Girl, where are you going and for what again?

First, I want to say sorry to June, the month. June receives so much slack and dissatisfaction from Chicago because it doesn’t feel like summer, but June has never agreed to be summer. June is quite literally a spring month and we all hate it because why would you be who you’re supposed to be and not who we want you to be? Weird but okay, girl. I will refer to June as summer from this point on because 

CPS won the battle against nature for when summer begins. Secondly, I want to say thank you to everyone who contributed to making my summer sooo fun. I was definitely outside non-stop because I knew I’d need every memory to carry me through this next month abroad. While I am used to leaving my home and excited to pick up a life I’ve created, home is home. I am most understood, most peaceful, most confident, and most loving in Afro Chicago. 

To answer the question, ‘girl, where are you going and for what again?’ lol, don’t feel bad if you don’t know exactly. In true Scorpio fashion, I do tend to say a lot and nothing at all simultaneously. Last summer, I was notified that I’d received a DCASE grant for my research proposal. I’d recently finished my Master’s and wanted to continue working in methodology but doing so in a way that felt more authentic and allowed for creativity. My research proposal (generally speaking) will serve as a culmination of the writing and informal observations I’ve been doing over the past decade. 

In February 2022, I went to Senegal to study ceramics. My trip was almost entirely self funded and with the mission of creating global connections for Tea House Collective. While I was in Senegal, I also wanted to learn more about basket weaving. Please pay attention to how God will work in your life when you trust your process and take the first step. (read this in a Baptist testimonial voice) I went to Senegal to study ceramics but I was connected with a man who participates in trading baskets between Senegal and France. He then took me to Nguyen, which is the area most known for basket weaving in Senegal, where I began daily weaving lessons by women who had direct connections to that ancestral knowledge. (Here is where God’s plan started to become clear.) Weaving with those women and girls, I started remembering memories that were not mine directly, I kept saying, “nous fasions ca, les americanes noirs.” It felt like information was truly returning and downloading into me. But, I’m from Chicago so I hadn’t personally seen basket being woven, I hadn’t seen it in any particular piece of media that I could recount but I was incredibly confident that I’d experienced this before. Then one day, a woman who was particularly good at weaving, I could tell she shut stuff down, like bring me your best weaver and I’ll bring you her and we’ll go basket for basket (hope you heard the band for band in there), she added linen to the basket instead of the more modern made in China plastic that’s being used and it clicked. 

In old movies depicting enslavement throughout the americas, Black people’s photo appearance in history books, when you are lucky enough to have pictures of your family members that date back to the 1700s or before, the baskets are there, hidden in plain sight. The baskets were and are always there. Even now, in the USA, I can go into a Black African of the diaspora’s home and there are woven items that reflect a more modern take on our African weaving practices. I knew then that these were the stories I am meant to tell, not stories of all we’ve lost because of hatred for Black African people, but all that has persisted because we’ve always loved ourselves so deeply that no system can stomp it out. 

The summer of 2022, I ended up in the Carolinas, these trips were very random occurrences, the result of me following and trusting my process. Because of the second season of ‘High on the Hog,’ and ‘Outer Bank’ I knew I’d find more of what I needed in Charleston, South Carolina. My family was vacationing at Myrtle Beach so I drove to Charleston for a day trip. It felt like I was being guided by ancestors who were anthropological, historians, and novelists. People who had wanted to write, read, explore, and synthesize, (or maybe they did but I have no knowledge of it). There were so many historical connections between the enslavement of Black Africans of the diaspora and those who’d been in Senegal for centuries. The first piece of information that amazed me was learning that Charleston had a french quarters similar to New Orleans, but seemingly less popular. I’m sure I learned in history at some point that the Carolinas were owned by the French and later bought by the British, formal apologies to my teachers for not being able to recall that knowledge. The second piece of information that made me more confident that the Senegalese in particular passed through Charleston and the Gullah Geechee people are likely descendants of them is the mentioning of how enslaved people engaged in basket weaving in the park during their one day off a week. 

After speaking with KaTrina, a Gullah Geechee woman in South Carolina, she explained to me that she’d learned basket weaving from her mom who’d learned it from her mom, and so on. I could only wonder how far back this generational heirloom had existed in her lineage and how many other forms of wealth we’d been taught to ignore because of eurocentricism. We say that wealth isn’t only financial yet we are taught to focus on the deficit left behind by colonialism, enslavement, and all the systems that followed. My research looks at the parts of ourselves that were so intricate to our being that the only option our ancestors had was to maintain it. There are art forms that we’ve come to view as mundane because the oppressors have systemically devalued them (while ensuring they are constantly on display at their museums) so much so that we cannot even appreciate our gifts. Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, speaks about this, the way that we can have the ability to grow plants, sing, dance, recount stories in the most captivating way, decipher and share information, and the myriad of talents you can speak extensively about a family member doing incredibly well but in the most casual way. 

After returning from Ghana, I did an ancestry test which concluded that based on my mitochondria DNA, I am largely West African with a Senegalese emphasis. At the time, this information elated me because ‘I’d finally known where I was from’ but I slowly started to realize (referencing my earlier blog posts) that who you are isn’t only geographical or genetic; there’s a series of behaviors, cultural understandings, diets, etc. that makes you feel you belong to a people. Around age 20 - 24, I did a lot of digging into my immediate ancestry through use of obituaries, Ancestry.com, public census data, and traveling to the African american Smithsonian in DC twice and this allowed me to put together a family tree and migration timeline for my mom’s parents. I learned that my mom’s maternal side is Gullah Geechee by way of her grandpa’s mom and some of the earliest migrants to Chicago on her granny’s side and also on her dad’s side. My father is from Yazoo City, Mississippi, and remains there to this day which is all I know about his ancestry. Since learning this, I’ve been saying, I am genetically wired to leave as soon as the option presents itself but also drawn to stay where I am invested, a conflicting duality but I have come to navigate it well; knowing when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em. 

Through basket weaving (and with time expanding to more art forms), I hypothesize that Black Africans of the diaspora have maintained a sense of cultural identity and connection that can help them identify their African ancestry in a more relevant way than genetics alone. In Indigenous African culture, ethnic groups served a purpose and would trade their skillset to neighboring groups (this is not to say that is the only thing they could do but it was a specialized skill). More on this here: https://luminousphotoexpeditions.com/a-guide-to-africas-rich-tribal-cultures/. My theory is that while the diaspora (and continental Africans who experienced colonialism and have connections to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade) may be multiple ethnic groups geenetically, the cultural practices that their family has maintained and stealthy treated as a family heirloom ensuring someone(s) could carry that skill into the future generation, that skill becomes the indicator of who your family is culturally and ethnically.

I will close this post by sharing talents of mine that I have overlooked or attributed to systems but looking inward, I now contribute to my ancestral funds of knowledge. One of my many public gifts is the way I can make big topics feel manageable to understand and approachable, so much so that people who typically avoid engaging in hard conversations will do so with me. I also can make people laugh, at first I thought this was because I was silly but I truly started to understand the depths of this gift when it could transcend language. There are times when I cannot even form a coherent and logical sentence in a language but I can still make people laugh and share my spirit. These are a few examples of my generational wealth, gifts that have been cherished and passed down to me from my elders. I assume that before this would be considered oral traditions, coming from keepers of knowledge and those who would travel to funerals and other somber events and lift spirits through dance, song, and laughter. I encourage you all to begin looking in all the corners of your life that you once considered mundane, insignificant, a talent you’ve taken for granted because you haven’t had to work for it. That is the talent whose origin I want you to begin tracing.