NOTIN’ DO U (Nothing Worries You)

your mind is philosophy.
your loyalty epically stays in love
and you love me in a way that
safely feels something like ‘prophetic.’
you see things in my soul
that elude my ordinary eyes
and i can feel it deeply when we talk.
it is in the way you casually lean your body
towards mine and then talk half-asleep,
it is in that unutterable way you look at me when no one is around,
it is in the sweetly serious way you say we should
talk a lot so that we don’t float past each other like space men
but rather grow together entwined.
i like it when we talk and your delightful mind
sparkles in conversation and your short white teeth
reveal a sweet, rare smile behind full, dark lips because simply put,
when we are together, notin’ do u.
...you are now pressing hard against me.
and in your face i see
a fineness raw, exciting yet gentle.
    all in one deliciously dark, square-jawed face...

...for there’s a fluid storm rising and billowing like harmattan
    behind your pair of marble eyes.

THE BEADS AROUND MY WAIST

I fell and faltered,
and they fled my side.
I accepted the bitter, biting destiny
that we had outgrown each other -
family and I.
in solemn, solitary silences I watched wisps of clouds
scatter, and the clear, blue sky stand firmly behind the sun;
I marveled when dusk fanned the smoldering coals in
the horizon and darkness planted itself in the path of the sun:
I came up with you.
…birds in giddy colors flew with wild abandon and trees swayed
carelessly with a new air of sureness – I was told
that fulfilling your plan meant to desist from my own plan for myself.
it was then no wonder that they fled my side
when you entered my life, and I outgrew their name.
visibly, the loves in which I was invested because of blood were not
aligned with your will. and so they quickly unraveled
under the touch of your mighty breath.
when I saw that tiny, garish tanager flap its wings and take to a rough and awkward flight, almost tumbling,
I knew that I would not spend all my life crying behind a painted face.
And so I write this poem now, watching the smiling sun
part the clouds and break the unsuspecting dawn,
commanding the earth to rouse, to do, to pray. I scribble this now,
and give a calming thought to how the gracious light you proclaim remains,
and blinds me to all evil for it daily gives me the heady, hopeful thought
of time without a season…
…of a seamless love that leaps and jumps
beyond blood and last names, beyond the tarnished beads
around my waist, above beginnings and endings.

Telling Uneasy Stories #2

I continue where we left off last week with the story of El Negro, a Motlhaping man who was eviscerated and stuffed like a trophy animal and exhibited in Spain for the entertainment of Europeans. To first recap, we established a freak as “a person or animal on exhibition as an example of a strange deviation from nature.”
El Negro was exhibited as a tactile example of the Other. Along the same vein, this Other was not introduced in an egalitarian fashion: a power dynamic was also determined between Spain and Africa. Spatially, El Negro was exhibited in the same room as tree-trunks and crocodile-skin. But while the crocodile skin had captions underneath them of how certain species crocodiles growled and some snapped when the naturalists attempted to capture them, El Negro’s caption simply said, “El Negro,”which
translates to “The Black Man.”
Effectively, the narrative his remains and manner of exhibition tell here is one devoid of agency, behavior and humanity. We can see here how the tone was established that the African is inferior to the European because his exhibition was not intended to be in conversation with the viewer. It was just to be seen without it being able to return the curious gaze not even in a simple caption denoting behavior. In actuality, thiscollective Other that El Negro represented by being called “The [Definitive] Black Man,” would have been just be as curious about the Verraux brothers when they settled in that dusty village between the Vaal and Molopo rivers in 1829. The Batlhaping would have spilled sorghum-beer on the ground to ask the ancestors for answers about these “albinos” who befriended the ailing king and spoke gibberish through their noses. But as the saying goes,until the lion can speak the tale will always glorify the hunter. That is the tone of inequality that was struck. Perhaps this is the sort of inequality that Dr. Kwame Nkrumah had in mind when exactly today in 1957 he declared that we need “a new African in the world” who “can fight his battles.” Permit me to digress here and wish the Republic of Ghana a happy 55th independence anniversary.
Back to El Negro, of course in the Banyoles context El Negro was the ultimate freak. Standing stark in the middle of a Banyoles museum with unnaturally dark skin (the Verraux brothers darkened it with chemicals for dramatic effect), clad in animal-skin loincloth and bearing a frozen stare through the glass marbles that were installed in place of his eyes, El Negro was the definitive black ethnographic freak. More interestingly, his high entertainment value as a freak derived
from his perceived hybrid nature: he was partly human and partly animal. Author Rachel Adams once wrote that, “It is an important historical lesson to recognize that freaks were not always understood as the flip side of normality; at one time, their bodies were read as figures of absolute difference who came from elsewhere…” It is this “elsewhere”(this Africa, incomprehensible continent of jungles and darkness) affirmed by his props that despite his physiologically human form, El Negro possessed the mystical animal quality in the fascinated European imagination.
Therefore, due to the white-supremacist 19th century definition of “human,”another long-lived narrative was constructed: the black African is a less evolved species of man that never entered human-ness. Or as President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said in Senegal in 2007, “The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has never really entered [human] history.The African peasant has known only the eternal renewal of time via the endless repetition of the same actions and the same words [like an animal]. In this mentality, where everything always starts over again, there is no place for human adventure nor for any idea of progress.”
I bring up President Sarkozy’s speech not because of his impressive imagination but rather to underscore the perdurability of the 19th century savage-African narrative as constructed by such storytelling tools as El Negro’s exhibition.
I look forward to next week, to further discuss the stories/narratives that El Negro was used to create. And indeed enforce. May we all continue to have the courage to excavate our painful histories and re-humanize ourselves. It is time for a “new African in the world.”

