i am the secret

I received my ancestry DNA results today. My suspicions were true off course. Yet even more rewarding is the fact that I had already visited some of the countries which my people were originally from, and now I can make plans to visit the other places. Benin/Togo, Nigeria, Cameroon/Congo, Senegal, Ghana, Mali. How beautiful it is to know your people. After I purchased the kit, it took me over a year, before I actually began the process of putting my saliva into a tube, and shipping it. I was a skeptic, and still am. And there is so much to understand about the origins of mankind, especially people of color, and where our roots truly stem. However, I went and did it anyway.

Weeks later, when I checked my email, I was finishing up my reading of Toni Morison’s novel, Song of Solomon, a book about a man Milkman Dead, and his family, and how he ends up returning “home” to where his family came from to find legends, tales, names, and origin which together helped him to feel whole, and at peace. It felt so poetic, to be learning my origins at the same time as I was finishing the book.

I recalled my visit to Lome, Togo, of which I have no photos to speak of, the men who drove my friends and I on motorcycles kept asking me, “Are you sure you’re not Togolese oh? You look like us. You speak french? You are my sister no? Is it because you are with your white friends?” I insisted that “No I am from Haiti, we speak French too, but I am not from here, maybe my ancestors were.” That moment made me smile then, I got excited thinking if only I was really from here. Little did I know that indeed, the highest percentage of my heritage as described by ANCESTRY DNA was from Benin/Togo – a whopping 27%. I have to go back. I connected so much with the people when I was there, because that place reminded me so much of Haiti. I was both thankful and angry about how it was all an impact of the evil grips of European colonialism. And I couldn’t come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t just our French customs that connected us, it was the way we transformed the french language into our own, it was the chants and drums, and traditions that remained with Haitians till this very day.

What I have come to find however, is that with all the obsession I have with the cultures of Nigeria, and Ghana, and the rest of Africa after my first couple of visits to West Africa, I was on the right track all along. That song I heard in my heart, that joy I felt being amongst them, the culture so similar to my own that I could point out so clearly, the melanin in my skin, the shape of my eyes and my thighs, my genetic vibrations were all just clues left behind for me by my ancestors. They were all reminder, that this is where I am from, no matter what the history, Africa lives in me. I understand now, that someone survived the past for me to be here, I carry the answers that I’ve been so determined to understand all this time.

And so, I did what any writer would do in my position, I wrote a poem. And oh yes, I’m heading out to see Black Panther again 🙂

shot by @hughmorrisphotography

i am the secret 

i just need a little sugar, to settle in my gut, so i can subside the tremble of my hands at the sight.

i just need a bit of lovin’, to carry my skin through the healing, a place to confide the magic in these bones.

everywhere I’m from, your hands have tasted; laid waste to, my oil, my sweet honey, and i wonder… aren’t you full of me already?

the secret of my mothers, and their mothers’ mothers, and their mothers before that live in my fire, in this river of blood, this glass of wine.

here i summon the gold, you dared to call your property. so many ancestors live with me, you see my eyes? the almond milk you drink, you see my thighs? two aged palm trunks, guarding the gates to a secret you wish you knew. i just need some sugar or maybe it’s salt to salivate these burns you left me with.

but all i’ve got is me, i am the sugar, i am the salt, the secret’s in my gut; it’s the melanin in my blood.

#selflove #nationalpoetrymonthchallenge #writer #poet #poetry #ancestry #blackgirlmagic #melanin #writing