For Poetry and the Creative Mind Day, April 19, I will moderate a free artivism panel with some of my favorite creatives (and people) at my absolute favorite location in NYC: African Burial Ground National Monument. We will screen our latest short films centering the site for “Creative Resistance: Movies, Music, and Memory at African Burial Ground” before concluding the event with a walking tour of the Outdoor Memorial. We will collectively get our creative juices flowing motivated by this historic location and these artists—representing a spectrum of mediums—who will share how they are leveraging their creativity to activate culture and encapsulate the unprecedented times that we are thriving through.
As much as we use the word “unprecedented” to describe the life and times we are currently navigating, fact is: we have been here before.
Our ancestors artfully preserved a rich, soulful, dynamic, complex, highly imitated culture for us through eras when their reading, writing, and drumming were outlawed, and they could not even be buried in the same land that would have dried up without their skilled labor. To paraphrase Brittany Packnett’s masterful response to the National Museum of African American History and Culture being recently targeted: “our history doesn’t exist because of that building, that building exists because we were wise enough to preserve our history.”
Now that we can legally take full advantage of the English language, play our music from rooftops, and lay our loved ones to rest wherever we see fit, I still find that we can be reticent around passing on our legacy. When I worked at African Burial Ground National Monument as a Park Ranger, oftentimes Black passers-by did not want to stop in under the assumption that it was a mass grave: “why would I want to learn more about a hole where people who looked like me were thrown away?”
Undoubtedly, the history of Africans in the Americas is quite nuanced. Unless one actively searches for bright spots of resistance and triumph, you can find yourself suffocating in a centuries-long chokehold of degradation and disenfranchisement. Folks work hard to divorce themselves from this scarred legacy, and consequently, do not pass it on. However, I have learned that we shine brightest through darkness.
Being born and raised in NYC and having taught American history in my hometown, I did not learn of Lower Manhattan’s African Burial Ground—our nation’s largest—and its empowering history of political savvy, agricultural pioneering, and culture-melding until I worked there approaching my thirties. The creative ways with which Manhattan’s first Africans showcased their Africanisms while mourning their loved ones survived centuries of construction and upheaval. These life-sustaining rituals were cathartically born out of death.
Every culture holds onto rituals and memory with a kung fu grip! For example, I attended Phillips Academy (aka “PA”) in Andover, MA, the oldest independent school in the country, established in 1778. When I matriculated into Andover from a junior high step team in my East New York neighborhood and taught the library of steps that I had learned as a founding member on PA’s first step team, I could not foresee that thirty years later it would still be going strong. Actress Olivia Wilde (PA ‘02), having finally made the team after years of trying out for S.L.A.M. (Spirit Leaders of Andover Madness), actually taught Ellen Degeneres our Brooklyn-born steps and it has evolved into a highly sought after Varsity sport. PA’s legacy is vast and deep because most communities are acculturated to hold on to a good thing.
When you are taught that your ancestral memories are everything, but “good,” cultural preservation can be a tall task. However—in the same way that NYC’s Descendant Community fought to preserve the cemetery established because African Diasporic people could not be buried in consecrated land—if South Africans divorced their memory from the horrors of mining, Gumboot dance would not have influenced how African-Americans gave birth to the stepping that has become a part of Andover’s fabric. In corralling National Park enthusiasts, music lovers, and cinephiles for our family-friendly event open to the public next week, we anticipate hitting capacity. Nonetheless, our culture is valuable: not only when it is validated and edified by others, but also and especially when no one is looking. It appreciates in value with time, and costs us nothing to preserve it.
