A Memorial Visit; Remembering; Afrofuturist Sankofa; A digital memorial

That visit to the King Center was a trauma reopened,the traumas of ancestorswhose dreams stubbornly flinchfrom the past into the strictures that swallow us still. What we witness in the sculptures to memory does not unwound the past nor repair the fractures in the polis.Neither do the artifacts of remembering ever stay silentthough we trample upon them, as in those in Berlin,or simply stand before them in a dark museum wherecameras are barred from clicking to the afterlives of terror. What we witness in the sculptures to memory is the spectacle of ancestors who broke leashes that threatened their minds, elders still dreaming of freedom as frozen eyes watching the breathless.A memorial to the horror that stalks the present.like zombies from the abyss of a violent history.Prague was the protagonist of it all.The weight of memory laid siegeagain to a wandering mind there,an army enclosing the walls of anancient city. But that skirmish wasfirst in Bayreuth: in a Baroque Opera,Margravial—awakened annuallyby the sound of festival musicand the footfalls of tourists releasingtheir camera shutters in pursuit of Bavaria,its history. And Wagner’s Wahnfried.The marbles in those places brimmedwith earthy reds, the colors of opulencedulled by the crumples of age; they calledout to you, asking of the monumentsyou left at home: “What became of Beninand Timbuktu and Zimbabwe, andthe pyramid of walls that unfoldedgreatness?” I shrugged it aside, blamingthe brutalities of Empire, while scriptingindifference to truth. But their voicesnever left me. What is it we losewhen we don’t remember?The same thing happened in Prague.I was in Charles Square awaiting the magicbells of the city’s astronomical clock,a medieval fairytale that enchantedthe city of spires with magic and crowds.In the cacophony of expectant faces lookingupward to catch the spectacle of monksand priests, in the brushing of strange bodiesflirting with time, the angel of history returnedto ask, “What is it we lose whenwe don’t remember?” This time, the voicesstayed, a reminder of the elders at homewho labored to record their own days,to ask what became of the chroniclesof their memories.The gemstones of times to comerebelling against the afterlivesof homochromatic violence belongin the loins of the ancients, ancestorsof the future who heal with their wordsand rain down wisdom from the loftof sacred trees from which theysprout rocket cities and resilience.Humanoids, too, metal mortals fromdistant clans who parade their truthas brothers in our new galaxies.Each night, I look above to touch their smile.Each night, I seek the scents of their senses,lurch into the place where being Black rainsa blessing on the earth, where the shadowof freedom provides the sureties of libertiesonce denied by those who swore most tothe sacraments of ethics and equality.Perhaps I will be lucky to see the worldto come, to sit with Malcolm and Mandela,fraternal sages for the fellowship of the free,in whose breasts holy fire dwells in flamesof harmony. But to surrender myself tothis languor and the wistfulness it calls withinme is to negate their memories, the triumphsof elders—alive again to guide our sailto Mars, to the heart of the Orishas, whoselights are emissaries from the herbsand fountain we drink to life.So, as one that retrieves a daughterforgotten in the march of progress, I standhere, a supplicant before a willful deity,beseeching the moons to unfold thehidden scrolls of history and code theirstruggles into the spirit of the Panthers,into the souls of their architecturesand dreams. With eyes that cover the earth,that look back to the future, I, Sankofa—sage bard of the crimson skies—dancewith them and the unborn to the drums ofartifices, engines powered by the gracesof Black souls.The other day I watched a friend’s piercing wordsbreak through the crowded wall of a mutualon Facebook. It was a tribute to a fondness past,to a soul disappeared into the memories of photos,events and birthday messages they will never read.I scrolled through a frozen timeline, the coldnessof it all like a lonely grave lined with orchids and lilies.Then a comment caught my eye, and thenanother, both written by friends of the departedto wish them a long and prosperous life.Those comments did not gather a storm of likesnor summoned a sheen for the parade of egos,only plaintive sighs for the festival of fleeting beings.But I wondered if someone beyond our realmwas reading the affections of earthlings,flipping through each post before tossingthem into the void until they reachedmy constricted heart.