Excerpt from Short Film "I, John De Conqueror"
Full film available with Patreon membership
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****video shot by @iamimega ****
"inside the charged dark
of this severed head called 'earth' -
this marvel of a celestial brain case
rotating mid non-air -
dead things stay alive
under the red umbrella of thought.
right here: a centered dark mirror -
'meaning what?'
if this severed head has a heart,
it is tell-tale.
lovelorn.
a reckoning that is mud-formed: i.e.,
a black, albeit begrudgingly, male,
'and you should be afraid.'
i have the original man, as ghost,
fixed in the wet ink of my pen.
he can be mended into a single tenderness.
i call this optimism 'self-recovery.'
a thing that fractures
at the end of every well-written sentence..."
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****artwork by @rashidjohnson
"Regarding the Black male body being 'seen' or 'perceived,' philosopher Frantz Fanon’s notion of 'body schema' is rather insightful: 'In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity…the body is surrounded by an atmosphere of uncertainty…for not only must the Black man be Black; he must be Black in relation to the white man.'
It is from whites that the intention, the 'meaning' of the Black body comes. Writer James Baldwin once described the Black body as 'the paying for the guilt which white people have about the flesh…all the agony, and the pain, and the danger, and the passion, and the torment – you know, sin, death, and hell – of which everyone in the country is terrified.'
It is a site of paradoxical, contradictory investments (desired / undesirable / known / unknown), rooted within the colonial white gaze. The end result being imprisonment inside myriad narratives, anecdotes and details built upon a backdrop of ideological truth. Philosopher Cornel West speaks directly to the matter with the assertion that, 'white fear of Black sexuality is a basic ingredient of white racism. And for whites to admit this deep fear even as they try to instill and sustain fear in Blacks is to acknowledge a weakness – a weakness that goes down to the bone.'
Framed by myths that fix my body as a site of danger, I am what Franz Fanon called a 'phobogenic object' – a stimulus to anxiety. In a space of phantasmorgia, I am ideologically condemned before even acting. Having projected upon me upon all the anguish, anxieties, and fears of white outsiders; as the nexus of their racist, semiotic constructions, I embody all that is antithetical to 'civilization.'..."
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****photo by @theimtiredproject ****
"Black male self-recovery cites Afro-futurist theory - such as Rasheedah Phillips,’ ‘Black Quantum Futurism,’ - as directly relevant to the deconstruction / reconstruction of Black masculinity and manhood. It is a potential vehicle for rearticulating past and present paradigms of Black masculine existence, and conceptualizing radical frameworks of resistance against the temporal and spatial constraints imposed by oppressive hegemonic structures. Temporal and spatial constraints that, historically, Black men have responded to with little more than brute force. This prompts me to think of the Afro-futurist expression of ‘Astro-blackness,’ which is a person’s Black state of consciousness, liberated from the historical nature of ideological categorizations. This gives rise to an awareness of a multitude of possibilities and probabilities, within the universe, which then engenders a critical eye on the multitude of probabilities and possibilities, within him or herself.
I contend that the true mark of intelligence is the unified treatment of emotion, logic, language and thought. Within this context, the mere presence of a truly intelligent Black man fractures historical categories of race and gender. By necessity, the unified treatment that I assert marks intelligence, has to go beyond mere analysis. Articulated not only as a source of therapy, this treatment is integral to the formulating of what philosopher Michel Foucault conceptualized as 'technologies of the self.' This is when a person can effect 'by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves' however they see fit.
As a Black man, my 'technologies of the self' are fully articulated through a philosophy of the 'poetic.' What is the poetic? The poetic is any attempt at the unified treatment of emotion, logic, language and thought, against the backdrop of oppression. It is the lived experience of philosophy over the abstract - the arena where one articulates the terms for a humanity unrealized or unfulfilled..."
artwork by Mikael Owunna
"robed by robeson, here i stand.
here i bury nothing.
here is the illicit burn of sanctity -
the salt-magic of spit.
history calls this a 'double delirium':
hoodoo’ed, two-headed, deep soil men,
unfathered above ground.
their second-chance feet.
with seed-like attention,
they walk over the unmothered below.
every stride - the grip, the pull of a grave.
don't trip. don't fret.
my speech is the upshot of bladed breath.
it cuts deft into history’s handling.
severing the spine of words
that backhands a man’s own blood.
explosion: the proper etymology.
when properly named, things puncture
the english language like shrapnel.
to you, the naming is world-ending.
to me, a world is now beginning.
consider the cliffhanger:
the letter 'n' in human, followed by
what language
should not be able to repair..."
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"i swear,
i'm this close to stealing the comfort
of the next white woman
who steps through me
on a new york city street -
gifting it to a Black boy
who has yet to learn fatigue.
indeed,
history gives us the fury
of inarticulate need.
but here,
said black boy is untethered.
still tender.
remember:
all things eventually birth their own opposites.
said black boy sees
the violent gesturing -
the sophomoric posturing.
this is his naked moment.
he chooses to bypass the frantic.
he is not ready for burial..."
"my blood trills.
my bloodline is so trill that time transmutes. now, this hard-won needle. the thread of my becoming. i fasten the fork that fables history’s tongue.
which is to say, fuck what you heard.
i promise you, it's all hype. the wingspan of my lineage be supreme baller-like. the flat-out will-to-power that pillars these eyes. inside, the beautiful browns of good men, good black men, who perform problematic rituals of love. who nurse themselves out of any tragedy involving choice.
call this accountability. call this discovery.
but i'm unusual. black men are held for the dead. and since the heaviest caskets are blood and bone, i see self-recovery as a un-funeral. i see all recovery as resurrection. even if they vanish for a season or two, fuck it. bound by stolen interior, watch these men return: huge, unburied, candescent.
the imperative: heal, at the dark root of the scream..."
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****LINK IN BIO****
****artwork by @jordanmcasteel ****
"like a prophecy from a dying God,
they say it together: 'Mommy.'
the seasons switch their tempo.
the world stops its ending.
our daughters,
unbothered in unison.
our new beginnings.
I love you for this -
your quiet superpower.
to build a world from nothing
and say with mercy:
'Ours.'
HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY AKIBA ISMAIL ❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️💗❤️
