Defiant Love
My essay, "Footprints in Alabama," was published in The Sun Magazine today. Read on for my thoughts about having defiant love for my ancestral soil.
Thank you to the extraordinary team at The Sun Magazine for publishing my piece about the love that my family, and so many who look like us, feel for Alabama. It is because I am fortified by who I come from that I can experience joy while anticipating and preparing to fight the battles ahead.
I will record this piece soon. Meantime, here is a bit of the essay:
Alabama lives in my blood no matter where I find myself in the world. I am fortified by ancestral connection, loved by my folks more than anyone deserves, inspired by the exceptional diversity of my surroundings, and blessed beyond measure by the stories my mama and my kin kept alive. Blood relations, kin by skin, griots, writers, and historians all reach back for crumbs of historical evidence with which to reconstruct Black narratives. Through preservation, imagination, and wonder we find our ancestors, or glimpses of them, and slowly, painstakingly try to give life back to their resilience, their endurance, their pain, their creativity, their brokenness, and their hope, one breath at a time.
In these stories we find moments of tenderness. Humor, even. Connection. Community. So whenever my mama was confronted with the regurgitated horrors of the captors and the perpetual sins of anti-Blackness “down South,” a subtle hardness would enter her eye. With irises as clear and resilient as diamonds, pressurized by years of addressing the certainty of Northerers that things were better for Black people north of the Mason-Dixon, she would usually just allow her pursed-lip disagreement to will the conversation to conclusion. Others in my family suggest that the North is “sure different” with the slightest hint of a grin that invites a similar end of discussion. Like my mama, my folks are diamond-hard, uttering words and resting in silences that cut glass. This comes from somewhere, passed through the generations, though where it originated is anyone’s guess.
Read the full piece here. Thank you for reading my words🙏🏽
Blessings,
Jamila