220 Years. And Another One
It's been 220 years since enslaved Africans and Taíno people got up and began killing the people who've killed their families, tore them from their homes and triggered a series of events, like Argentina's liberation, the protection of escaping Jamaicans to the shores of Haiti and many other forms of Pan-Africanism throughout the world. The understatement of a large colony transforming itself into a region of autonomy is ... well, understated. At the same time, I take care not to hyper-romantize the nature of these events. The liberatory front wasn't without its fault as I think of the Black Panther Party and its extreme failure to acknowledge and confront the nature of patriarical violence externally and from within. I can't imagine (nor can I say) that this hasn't happened with Haiti's past as I do see remanents of it today.
I chose this to begin as I work through my own personal growth as an activist. I refrained for so long from using that word because with it comes what society either (if accepting of its binaries) gives you a career (as many sadly have turned into, using the guise of liberation as a means of profittering beyond sustainability) or into a shorter lifespan (as we've seen with the unintending marytrs of the Ferguson uprisings and the excessive force brought out by the American State). I write this as I'm taking up space in Florida, a state whose formerly-enslaved African populace also saw freedom with the Gullah Geechee populus that spanned over the Carolinas and Georgia and understanding that the act of liberation isn't isolated but a flame to be sustained and passed along. We do what we can but we do not it out of self-interest or self-preservation: we exist and demand change through direct action because it remains the only way in which we are able to, in Beyonce's words, "fuck up the night". It'd be amazing if we could actually do that - enjoy ourselves without fear of being killed. But the choice to ignore the actualities of the world enable and embolden those working to snuff out the joy that we so desperately seek out, the anti-thesis of our ancestors' dreams, among other things.
Where do we go from here? If someone had to bluntly ask me what I'd see as the primary step towards liberation, it would be the complete decimation of the neocolonial system created and expanded by the European powers that began in the late 1300s and has not stopped (in fact, it's constantly reforming and expanding) since. From Vietnam to the internal (and remote) colonies upheld by the United States, from Argentina to the Netherlands, from Palestine to Azania (occupied South Africa), we have seen constant demands for the world to be brought to a place where we can live. Not solely demanding for "human rights", a means of setting a mininally acceptable blast radius for defending it, but a clear demand for justice - something that's available to everyone and rejects any space for harm to anyone. The nature of what brought the Taíno together with a people so far removed from their native lands is what spurs people to fight today for what we'd consider to be the modicum of the foundation of a just world.
I'm excited to see more of us fighting to bring this to actuality.