Conjuring Refusal

There’s something after hope. After triaging a system with your own life force that has always wanted you crushed, mangled and teetering on the brink just to keep everything going, in hopes for something slightly better tomorrow. In hopes for a seat at a table, a mug celebrating Black History Month, and a federal holiday where white people have invited themselves to the cookout they were unaware of until 2021.

It’s Black Magic. You know, the sorcery of Boukman and Gullah Jack and Nat Turner. Dismal Swamp Maroon Magic. The slight turn and spit and sneer of a Black man, taut as a live wire, turning his head towards a so-called authority and saying in the chord & timbre of the abyssal, “I ain’t gotta do shit but stay Black and die”. The dip of a Black femme queen, clean as a blade, against the back of a world that’s too busy not deserving her, choreographing her own resurrection. The Black mother giving her child a mouth full of syllables that ring like a song that opens the sky every sunrise, illegible on a resume.

The bible, remixed with a red candle, graveyard dirt & the presence of ancestors who remember a world before and a world after. The force, the equivalent surety of gravity, that says that we will be here, fuck an apocalypse. The whirlwind of Marcus Garvey, and us conducting our blooming a la Gwendolyn Brooks.

After you have turned back, 100, 1000 times, to make sure that nothing in the burning house will save you, after you have lulled yourself past boredom with self-care and scrolled until you forget your own breath, after you are sure that these parasitic systems of enclosure, enslavement and oppression will not ever give you the closure that you need to #heal. After you are done with Black Superbowl circuses & exhausted with begging your way into the house you built while donning negro cloth and star spangled chaps and manufactured identity crises. that house that, again, is burning-

You break out the Black walnut, the Black salt, the Black candle. The Black castor oil if needs be. The wormwood. the hyssop. the rue. the snakeroot. you take your first mornings piss and turn that acid upside down on the flag that denies your personhood, and the personhood of rivers, and forests, and your locked up cousin, and your overworked RN auntie who still has a net worth of 200 american dollars. That denies the personhood of your little cousin who was born into a pipeline because her zip code is 15208, same as your best friend, and they decided to build a cop city on top of her head. That denies the peoplehood of your ancestors because they wanted to build a Microsoft data center so they moved and buried them in mass graves. That refuses to let mothers hold their living laughing loving babies in Palestine, Congo, Iran, Ayiti. that roams the streets looking for Yucatecan fathers to kidnap.

No salt on the inside, but salt everywhere they got they hooks in you. 9 days, 9 nights. Nothing but Ntozake, Toni & Toni, June, Audre & Sylvia. Gloria, Lucille & Assata. & Black candles. Nothing but rosewater and honey baths for the child ghost in you that was bludgeoned to fit into something that only wanted ever to eat you but never love you. 9 day, 9 nights. Nothing but hugs for your living Black children and gentle scalp scratches that tap codes into their small bodies of how the love for them stretches all the way through time to the constellations. Nothing but libations and tears for missing Black children. Nothing but Sun-Ra and Coltranes and Umi Said til you remember your own heart’s rhythm. 9 days, 9 nights.

Nothing but greens slow cooked in bone broth (or mushroom broth) and Black eyed peas whispered over with love to heal the tender places in your quantum structure. Nothing but echo locating your closest friends with telepathic jokes that only we can make in times like these. 9 days, 9 nights. Nothing but wails heralding the end of broken promises that did nothing but take, take, take from you. Nothing but tending the places you speak with your spirits and walking & chanting demoja on the edges of your favoritest fresh water. Nothing but taking advice from trees, picking up aquafina bottles tossed into hedges, and taking notes from the birds willing to teach you how to fly. 9 days, 9 nights. Nothing but letting the stars tell you your secret name.

9 days, 9 nights. 9 days, 9 nights, you call yourself into a home not built on hope. Not built on any image they’ve ever given you of what freedom looks like and what grace and mercy is. Not built on compromising the wildness or wilderness in you for an ever diminishing sliver of something they call goodness that leaves you famished. Not built on the desolate symbols of success they told you, repeatedly and with force, you love. Not built on coercion masquerading as options. Breaking the mirrors that tell you to sacrifice yourself in somebody else’s image. Refuse them. 9 days, 9 nights. 9 days, 9 nights. 9 days, 9 nights.

Nailah’s Substack

And what lives after hope, lives because you really alive, Hoodoo, on all sides of the veil. you multi-headed doctor and death doula, you. Because you have refused the meagerness of reality and the scraps of the realistic, and dreamed beyond the confines of hope and despair. Because you called forth the way out of no way. water pours forth from the rock. You pour forth from you. The tao of Hoodoo. Not because you will always be on this pretty blue mama. No. But because you live right now. all of you. all of we. standing at the repast of a civilization that died because it refused to stop drinking our blood so we starved it, sucking our teeth, asking who done the body. laughing because it tried to diss & dis remember us.

All of we with our trembling hands, which are our ancestor’s hands, and our grandchildren’s hands, baptized in indigo and holding soft Black earth, hair full of seeds, tongues full of power, with our remembered wings, with our eyes reflecting each other like full moons, freeing all our sons & daughters, speaking ourselves and one another into existence like nommo. A family reunion unshackled from the disenchanting spell of a hope built on suffering. A Hoodoo liberation, undone from her dead names. The magnitude of us, stretching beyond time, heartbeats like whale songs, dancing the incredible, the unimaginable, the impossible. Don't look at my finger. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look!