“Modern day branding tactics are sneaky and not nearly as visceral as cooking someone’s flesh with a burning hot piece of metal. Because of this, they are a little harder to spot. They may disguise themselves in marketing lingo like partnership, campaign, and collaboration or hide behind financial backing calling themselves grants, fellowships, and awards knowing damn well they have an ulterior motive—let us put our names on your back, shoulder, or face like chattel.
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— Jeannine A. Cook

An excerpt from my piece—Holy Cow

“This Erykah Badu on and on and on-ism is also something I do with history. Sit myself in the haul of a ship tightly packed with piss and vomit and blood and death at my feet and at my head. I am Antoinette Sithole running beside a dying boy through Soweto. I am Winnie Mandela 491 days solitarily confined. I too chew with the ancient aurochs and swim with the ship jumpers. Someone told me to practice writing the ruminations out. To release them like an unruly herd. Not a therapist, just a fellow ruminator who reported to have found a way to reuse their unmanaged, unmitigated written ruminations to reimagine. I want to reimagine what the American version of the Truth and Reconciliation Trials would look like? A social epic I suppose. Can we stand to memorize other people’s lines? Like future replay in reverse. Rumination was originally defined as repetitive thinking about negative effects and their possible causes and consequences. But rumination can also be beneficial when it focuses on reckoning with an error—one's own and those of others. Like spending hours thinking about what healing feels like in our bodies, in our minds. Rumination is also helpful for goal attainment rehearsing a task—seeing ourselves, smelling ourselves, in a future as we wish to see it. When was the last time you ruminated on a world repaired? A people healed? Remembering that finding social nutrients is an all-day job and gave yourself the whole day to do it. I say sifting through reggie is tiresome when looking for good grass. But it is worth it if you actually want to get high-er. Write out your regurgitations, prepare for reconciliations that repair the harm because we can ruminate on the problems until the cows come home, but how much more can our minds really take and who is it actually feeding?”

Philadelphia Stories Column: At Your Mother’s Knee

The idea of instituting Governments is to secure people's rights to life, liberty, and property. When John Locke stole this nugget of ancient Egyptian wisdom from the goddess Maat, I wonder if he had any idea folks like Thomas Jefferson would bastardize the wisdom and completely change the language, replacing property with pursuit of happiness. 


Today, we see the consequences of this theft in American society. The colonialist mindset of manifest destiny was created without the contextual principles of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice that Maat represented thousands and thousands of years before this country’s inception. 


If America had been built on these principles, the humans, the animals, the oceans, and the airs would yield better results for all life forms. But alas, Maat’s bastard child, the United States, was birthed without a legitimate connection to its mother. Stealing from her while trying to mimic her at the same time. 


No respect for the true mother of American principles has been shown. This is evidenced as women who built this country were shamed, granted no property rights, and barred from the pursuit of happiness. And of course, out of pure hate, the founders captured Black women, and not only denied them property or a pursuit of happiness, but also inflicted inexplicable atrocities on them. 


This sordid, inequitable history has left many Black women behind their peers when it comes to ownership in this country. And by ownership, I really mean guardianship, because as Maat will tell you, no one “owns owns” this land. 


So how do we begin to reckon with this wretched history and restore the order? Well, look around and see that I, like so many Black women business owners in Philadelphia, are running businesses out of buildings and off of land that we have very little rights to or ownership over.


This modern form of sharecropping, working the land that someone else benefits from, limits our ability to leave the legitimate legacy of our businesses to our lineage and poses a serious impediment to our lives, our liberties, and our pursuits of happiness/property. 


For the new year, I wish more folks, especially Black women in Philadelphia, and around the world, owned (not leased or borrowed) our own land and maintained complete and total autonomy over the direction of our futures on this land. This is the only way to begin to rectify the bastardization of Maat’s ancient wisdom. This is the only way to begin to repair the damage inflicted on us through forced labor in a measurable, sustainable way—because simply posting Black Lives Matter on Twitter or kneeling at a protest or reading antiracist literature is not enough. 


Speaking of reading antiracist literature, my job as the shopkeeper at Harriett’s Bookshop is to curate and recommend books. This month I am recommending Ida B. The Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells which will be released on January 21. It examines the life of Ida B. Wells—the mother, the writer, the advocate, the activist. Ida B. Wells exemplifies a crusader intent on restoring order and enlisting the principles of Maat even in the face of the lynching of her friends, the destruction of her newspaper, and the insults on her name. In her day, Ida B. Wells galvanized small civic groups across the globe to work in tiny cells on measurable community actions. Think big tree, small axe. 


Consider, not only reading Ida B. The Queen, but also using her great granddaughter Michelle Duster's text as a catalyst for starting your own small civic group that moves into action on the topic of life, liberty, and property. Because only the people can restore the order. It is also time to start partnering with like-minded folks and securing guardianship over land in ways that align with principle over profit. And while I am asserting large institutions should listen to this conversation and take action by offering land and resources to the people, I assure you this is going to happen either way. Because as the Great Mother Maat reminds us, balance is necessary and life, liberty, and property are a birthright. Ase. 

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Philadelphia Stories Column: The Devil In Society

My Auntie Lilith is a storyteller adorned with all the histrionics a 5-foot Trinidadian woman can muster. As a child, visiting her home meant witnessing random flares of dramatic scares where, without warning, she’d turn out all of the lights, lock all of the doors, and provoke spirits as my sister, cousin, and me ran alongside her fighting evil in complete dread.

That eight-year-old me hid under her table in a puddle of my pee while my thirteen-year-old sister with tears on her cheeks locked herself in the closet and my cousins yelled in terror as my auntie’s unbridled jumbies and soucouyant and dwens chased us down the stairs and into varying corners of the house. Read full: https://philadelphiastories.org/article/writing-for-social-justice-the-devil-in-society/

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Us + Sandra Bland vs. The State

“Call the motherfuck….Call the….”

I make out muffled screams from outside. Barely there. From the comfort of my bed, I ignore. People on the block yelling is nothing new. Under covers, face in phone, I press play on CNN’s video report of Sandra Bland’s arrest during her traffic stop in Waller County, Texas. But instead of watching yet another over-edited rendition of the incident for my documentary studies class, I press a link to read the actual transcript.

We live on a mattress on the top floor of my boyfriend, who I call my love’s, row home in North Philly while I finish college. Our room is the only one left. Every other room in our house is grit and studs and bones and people’s junk and dead decaying mice and shit-stained toilets. Even still, we saved up and hired a graff writer turned fine artist to paint murals of Egyptian hieroglyphs on all the walls inside of the house. We hijack electricity from our next door neighbor Lisa, the unapologetic smoker, who thankfully never has any trouble paying her electric bill.

Read full story: https://www.midnightandindigo.com/sandra-bland/

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The Day Before submission to citywide #coronavirus poetry writing w/ Poet Laurette Trapeta Mayson

Who are we to smile, when news is as close as the day before?

What about the faceless forms frozen by the day before?

Where are we to run when virus is more air and lead is more water than the day before?

When do we tell our children love was only for the day before?

Who are we to say we survived when we but withered while inside longing for the day before?

How are we to discuss forever and never and always and yesterday and tomorrow and tonight and the day before?

No answers.

-Jeannine

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