I squeeze myself between the empty book shelves stocked with stoic dust reminiscing on the wonders that once laid atop them and they atop the wonders. Allowing my fingers to glide against the cherry-soaked mahogany, I search for the voices erased. Urging them to speak to me, to trust in my silence though the air is thick and heavy with resentment. Sorrows of unnamed women swallowed up whole, all exist here in the river-like, cramped sheet of blank space tucked away behind what was once known as a library.
The past still rings in remote, exiled stages of this current life. And I can feel her calling in my dreams, my mother. She falls in pastures around me, cradling my limp exhaustion, molding me back into humanity. A staggering deafness it was, it is, not in this world but another. One that seemed to be living beyond a curtain-skin we could not shed. One where my mother and I are left floating along the seas of white as if we could be infinite.
There are reasons to appreciate finalies, my mother once said. If time sees no end, if we were to all go on and on like a merry go around, like cyclones, you wouldn’t mean as much to me as you do now, and I would not to you. There would be no reason to love, to feel for anything at all. Because nothing beautiful can bloom from a boundless existence, Khadija. The impermanence of it all, the fragility of your life and my own upholds our humanity during the most strident of times. Do you understand me? Only in knowing of your impermanence, in understanding, and accepting your ending will you come to grasp the true spectacle, the marvel of a timed existence.
During the those years, Mother warned me to never fear Death itself but to instead be terrifyingly cautious of the men who attempt to command it for themselves.
--
The act of dying belongs to an ancient ideology, that of which Death can no longer afford for Man to believe. Mankind once believed, through the opaque vision of the dying world, that
Mortality was to humanity as Infinity is to God. But, it is now more overwhelmingly clear that Mankind has surpassed humanity. Through divine ascension, We have become the Gods our ancestors prayed to. Stand tall and claim your rightful position in eternity. Or, fall to the whims of transience and rot in a lifeless soil.
--
Never before had there been a society which would attempt to live forever. It was during the age of purgatory that man began to question how mighty God’s fists truly were. I remember the folklore of our great-grandparents, the spells they’d cast as they dipped our heads in spoiled water and cursed our brows with Hail Marys and Lord’s Prayers. Through their rituals, they housed the sacrality of the final generation, the time before expellments and the sterile-road. Mother used to tell me that those of us who survive will be responsible for shielding the lost world, for entombing their histories in our skin, and wearing their truths like scars. This is your task, mother said.
I am a daughter of the matriarch generation. A finale within itself.
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By 2238, the Fifth World War commenced. Decided amongst the leaders of freedom’s reign, the time for a global purging had arrived. Britain, France, and America had fallen. The first world as it had once been known was collapsing and those who for the entire expanse of modern human history were Kings, were in the midst of a monstrous break-down of the definition and face of power. It's a funny thing to watch the sky fall from an oppressor’s gaze. It was a truth many of us believed would not come in this age. But, Haiti was rising. For the first time, forced continental-expatriates, once known as persons of the diaspora and second and third-worlders were ascending and their revolt against continued subjugation was an intimate form of terror that the first world had yet to burden.
As in all wars of erasure, books were the first to set fire. Autonomy ruled, ideas of communal learning and shared intelligence were lost in the new world, thrown to rising seas. The Anti-Monarchs demanded that we think independent of our ancestors’ lore. They eradicated children schools and universities. My mother said it was their form of cleansing themselves of the ideologies that once ruled over us all, but as historical institutions such as the late-Harvard and Spelman disintegrated on the screens of static-image, it felt as though we were losing more than just theories of the past. She said it felt as though we were losing ourselves to the apoplectic rage that seemed to consume these men the same way it overtook the men who chained and hung my ancestors as strange fruit, swinging in a summer breeze. She would quote those words exactly, as her grandmother had sung them on shrinking nights when the swealter of a sorrowful moon could be felt gazing upon our horror, it’s sweat becoming tearing at the stillness as it watched the tiny ants behead the dead world and spit upon it’s phantom.
My mother taught me that genocide happens through generations.
