Bourne Amnesia

© 18 July 2011, the Griot Poet

Did I miss the memo?

When we were brought to Plymouth Rock, it wasn’t a voluntary vacation…down in the bowels of overstocked ships, sleeping in bile, human feces and piss, separated through Goree Island gates from our continent, languages and tribes fulfilling Deuteronomy prophesies of slavery in “a nation of fierce countenance, which does not respect the elderly nor show favor to the young.”¹

Did I miss the memo?

"Your sons and your daughters [shall be] given to another people, and your eyes shall look and fail [with longing] for them all day long; and [there shall be] no strength in your hand.”² Brought to a foreign land, scarred by whips physically; eyes cast downward mentally; “Willie Lynch” myth beaten us down spiritually…

Did I miss the memo?

When Harriet Tubman conducted the Underground Railroad – at gunpoint – to those that would decide to first blow their joint, then change their minds and side with their previous “Simon Legree” plantation masters, the equivalent of going back across seas of reeds to Egypt, bondage and slavery?

Did I miss the memo?

A Civil War was fought not for state’s rights, but the right of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” by original humanity deftly defined constitutionally as three-fifths like livestock to increase the stocks of landowners and founding fathers fathering Sally Hemming’s mulatto children.

Did I miss the memo?

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

“Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe,” wise quotes by Frederick Douglass, playing out over decades in mind-programming entertainment minstrelsy shows.

Did I miss the memo?

Medgar Evers murdered by Byron de La Beckwith: one lone nut theory I can get with, but Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were not too long after their 1st and only face-to-face meeting (after public animosity) assassinated by actors that should not have had access to them.

Did I miss the memo?

When we were lampooned in minstrel shows, burnt cork face, step-n-fetch blows to our woman and manhood, birth of Jim Crow by Thomas D. Rice to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ not-so-subtle statement that English Lord Greystoke-Tarzan is needed to tame the African jungle.

The modern context is Bankrupt Entertainment Television, birthed when Rick James couldn’t play his videos on MTV, now VIACOM owns the whole shebang; we’re mentally/spiritually being programmed to desire those things we once fought against as labels of our libel.

“My people perish for a lack of knowledge.”³

Did I miss the memo?

1. Deuteronomy 28:50
2. Ibid, 28:32
3. Hosea 4:6