LISTEN
LISTEN
Oh Sekhmet 5 , holiest of warriors! They saw our eyes, red from the tears we shed when they built the dam that flooded our ancestral lands. The Nile floods filled our sacred temples. Our homes were destroyed. Our culture epicenters washed away into the sea. They uprooted us, but didn’t know our roots have survived for eons, nourished and healed by those very same waters. They tried to drown us but they didn’t know we were descendants of Nubia’s Nile warriors. The Undrowned. Healing the earth. Rising eternal from the waters like the sacred blue lotus. Our Nubian songs filling the skies with our undying love for the land. They called you bloodthirsty but they do not know you. What they thought was blood in your eyes was really magic. Your rage is misunderstood. Our power frightens them. It roars across the lands in prayer, returning to us tenfold, filling us with your fierce love, as our undulating arms echo the soft hills and valleys of Nubia, and the soft tongue of our Nubian song. We re-member you. We re-member us. Eman Desouky is DJ Emancipation, and a fierce mama of a mag- ical 7 year old human. Her two decades of cultural work in the Bay Area are rooted in transformative justice practices that imagine a world without racism, colonialism, classism, and homophobia. Her current written and music curation work is an exploration of what embodiment of our ancestral remembrance looks, feels, but especially sounds like. Her ancestors ascend from the fertile soils of where the Nile river meets the Mediterranean Sea, the Horn of Africa, and the Turquoise Coast of Turkey. She currently resides on the ancestral lands of the Lisjan Ohlone people, also known as Oakland, CA.
Oh Isis 4 , divine Mother. They stole your name like they stole our ancestors from their tombs, stole our belong- ings, stole our lands. They took us from Your womb, oh holy One. They took us from ourselves when they said we were too ugly, too dark, too Black. They turned our sacred into a joke. Dis-membered. Severed our continent despite centuries of graceful crossings through/above/ below the Sahara by our kin. Are our dead lost and wan- dering because of the theft of our resting places? Will our ancestors know who we are? Will they find us? But as we are bent in grief, singing songs to the winds that carry our prayers on the Nile, we are no longer afraid. We dance with warm sand between our toes as we touch our foreheads to the fertile soil of the delta smelling like tears and blood, in reverence to You, di- vine Mother. Your magic is like a balm, oh Isis, healing the wounds of grief with each prayer of re-membrance, each moment we invoke the song of our people that tell stories of the majesty of who we are and where we come from. The balm that stitches us back to ourselves, whole. In the practice of being beyond space and time, moving our bodies together, you remind us that our lives are not scarce, they are Infinite.
4 The mother of us all in Egyptian mythology
5 Lion goddess, fierce warrior spirit in Egyptian Mythology
WRITER’S NOTE: through dance and the embodiment of song as prayer in homage to my ancestors, I defy the colonizers’ definition of who I am and where I come from.
16
in dance SPRING 2023 16
SPRING 2023 in dance 17
In Dance | May 2014 | dancersgroup.org
unify strengthen amplify unify strengthen amplify
44 Gough Street, Suite 201 San Francisco, CA 94103 www.dancersgroup.org
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker