Reclaiming and liberating narratives of Black history

The state of a narrative

What is a story? Is it the same as a tale or is it closer to a record? I think all stories rest on a frame, a set of assumptions and truisms that we accept as existing before, throughout, and after the conclusion of the story we are engaging with.  

History is a telling of a story, like any other. And like any other, the story-teller makes the story what it is, filling it with all they’d like to see and gutting it of everything they’d rather shut their eyes to.  

We have to be mindful, therefore, who the telling of our stories serves. Michael Taussig said in his article The Sun Gives Without Receiving (1995), “History itself has taken the turn whereby people are increasingly unable to assimilate the data of the world around by way of experience. The capacity to remember is under siege because, in a shell-shocked world, the capacity to experience has had to atrophy”. In the context of Black History Month, these words highlight to me how history has become such a complex tapestry that it unravels into our present. It floods our lives with so much weight that it impedes our ability to experience our lives fully and, thus, to properly remember our individual or collective past. 

What we remember of Black History is part of this deterioration, the Black experience everywhere mutilated by White Supremacy. The narratives of Africans and racialised people the world over have been dismantled and reformed into unrecognisable tales. These stories assimilate and neutralise rather than challenge the dominant ideological frameworks that oppress Black people. 

Divorced from a just and coherent tale of our own existence, many Black and racialised people are forced into a relationship with themselves that reproduces the ongoing violence of neocolonialism (quite literally “new colonialism”)². So, we are led into misinformed reverence of figures such as Barack Obama, but might remain in ignorance of the works of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o or the leadership of Thomas Sankara. 

Liberating narratives

 A narrative must be spun. While a spider weaves a home, a tool, a dinner table, for the fly the web is a trap. Perspective isn’t merely based on who spins the narrative or the web, but whom it serves. When a narrative is spun to serve the dispossessed, it can be empowering, but when created in service of the powerful, a story can facilitate generations of pain. It is for this reason that it is so important that Black History is told not merely from the perspective of a Black person, but from the perspective of Black liberation.  

The power of language

In his book, “Decolonising the Mind”, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1986) makes the argument that language lies at the centre of a people’s self-identification. He goes on to argue therefore, that the language we use to communicate (and the culture and collective memory encased in language) constitutes a colonial force on the mind. In essence, language is a means through which people are subjugated. If something so fundamental as the body and structure of the words we use to communicate can mediate what, with whom, and the affect with which we communicate, what ideas then might be possibly rendered incommunicable, or even unthinkable through the limitations of our language? Another question: if African peoples and their languages were colonised by European ones, is it even possible to precisely communicate – and consequently understand – who we have become as a result of the very process that birthed colonialism and grew into imperialism and neocolonialism. That process is a capitalist process and, requiring that we all submit to a principal common language to ease the flow of capital around the world in a neocolonial age, it has made the languages of colonial nations all but a necessity for modern life.  

If we look only to the languages of those peoples that conceptualised and perpetrated the colonial atrocities, can self-discovery for the colonised and their descendants ever be truly achieved? Or must we look instead to the languages produced in and through the experience of those crimes being wrought upon body and soul? 

The sound of liberation

In roots reggae and ska, calypso, rumba and salsa, country, blues, jazz, rock and roll and soul we hear the resilient and resistant voices of Maroons and stolen Africans telling their tales in the tongues that their ancestors crafted as they fought colonial violence and domination. From words like “nyam” (meaning “to eat”), found in both Wolof and Jamaican patois, to the very rhythms that find their origins in Africa, language itself is a mode of resistance. From gwo ka to steelpan, punta and areito, we hear the rhythms and dance the dances of those peoples whose very souls survived in languages shorn not from tongue, but from all the sounds of the worlds they saw and struggled through. Language survives with the people themselves. In language and song, the very words we speak reject colonisation, retaining their meaning across oceans and travelling between worlds. These are the narratives that were not reclaimed, but are anti-colonial in their origins. 

The dangers of co-optation

Over the years, we have seen how Black voices have become co-opted by the interests of those who profit from our exploitation. By co-optation, I am referring to the method through which language that is intended to liberate is appropriated, misused and diluted by those that seek to undermine its liberatory effect. Where hip-hop music once emerged as a mode of resistance to police brutality and a forum for Pan-African ideation, the ‘fourth branch of the government’ (Immortal Technique) quickly  appropriated and repackaged it into a corporatised form to generate messages that serve capitalism. These narratives spun by Black mouths for a class that profits from the subordination and exploitation of Black and racialised peoples and, often, the lands they steward, will not serve the interests of those people. The consumption of Black mediums of narration, under the system of capitalism, emerges at the cost of sanitising the narratives themselves. This co-optation has resulted in a wealth of the sharp analysis of and proposed remedies to the conditions of Black people found in the music of musicians like Bob Marley to Dead Prez. 

Liberation narratives connect us

If liberation is considered a core condition of mental and communal wellbeing (Riemer et al., 2020), where can the narratives that promote it be found? As Palestine resists, we have seen the narratives of the oppressed push back against the mainstream narratives of the oppressor, connecting the struggles and narratives of many colonised people and moving hearts around the world. Importantly, the Palestinian liberation movement exemplifies a medium of self-narration that is resistant to corporatisation and co-optation. It shows how, through a radical mode of self-narration, it can generate the space for other experiences of oppression to find resonance. South Africa has identified the commonality of the experience of Apartheid there and in Palestine, and in Congo and Sudan we have seen the narratives of resistance to neocolonial violence connect the conditions of people across lands and languages. Narratives hold the power to liberate and to inspire, to connect and entwine. When narratives are told from the perspective of those that seek liberation, they can free us all from the shackles of alienation from our fellow human beings.