Growing up poor and brown proselytises you into the cult of poverty. The refinement culture of resourcefulness.
I watched numerous Ken Burns documentaries on wars, they were all hell but it was mandatory viewing but one documentary that stuck with me was the one on the Civil War, I did my googles and realised that slavery had only been abolished 190 years ago in this country and even less in the United States. A cacophony of messages appear into my mind, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, Frederick Douglass etc. On the day of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination coloured women would cry in front of the White House unknown to what their future would hold. It was a symphony of chaos, I realised how disorganised our people have been, and now that how the shackles have been released we have been told— here go fetch you are free; as if freedom was nothing more than an abstraction, something so nebulous and undefinable.
As a child I would go to this thing called “Kid’s Club” it was a way of watching really cheap movies in the cinema, I can’t remember what film I was about to watch but I remember a trailer for the movie Jarhead had just released and the song that was present in the trailer was ‘Jesus Walks’ I think this is my first time ever experiencing Kanye West and I’m glad that it was in the cinema because hearing Jesus Walks for the first time was an ethereal experience. I was 10 years old.
I will always have Kanye’s back.
The End.