Telling Uneasy Stories #1

Over the next several weeks, I will be analyzing the phenomenon of human exhibition  that was the trend of the day in 19th century Europe. I will do this with specific interest in the exhibition of the African body, and even more specifically the body of a Motlhaping man who came to be known as El Negro. Here begins my story with this story. There was a mild drought in Botswana that year. I also remember that there was also a flood and Gaborone City had just suffered a minor earth tremor – and that all these unusual happenings were (according to the superstitious among my compatriots) clear signs that El Negro could not wait to come home and receive a proper burial. I recall October, 2000. I was a 15-year old high school student in Gaborone. The news reports on Botswana Television repeated themselves like commercials about a southern African man whose body had been stolen from a grave almost two hundred years earlier. Ostensibly, the man had been a king of his Batlhaping nation or as Western media like to condescend: “chief” of the Batlhaping “tribe.”
I also remember political pundits on Radio Botswana speaking in subdued tones about how after the said king’s traditional burial in 1830, his body had been exhumed and stuffed by two French taxidermists in exactly the same way that trophy animals were stuffed, and taken to Europe to entertain the public who had never seen a black African. He had become known as “El Negro.” Before 2000, Batswana themselves had not heard of “El Negro.” As history would have it though, the African Union – Botswana included – had decided that his remains be repatriated from Banyoles, Spain to Africa. What better place to re-territorialize his remains then than the internationally obscure Botswana in lieu of the rightful South Africa to circumvent international media? In consequence, on October 4, 200o El Negro’s remains touched down at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport in Gaborone and his physical reterritorialization slotted him into Botswana’s narrative. We even created myths around him to justify our climate.
In this series of weekly posts on Black Looks I will:
i)discuss the narrative about Africa that El Negro served during his exhibition in Banyoles, and
ii) examine the narrative about Banyoles and perhaps Spanish society that he told at the same
time.
Let me leave you with the idea of a “social freak” since that will be the first category I look at and the ways in which El Negro was made to be one and how that ripples across centuries to today in how the African body is consumed by spectators. A freak is defined as “a person or animal on exhibition as an example of a strange deviation from nature.”1That cool night when Jules Verraux, a French taxidermist, and his brother exhumed El Negro’s body their objective was to show Europe body deviant from the European norm. El Negro’s corpse would be consumed as entertainment; a freak would be created. For the Banyoles museum-goers who had never come across a hue this dark or hair this tightly-coiled, the startling exhibition of El Negro immediately established a more tactile notion of the African, the Other. Looking forward to discussing more with you all next week.