Imagine how difficult something as simple as a name made it for Africans in the New World to be Africans. Imagine if the Europeans were a little more imaginative and a lot more enlightened and instead of naming the Caribbean the West Indies they named it the West of West Africa. With a simple name change centuries ago it could have been easy nowadays to say, ‘I am African.’ Now people have to bush-whack through the thickest jungles to reach a clearing where it feels safe to declare, ‘I am African.’
In the language I am creating for myself I have transformed the word ‘black’, as a racial identity, into African. All ‘black’ people, whether self-identified or not, are Africans. It is a simple matter of honouring who I am. African is an energy vibration programmed into the design of ‘black’ people. African is the collective heritage that gave birth to me. ‘I am African’ is a statement to reclaim my spirit; to honour my-self and my ancestry.
Although I am reconnecting with traditions that resonnate in my soul and are familiar to my spirit, that has nothing to do with why I am African. No one needed to give me permission to say I am African. I listened to my soul and it said: ‘I am infinite and divine feminine energy from West of West Africa’. I feel no need to prove it to anyone or validate myself: with an ‘African’ passport or outfit. In fact, I am inventing my own African livity: reconciling the traditions of my Old World with the traditions of my New World.
I used to criticize African Americans for calling themselves ‘African Americans’, but when I put politics aside, I saw the subtle brilliance in the term. Although the world has made ‘American’ mean the nationality of someone from the United States of America, the Americas actually consist of two entire continents. People from North, Central and South America are all Americans. An ‘African American’ is an African inhabiting a New World in the Americas.
When I was in Alaska I asked an Inuit chief how far back he could trace his ancestry. He said probably about 1000 years. I was astonished, because I am working on my family tree now and struggling to go back more than four generations. The fact that I do not know the names and stories of my ancestors has no bearing on the fact that they inhabit my being and I manifest their collective consciousness.
Many people try to make being African a diminishing identity; they play this game of disassociation, where being African is made into a conflicting identity with everything Africans now self-identify with in the New World. Disassociation has become a means of survival for many. It does not have to be that way. When you take the politricks out of the situation and reclaim what you already are, a new vision of yourself emerges and a new vision of the world.
My self-declaration, ‘I am African’, is like a key to unlock my spirit. It does not diminish my other identities; after all, at the end of the day, my true nature is every-thing and no-thing.