LISTEN TO THE STIRRINGS of your copper brown skin, the greatest gift of the Egyptian sun, the creator of all life. The focus of your deep eyes, molten and luscious. The rhythm of your heartbeat, strong and deep, as it drums your life’s beautiful song. Can you hear it? Do you know what language that is? We have been waking up to this melody for centuries. Ancestral Re-memberance (Egypt) by EMAN DESOUKY
LISTEN
NUT 2 , oh holy one. Goddess of the sky. You guided our people across the Mediterranean sea. The currents carried us to the West. Propelled by the winds of thunderstorms and Sahara dust* 3 across the Atlantic, to places where they spoke different languages, but were mirror images of us. You remind us of the songs we sang when we landed and were greeted with care by the peoples of those lands. On our journey back home we anchored off the Western edge of our continent before making our way into the Mediterranean. We remember the pain You held bear- ing witness to the creaking ships that reeked of terror. A strange language not of this land echoed. Black bodies imprisoned, shackled, enslaved. Our fear floated into the heavens and You wept. Your tears falling through the skies, across the land, beating down against our skin. We sang songs of grief, drummed rhythms of courage as we watched our kin being forced onto the ships. We sang and sang. Together we opened our mouths as your name screamed through our throats, tossing our bodies to the sand, undulating, throwing dark tresses side to side through the air with our heads bent until our voices, raspy and pregnant with sadness, faded with the ships into the depths of the wailing Atlantic . We look into each other’s eyes and see the edges of NUT’s majesty: Altair, Pleiades, Alawaid, Andromeda, Kaitos. This is the map home. Oh Nut, sacred sky moth- er, You help us re-member that our ancestors created the universe. Reflections of us, returned whole. Now as we toss our bodies to the sand, throwing our dark tress- es side to side through the air, it is in reverence of You. And it is in reverence of us.
These are songs of re-membering* 1 . Of re-awakening. Let us re-member together:
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1 This act of “re-membering” is inspired by the work of Layla K. Feghali of River Rose Re-membrance, who says that we re-member in order to heal the “culture of severance” that characterizes our con- temporary world, a transformation of personal, ancestral, communal, and ecological traumas and violations towards a more life-affirming and dignified reality.
2 Goddess of the heavens, creator of the world, in Egyptian mythology 3 The Sahara Dust is a natural phenomenon where sand from the Sahara was blown by a storm across the Atlantic, to the lands of Borinquen, now known as Puerto Rico. I imagine these storms (which continue to this day) carried my ancestors, in partnership with the Phoenecians, across the Atlantic regularly way before Columbus was even an idea in the cosmos.
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