I've been learning about the black imaginary. Special thanks to my friend Ernesto Mercer, long time warrior, poet, and priest for reminding me to root myself in the black joy of the #Wakanda moment.
I've been imaginary and visionary most of my life, though its been in a way that has been tested by the boundaries of survival and real work. As a little boy I would imagine the swirling eight of infinity as a riddle I couldn't quite rap my mind around. I also imagined the bottomless pit as an object of contemplation. I would sometimes put my hands in hot water with an ice-cube to try and experience opposites at the same time. All that was before I started studying Taoism, the I-Ching, and Taiji. Behold in Taiji that swirling eight comes back in my feet, via energy pattern. Through alignment, rest and relaxation, through study and practice, the imaginary becomes real.
But I still look the same. I wear my dashikis less. I am well beyond the glamour and glitz of Wakanda. I am black talking about free black space. I am not a super hero or marvel comic book.
And it seems that the heart of Wakanda is the imaginary employed so one can get at the solutions. There is the pleasure and joy of the moment, but it is also held fast by the movie theater itself, the everybody talking about it, the proud to be black, public appearance.
I get that, and need that. I ain't joyless, but I once had a bookstore-call it a little Wakanda in P.G. county Maryland, started with five hundred dollars. A tiny empire. A non-Disney production, forged out of imagination and real work. By real work here, I mean the make money hustle, not in some abstract capitalist way or a hip-hop video where I make it rain, but in the simple way of the come-uppance ingrained into my brain by my migrator parents. By real work I mean the type of work that gets a movie in so many theaters, and pays the black folks, and makes everything seem so effortless for the consumer. I mean you only need to want to see it. Then you go then you watch. You are free to experience.
I crave that and know why the black craves that. Why would we not?
I was born into that craving by way of my parents. They came from the South. Small houses. One across the street from a graveyard; the other in the city across the street from Meharry Medical College, and down the street from Fisk. I remember the floors in those houses. The creak in my Grandma's about twenty feet in that would make the china cabinet at the end of the room tremble a bit. Almost like bells. It's a long memory that doesn't begin with me.
If we came from Wakanda that memory was forgotten. I've contemplated how far my parents came from their humble beginnings. I've contemplated the ancestors and continue to do so. Especially now, in my middle years, twenty-six years into a marriage, I think about all they have been through. I remind my children, when they look sad or depressed, and sometimes with too much fire, that understanding where we have come from, can help clarify most difficult times.
I've never been to Wakanda. I don't have a cat suite that helps me deflect any weapons formed against me. If anything, now, I am humbled by the realization that I can be hurt, and that my imagination operates within some limits formed by the square and the compass, asphalt and concrete, steel and rubber, glass and brick and mortar.
If I loose myself in the thinking about what it takes to build something, it is because in my somewhat younger years, I built something out of what many would consider nothing. It was black bookstore that was devoted and dedicated to the black. Whatever that means, I thought I knew it then. Though, in all honesty, it was simply and extension of my family. What imagined there, was a unit that moved efficiently towards some progress that my ancestors had imagined. Operating in concert within the continuum of generations.
As for joy, one memory is the cooking in my house. Though challenged and sometimes plagued by too much emotion, my mother taught me to cook at a young age. Cookies, cakes, steaks, shrimp, blue crabs, and chittlins. The last with black eyed-peas on New Years. As a young man, I would look forward to the stench in the house. Anxious to help my mother and hungry for the ritual; I would go with her to the grocery store and struggle to lift the ten or twenty pound plastic tub into the cart. Then, in the parking lot, I would put it in the car. Once home, I would carry it inside and then turn on the faucet, all the way hot. After the tubs had thawed out for a night, I would clean them. I can't remember what I was looking for. Maybe it was dark black spots caught in the folds of the intestines. I can see some black dots there in the layers of the saggy fat wrinkled skin from the insides of the hog.
There's was always the stench in the room. It seemed to seep into everything.
We'd bring corn home on our way from back down South and shuck in the tiny dining room with the T.V. on, laughing and talking about whatever. Sometimes a little bit of bacon, some pork meat, a ham.
But there was nothing like chittlins. It was memory, stink, salt, hot sauce, and the memory of home.
I grew older and stopped eating them. My good friends in the Nation of Islam, taught me that blackness is a righteous thing, a revolutionary thing. The pig is a stinky dirty animal that is bad for your health. Though my Uncle once told me, after I had stopped eating pork, "but you eat chicken son, and if you been raised around chickens you know that chicken would eat anything."
I never been to Wakanda, but I done been down South. And the first times I went, I understand how visionary and full of imagination my parents were. I lived a very different life from the one they grew up in. Whatever I had and experienced was testament to their hard work, vision, and maybe even just a little luck.
But there was alotta joy in that ritual with the chittlins. It was south this is where you come from, blood and guts, stink, and taste good. It was ritual elaborate, and inner workings of a thing I know as the black.
I've never been to Wakanda, but can understand how we crave the blackness that don't stink. We want the one that don't smell bad. We want an Africa that is all shine. White folks got that. Make America Great Again. We can imagine, with the help of Disney and all that capitol, we can engineer, an Africa that gives us mostly pleasure.
In the I-Ching, the hexagram for pleasure and joy, is number 58. It is moon over moon. The actions proscribed for superior folks is to gather together with those that you love for discussion of important things. To share joy, to experience it, is to be in the company of others who think like you.
If Wakanda is that thing, I can understand it. I've experienced it with the blue crabs, the chittlins, with some black history months of long ago, with the early days of activism and Malcolm, even with the rough stuff debates about when the revolution was coming. In other words, even in the circles where we appear to be most antagonistic and anti-there is the joy of joining together with folks who think like us.
The difficult in the black is there's always got to be some acknowledgement of pain. There's really no way around it, with slavery in the room. If we talk about joy now in Wakanda, the joy is rooted in the gathering together.
As for the imagination. I still imagine that we could produce a Disney, publish our own award winning books, or offer skilled black artists and intellectuals access to what those who employ us do. It's my imagination and a bit different from Wakanda. I consider the steps towards such tangible. If anything Wakanda's success says it is possible. Not completely imaginary, but more visionary. There's visionary in the imaginary. I'm down with capital, bricks and steel, infrastructure, and advanced management in the same way those who helped us get to Wakanda are.
I too can understand after 1979 and the Star Wars experience, a legitimate need to do something as common as go to a movie and experience a unity with what we know as black that simply gives up joy. I don't know about Wakanda, but I can accept it as joy. There'll be other times to talk about the intellect of the matter; but I think that is the thing about joy-it is not to be interrupted. It is to be honored as an important guest. When people are happy, we should accept that energy and engage it.
Let there be joy in Wakanda.