught to give away her riches without counting.

In the here and now of AfricaNow, we, the inheritors have an obligation, as poetically as possible, to preserve, perform, and expand the intimate and sacredness of our oral stories. Deepen this gift bestowed upon us and evolve it into the future —AfroFuturism.

©2013 afro’disiatic / amira.ali