No. 29 - ...to be placed on the altar

Poet Shalewa MacKall’s video piece presented at the O Listening Sessions, a panel at this past September’s Furious Flower Black Poetry conference, invited me to consider how I might, one day, appear, if at all, on the altar of a friend or family member. 

In Mackall’s piece titled, “Suite for the Ancestor I Hope to Be,” the artist documents in poetic and movement form an altar for the ancestor she hopes to be. In the first lines of the piece, which you can find here, she offers this key note [after Shawnee Gibson] to the self that she would like honored on this altar.

As she lights what looks like the bark of palo santo, we hear Mackall invoke herself as “not yet perfect…in this moment, becoming more and more myself…the one who actually knows she is enough, especially when just enough too much is exactly what the world actually, totally needs.” 

Hmm, I hummed to myself, weeks after first watching the video…what would I place or use to remember Nzingha? What might support my spirit being recalled to life, to the present of that time? What might the objects be? The chosen color? What would the poem be that I’d add to the altar table? If I place a fruit, a meal at the altar, what would these be? Pineapples? Kiwi? Cornmeal porridge? What would you place on your altar? What would you feed yourself? How might you sustain thy spirit when thy body is long gone? 

The question that this proposition also asks is how might my friends and family remember me? How might my neighbor, colleague or student, mentee, choose to remember me? How might you be remembered? What was the make, the nature of my lived life? How might that make & nature be captured in a moment? How do we give ourselves permission, then, to come as we are? How do we both take up space and give space for others to step into? How do we allow ourselves to let down the gates, let down guards standing sentry so that we, the truest of ourselves, may do much more than peek through.

Dr. Duriel Harris, the editor at Obsidian, a literary journal, who also led this session, shared that black people, at all stages, need this; that is, the opening into spaces of possibilities. Harris additionally offered this notion of visualizing your opus for the work that you are doing now. How is it fitting together, or fitting apart, together? 

Leaving off, too soon, I know, but sharing here, to close a note worth the last word. Harris goes on to reflect that black poetry, black artwerks wade forth in a world where it is, we are not only not wanted, it is, we are simply…not. In her words, 

They don’t want us dead,

They want us naught.

Hinting of Shakespeare in Macbeth, she adds: ‘not a woman born.’