Towards our Liberation

Juneteenth reflections from a mad Black artist

Note: Joy and Blackness to all in the spirit of this upcoming Juneteenth that approaches in nine days. This offering was delivered as a speech at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church here in DC, for their Juneteenth commemoration where I was asked to reflect on Black liberation in my work and life. Enjoy and stay free out there!

I write as a Black writer in the legacy of the traditions from which our people have always made beauty out of the hand we were dealt, whatever ugliness, whatever brutality, whatever inhumanity, we have honed it and made it shine and made it human out of ourselves. This is in itself liberation, so as a Black artist, I see myself as practicing liberation just by doing that, refuting the place I am supposed to have as a brute in the world by continuing to gift the world, and particularly my Black people, out of the humanity I actually do have despite its lies.

Juneteenth is a celebration of our liberation from shackles. We know as Black people that our oppression continues to this day, but we celebrate that we are free, out of the way we are made by our creator, despite what the world’s structure would believe. Juneteenth is also more than mere jubilance at being willingly gifted freedom by America. The enslaved in Galveston got word that they had been legally free for years after the emancipation although they’d been held in illegal enslavement. Juneteenth is actually the story of a country’s continued broken promises to us, our celebration of each step we gain liberating ourselves, with no saviors other than us.

We liberate ourselves out of our agency, we do not wait to be freed. It’s central not only to the fact that I write but to what I write. I’ve committed myself to writing novels of liberaion. In my work, people struggle to free themselves. No spoilers, but they succeed, though their freedom, like their lives, is complicated. In my first novel NONE BUT THE RIGHTEOUS, a young man who is inhabited by the spirit of St. Martin de Pores as Papa Legba through a hex put on him by his foster mother, must free himself of spirit possession as part of his journey to claim himself. As he goes throughout the journey of the novel, exiled from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and traveling the south, he gains a personal freedom from the worldview he had when his whole world was a city, and in doing so prepares himself for his impending fatherhood. In my second, FES IS A MIRROR, a young woman who was raised in the wilderness among sheep who ultimately becomes a DJ as the historical riots of December 1990 rage, must free herself of all the impressions others project onto her because she cannot speak, and ultimate gains freedom, through abuse, from the entire human world that had only seen her as an outsider. My work provides imaginative tools for us to free ourselves, as this is the vision behind my art.

My novel in progress seriously concerns liberation too though I won’t share from it. We here are survivors of chattel slavery, which even the United Nations and the Vatican are recognizing now as one of the worst crimes in humanity. That makes us people who are built out of survival and almost designed to free ourselves by our nature, which is human, since humans long to be free. We find ourselves continually struggling for liberation wherever we are. It does not end. The current administration has no more love for us than we’ve ever gotten from America. We must employ our culture and collective wisdom to keep our freedom at the center, to recognize our chains in whatever form they take, to throw them off, which means helping others throw them off, because we cannot do it alone. We can only be free together, and that is both what the oppressor does not know and his greatest fear.