Statistics
We looked inside some of the posts by newformsnewworlds and here's what we found interesting.
Average Info
Notes Per Post
0
Likes Per Post
0
Reblog Per Post
0
Reply Per Post
0
Time Between Posts
4 months ago
Number of Posts By Type
Text
14
Last Seen Tumblr Blogs
Fun Fact
Tumblr has a low social media market share in South America.
Text
Being a contradiction is Being Alive.
Being the holy tension—
the tantric yes
and the sacred
no
that make our contours
defined
So that we can see ourselves
and one another,
clearly.
Gogo Jillian Walker, October 2024, BAM, Brooklyn | Maya Sharpe Photography (@mayasharpephoto)
0 notes
Text
Ain’t you got a right to the tree of life?
You do, beloved.
And so do I.
0 notes
Text
0 notes
Text
Hair interlude: hair for black writers: why do so many black women wear writers and intellectuals wear locs?
0 notes
Text
Concepts and Themes >>
Africans as nomadic peoples (with an emphasis on the Bantu people):
In one of her most renowned songs, Marian Anderson sings, “sometimes I feel like a motherless child/a long ways from home/a long ways from home.”
Saidiya Hartman writes in Lose Your Mother: “I realized too late that the breach of the Atlantic and the routes traveled by strangers was as close to a mother country as I would come.”
In an interview on the book, she also writes: “LOSE YOUR MOTHER is about disenchanting a certain myth of belonging, of roots, to actually try to find another language of connection. I think there are people who never get to the last chapter, ‘Fugitive Dreams’, so they never understand that.”
When I bought the book, I did not reach the last chapter because I was trapped in my own grief about the first part. Feeling motherless with no way back to anywhere. But the book and my work with my ancestors eventually carried me to this circle. I could feel in my work that my mother was not lost, but that she wanders. And that is what I’m confirming, here. With you all.
When re-membering Africans as nomadic peoples, feeling wayward becomes a source of power, not a problem to be solved or a perpetual wound. It is reconfigured, for me, as a source of strength.
I have known the routes all the way home were not lost. I have known that home is many and all and nothing and this circle has helped me connect to that knowing in a deeper way coming home to the nomads across the ocean. The Bantu. Their footsteps traced around my edges.
To embrace the wander as a wonder of who we are as African peoples. Who we have always been is to know our power, our connection to each other and to the ancients.
It can never be removed.
I now see in my mind a picture of Africa before and all of the various peoples criss-crossing her Earth: to make kin, make kingdom, make ways, make kind, make peace, make glory, make space.
Nomadicism is a survival skill embedded in my dna and the dna of all African peoples
Nomadic peoples, people who can make home anywhere, who can thrive and build community in many kinds of spaces, places, who can grieve, who can say goodbye, who can say hello, who can learn new plants, rivers, seeds, who can carry their songs along with their children on their backs; are ahead of the game for the new world that is inevitably on the way.. We are prepared for the rapidly changing landscapes that climate change is creating right now. Climate change of the Earth will make it necessary to be ready to move at higher intervals, we will need to be ready to pick up and go. It has been happening around the world for decades, in India, Africa, the Middle East. Climate refugee status is now coming after its main culprit, the US and over the next 20 years, the topography of the United States will change at a scale few will be prepared to embrace.
Our indigenous will keep us as they always have as long as we continue re-membering. The so-called contemporary world will need to continue to catch up to us in order to survive.
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IN NEW CLOTHES
Co-working + Co-living are additions to the list we started last week of concepts the contemporary world is catching onto that actually stem from indigenious ways of being. Indigenious ways are all about living and working together. Now, we are seeing many people return to this through “the sharing economy” including through co-working spaces and co-living spaces which are becoming more popular in major cities across the world. It is a return to the village and to the ways of the village.
AFRICAN CREATION STORIES
// song as direct connection to ancestors >>
I talk about music or a song, rather, as something that arises or rises above the surface. The music is always present and sometimes it enters the realm of the heard, but it is not that when there is silence there is “no music”, or, when there are words that are not readily identified and qualified as “music” in the dying over-culture, that means that there is no song. There is always song. Song is entered and re-entered like river water.
Like identity in many ways (the where are you from?, question), Genres have done me great damage artistically, but more importantly, spiritually. Genres have stifled and confused me. Genres have contorted and broken me into pieces because I believed the lie of their primacy.
Like the Berlin “conference,” genres used to confuse me out of understanding my connection to South Africa, the fact that the Bantu people are all over Africa, not just in one part, as Gogo has shared. Not just the western part or the southern part. All African people are nomadic. Nomadicism, the fluidity of the movement of my people, leaves me free—restoring my ability and my right (right as in the correctness and as in justice) to do that in my own life: to enter and re-enter a never-ending current of song. And to answer to call to sing.
I am called to Sangoma and Sangoma to me.
Pan-Africanism is a fact because Ubuntu is a fact.
This is the embedded, embodied knowledge beyond national and international borders. Beyond the borders of the body. Songs live on sound and water waves and carry through Time. Songs carry us back, through, up, and onto our knees for prayer.
Songs have saved my life.
Hoodoo is defined as embodied historical memory linking us back through time to previous generations and ultimately to our African past, which I would now add is our African present as the future I speak is now. What I know is activated
0 notes
