Emancipation Proclamation

It's more than a year since I've blogged on the black blog—this work will be unlike the others.  Much has passed and I'm feeling a little Jennifer Holiday—I am changing.

I spent last night with Beckett's Stories and Texts For Nothing.  "I do not know where to begin nor where to end, that's the truth of the matter." 

I chose today to reinstate this blogspot for several reasons.  Today marks the 151st anniversary of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. 

According to Webster emancipate means:  "to set free (a slave, etc.); release from bondage, servitude, or serfdom 2.  to free from restraint or influence, as of convention 3. Law to release (a child) from parental control and supervision —SYN. see FREE.

I planned to make some new and relevant comment about Joint Resolution 65, and the fact that Navajo slaves continued to be held in bondage for 5 years after Lincoln's 1863 proclamation.  If you're interested in that troll this blog, there are many such statements.

Lincoln looms large in this archive. 

As I've been writing through this long December I've been remembering the many ways Americans have celebrated the birth of Christ over the years:  the mass execution of the Dakota 38, and Wounded Knee among them.  Good Spanish Colonial subject that I am, I look forward to the Day of the Kings and to the Man To Send Rain Clouds.  For now I write.

Today is also the day I used to spend at Baba Ellegua's Bimbe in Oakland.  I look toward open roads, more than freedom—aware that total freedom is a pathological concept.  It's up to me, knowing I must continue to act as a person with relations.  Though the last few years have left me feeling like one of Harlow's monkeys—less an experimental subject of love at goon park than someone having to navigate the ilk of domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse; nonetheless someone with no home to go home to.

For some that type of homelessness is the defining characteristic of the slave, the genealogical isolate—the fragmented kinship structures that are lost to something (time, colonization, extermination, slavery) that is difficult to describe, especially as it shapes our narrative strength to escape the story of our birth (metaphysical, ancestral and physical) and our journey narratives.

I already celebrated the New Year, in October, but I ask myself to pursue new beginnings today, gearing up for the lunar year (the second New Year I personally celebrate with similar intention and reverence)—and in that I choose to allow this site to transform itself into something I'm not quite sure of.  I am changing—thinking of the promise of writing, that it may take you somewhere you may never return from.  In light and beauty.