They strip your mind and turn it upon itself. Make you think their thoughts are your own. And that the idea of your own, of your claim, that the idea of you, belongs to them. They do it slowly, like boiling saltwater, they’re patient. They wait and sit and watch, as you slit your own veins with steel they carved out of the ground beneath your home. Let you think you’ve done it to yourself, make sure that the bullets they use to kill your sons and daughters come from the land you till to feed your children. Make sure all the killing elements come from you, everything but the concept. Until even destruction seems to bleed from your skin, spilling out of you like hot air, slipping out of control and into the bodies of your people. Until nothing is yours but the blistered screams splitting your lips as you watch yourself burn. And then they’ve got you.
The Anti-Monarchs set their people on fire with the same match they used to burn the past. Their death was a cruel mockery of the kingdoms we thought could be built from the same soil used to bury the slaves that molded the old world, the dying world. During those times, my mother wept every night, she said this is the moment before release from the womb, the lingering kiss of solitude before immersion into sound. We are in God’s birth canal and man is pushing to break free. But is this truly freedom? To force my mothers into the aperture of nothingness for what? For a liberty which no longer exists? There is only the idea now, Khadija. And believe me when I say that it will not be enough. There is no love left in this world. They may have killed all their demons, Khadija. But, they are dying, too. We are dying, too. That’s when my father returned.
He was a disciple of anarchy walking barefoot across the hooved-back of nihilism. A creature looking to die for nothing short of the spectacle, my mother’s yearning appeared as nothing more than a disposed martyr to his senselessness. His subtly deranged proverbs, in the most frightening way, gave rationality to his insanity. A wandering man, they called folks like him. The most dangerous kind because he feels nothing of the bones he cracks and the women he drowns.
The last time I saw my mother was the winter before amnesty’s bloom. By then, women of the old world were all sent to the expellments. Billions of ambience-raged skeletons, demarcated from a new civilisation unfit to reconcile with the finality inherent to womanhood, mourned in lawlessness, the chorus of their wails roaring across an aging Atlantic.
The night they took her from me, I remember approaching Death with a steel rod and an anger as fierce and black as the night sky. The way her blood split into lost stars as my pain beat against her paling figure made me think she understood what it was to be alone. I once believed that Death was charted out of the spirit of a thousand fallen souls, but that night I felt her translucency as limpid as the ocean beneath us. I knew she was as woman, as forgotten as the sea and I. So, I took her into my home, lathered her wedding-veil-skin in raw coconut oil, shea butter, and the tide and taught her the language of reminiscence. The same way my father molded the hymns of amnesia into the folds of my blackness, Death and I became fluent in the psalm of revivals.
They tried to bury the footprints of ghost women in the capsules of extinction but we bled their narratives into the palms and soles of survival and made the legacy of erasure our mother-tongue until the dialect of our resilience reincarnated each stolen life into the letters of lost & found women.
Letter #1:
The last time we kissed you could still swing your tongue around words like confetti flung on slain bodies still as winter’s stare. You made things go together that could never make sense til your lips spoke it and you were like God in that way and many others. You exist as a love departed. like dead children, your voice remains. Emotions you gave to me keep quiet like a hidden sinner. We play pretend around the merry go round till your head stops beating’. We play pretend like we know she’s coming back, like my love remembers you, like your body accepts healin’. Like your tongue doesn't choke on that granddaddy gold dug up through the soles of your granddaddy’s feet would have thought your granddaddy’s soul lived like your mama, in the tip of her toes. Was I ever more to you than your mother’s third half? How many young girls did you have to break to make a mother out of me? You now know that a thousand dim stars cannot make the sun, but what happens to the light you stole? To the daughters she birthed, I birthed, all halves of you? How many times should I split my little girl in twos to make one of you? To make her the father you couldn’t be? What haven’t you taken from the woman's body? You got everything but my soul, I got everything in her. And she won't bear none of your nightmares. That baby girl is half a person without you, but a full woman she will become.You can’t ever understand what it is to be incomplete, But, we've hollowed you out and weighed your spirit in dust. You’re nothing but a speck of the boy you used to be. And you will never be a man. I know you feel that, your potential, rotting away with those broken girls, them forgotten babies, and the lost stars.
