Connections

During my time with TRJE, I kept a blog, and sometimes I logged my experiences with the kids. While the children performed at an event, the main reason for the gathering was that Afrikan author Malidoma Patrice Somé had come to Fort Wayne, and gave a speech to the Jenbe kids, and other members of the community. I was shocked at how accepted I, as an “outsider” was, and how the color/generation/ethnicity lines blurred to invisibility. An entry on my blog details some of the feelings I had that day:

“I never felt ‘at home’ in a church, but I felt it today with Malidoma Patrice Somé, and among the crowd that gathered at the Weisser Park Community Center. As Somé, an Afrikan shaman (medicine man or healer) spoke, I felt the connection to Mother Africa, to where the cradle of life lies, fertile and full.

This connection to the motherland, to the traditional drums, dancing and culture makes me sad, makes me feel like I'm missing something. My culture is all about modernity, and the past is seen as outdated, worn out, obsolete. We Americans are supposedly the newest, best versions of humanity. Our links to the past are fleeting, if at all.

In the Afrikan culture, among Afrikan Americans and in other Afrikan traditions, links to the past and to ancestry are the hands that lift up the current generation.

Ancestors are respected, loved, and still looked to for advice, even if they had passed years, decades, centuries before. They still gain wisdom, and pass it down to the living. There is a real, tangible relationship between the living and the dead.”