Letter #2:
I wish I could remember that kind of love, a poor woman’s love: scathed and unwanted, rough and chewed out like the pavements we’d break-in in out-worn shoes we used to brave on our way to desert schools on roads decimated by a cheaper kind of hate. One easy to buy on half-sold liquor store-blocks, half-owned by government tracks and an extant form of blackness. And still a poor woman’s love builds the bridge between a thousand lonesomes. She makes a warm body out of skin and fat, takes the shape of water in an ocean’s gaze. The most expensive love to buy and only bought by men who weep when she’s gone. They pay in resilience, until the wind is chorused through their wails, the hymns of their distress harmonize with the elements. Til they ain’t nothing more than skin and fat with a nameless sort of passivity. That kind of love, the type where your nothingness starts to be defined by her kiss, it used to be the kind of love that made your mama scream. As you began to enter a breathing world, it was a love that made you miss the silence suspended in a drowning motion. A love that created life, it’s a love that don’t exist no more.
Letter #3:
And so now I wonder if your sweat tastes of my black river tears, of your old man’s pain-drunk-rage, of your mother’s translucency? You used to quote the bible during sex, used to say god didn’t care about the homegrown babies. Soil-rich babies made out of asphalt and dirty money, babies baptized in a cotton field with chains for a neck. See, God only fathered the purest ones. Told me that the rest he left for empty muthafuckas like you and me with nothing else to claim. The babies we make can be claimed and owned, can be bought, and sold, and thrown away, disposable beings. Ain’t worth shit kinda babies. You said the babies we’d make would be our own completely. Though you could never imagine having’ a daughter, said you wouldn’t know how tuh think ‘round her, how to give that different kind of love to her. You wanted to raise boys and men, something you understood, something you could be apart of, something you could forget, and relearn. A part-time giver like your own father, you wanted to have something and someone you could control with a heart that don’t run out. You said you could no longer afford me and my poor woman love.
Letter #4:
You have no idea of all the world's my rage has seen. The curses it has spoken into existence, the men it has stolen. You have no fucking idea of the Gods I’d killed to protect my daughter. Oh what sweet symphonies kiss upon thy lips and with the touch of your grace exalt me under your forever enchanting glory, I have become the unholy ghost. I quake fear in the throats of greedy men, I split organs for my love, my skin an invisible cloak, black skin hyper-visible beneath the seams you’ve split, I have nothing left to give but my wrath, prepare your men and I will; my tongue.
Letter #5:
My body is a house and its shadows creek your name Come back come back come back to me
This house is a body the echoes of my feet slip through its veins
I sit upon its torso and trace your eyes on the ceiling, we look into each other we look through each other and I feel your heartbeat like a trained orchestra like british symphonies, your eyes kiss my lungs and beg me to breathe
Come back to me darling, let me hold you again
The way I had when time was young
It spilled out of your palms and into my skin and like before we were one again
I miss the feeling of your head against my chest, you bring me memoirs in my sleep, I day dream at night, i haven’t slept since you emptied me out, does my heart sleep with you baby girl? Is it warm and smooth against your back, does it cocoon you in its outer shell the way I used to, undo myself each time I felt your fingertips, unzip the world from my skin and live in your jupiter, I miss your venus and mars I miss the jungle and your toes patterned along my spine I could build a house out of my bones over your grave but it still won’t bring you back I still don’t sleep but I’m not awake either I lay suspended, im too scared to die now, the thought of losing all that’s left of you in my mind is a forever I cannot bear, I wish to bare the pain ten times over to watch your chest rise and sink once more to the ache of my pulse.
Letter #6:
Barren hospitals lay desolate. The chambers of my heart which life abandoned once you were gone will remain uninhabited til my last breath. A homage to you, my fluttering dove. You’ve left me in a world gaunt with Man’s self projection, they could not see you, my love. Could not imagine your tenderness, your magnanimity. We belonged to another time, do you remember? Back when we were limitless, bound in our own catastrophe of melancholic sound waves warped by the rush of your sloppy rubber duck kisses, I used to bathe you in the pond, out back near the fire chambers in thick swamp marshes filled with lives unseen crushed yet surviving beneath the quick steps of you and me, I’ve come accustomed to the suffocating, it happens mid-day when I begin to think of the shallowness, the hollow rotting braised black carcas that had once been infinite, I know this coffin does not hold you not the way I could, I know god is empty too like all of us now, you know he lost his children too, he could not save us and I could not save you, we mourn the same way, I found him weeping beneath the lakes, the way his tears melted into the current made me think he was much weaker than myself and so I took care of him. Now God sits in my living room, on the rug near your old kitchen set, sometimes I smell him in my sheets he tastes like dewy clouds, he too is lost, I’ve found versions of myself hiding in your tombstone, between thick slabs of granite there we lay, taking up as much of you as we can all these versions of me picking up the pieces of our lost daughter returning her back to the womb, giving her back to ourselves, its a selfish act I know I’m punished every month I see red, specks of you fill the ocean till it washes you out. Is lostness my penance? Is salvation near? Are you? My ghosts are watching you from the windows I’m sure, do they remember your name or just the feeling?
Letter #7:
How does the heartbeat in swing time, is it a subdued sort of madness, the insanity of a thunderous seething or does it brew like earl grey in a grandmother's pot, an ancestral type of slowness that makes you think maybe you could live without it but it’s the soft sadness that keeps the rhythms in motion, you have to feel something, you need to, without the anger you rot in polarity and then im without her again, I can do without eternity, but there is no world beyond her.
Letter #8:
"Mommy, how long do ghosts live?" The rise in your voice tinkered along my cuticles, your moon eyes full with the sky. "I reckon bout as long as their memories do, lovebug" "Mommy do people dream on jupiter?" "Well I'd certainly hope so, what is the night without dreams" you were sitting on my lap now, my fingers dancing between your coils, your back pushing into my ribs, I swear I could feel the air shapeshifting in your lungs. "You look like you've dreamed a lot of terrifying things mommy" you're looking back at me now but your body remains gazing at the sun's performance, your head is half turned molding full moon eyes to crescents from my view you seem so small "What do you mean baby? What would make you think that?" "I don’t know, just the way you sleep sometimes I think you're afraid to close your eyes". You were seven then, I had watched galaxies form across your skin and snatch you away from me in the light, darkness was where I could see clearly, your hue falling into its gravity, I had watched the world swallow you up whole and spit you back out and into my stomach, they didn't want your kind of girlhood, I told them I’d make a thousand more of you if I could, but you weren't human like the rest of them, you couldn't be recreated not in my dreams not in my womb and so you live in my mind I rewind your moments each night before bed.
Letter #9:
Here in this lovin’ bisque, swallow me in spoonfuls. Let the gizzards and bones spill down your throat as easy as my blood broth. Wish I coulda been more fillin’ for you, but here is all I gots left uh me to give to you. Do you savour the taste? Be cautious of the splinters picklin’ my lungs, I bathed myself in redwood oil before enterin’ here, wanted to be a forest full of rage for you. Can’t you see all this red, all this green? I see your purples and blues. The babies in camouflage. I put my forgiveness in that bowl next to my heart, I want to say that I forgive you for hidin’ these children, I know they wasn’t what you was expectin’. But, you’ll see that they’ve made a home out of the wells in my stomach, used my eyes as ors to flow ‘cross the hot springs planted in sheets along my shoulder blades. Wish I could say they linger on the smell of the bambi grazed earth sprung up from out behind your chest, but these babies was born into a different kind of world. Yous ain’t no more sane than any other wanderin’ man and that’s all you is to them now, a wanderin’ man. You got the face of fallin’ water to these babies, got the body of a closed blind reflection, and the touch of tree bark. Your voice has become unchained and disfigured against the soft ballads of crumblin towers. The earth is revertin’ baby soon you’ll be lost in it’s gravel and dirt. So, start from 12 and count backwards for all of the years you done took off my life, for the possibilities that could not be realized for sundry colored type oh babies. I tried to wash the many parts of you away in glass rivers and ablazed oceans, but the elements is changin’ and with them shall go the rules of this past life. You are of a past life, so sip on this lovin’ soup and capture dreams of me in your sleep. dreams that won’t never be realized in this lifetime or the next.
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