My Invocation

You know in times like this I don’t even know what to say. Having said that, this whole blogging business may be more challenging than I anticipated. I remember Emily telling me that we needed a way to express ourselves as we traverse the natural and colorful West-African coast. And in a cosmic way this blog will be like a muse in which we paint our experiences on an easel known as the internet.

But aside from all the wonderful, mushy, idealistic plans we have for this blog, I can personally say that my hope is that this collection of writings will show our perspectives and opinions in the raw. Hopefully I can tell my story about traveling to the Motherland and leave out the self-righteous crap that blog readers are generally used to. In all seriousness, I am a Black man and this trip, my homecoming, is something that I have waited for my entire life. But, I am also, maybe more importantly, a human being who loves to learn and share experiences with other human beings.

Since I was a small child I was taught that I was not truly an American in many ways. One way was in my public schooling. In elementary through High school I was taught that my people were once slaves, docile and sheepish beings who may have fought for freedom a few times in the past 200 years but only accomplished to gain a few handouts. Another way was through my father who I would argue is a Black Supremacist. With an iron fist, he taught me the true history of where I came from. “Your not an American Miles, get out of that way of thinking, your are a Black man who happens to live in America." He taught me Afro-centrism, but in a very witty and charismatic way, a way that made me listen. “Your people are destroyed from a lack of knowledge,” my father would say to me. He would hide my allowance in works by various Black authors saying, “If you want to hide something from a Black man, put it in a book!” He would make me read “his books” the ones that they don’t teach Black kids in schools. He made me do reports on Black heroes, in addition to the homework I was already assigned from school! What a hard ass this guy was! By ten I was already familiar with the works of X, Garvey, Douglass, and the Black Israelites. I was a young intellectual with an attitude against America’s unfair history toward my forefathers and mothers. For me, going back to Africa was more than a study, it was an obligation.

Ghana is a frontier for me because of her deep involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Ghana was responsible for over 7.5 million souls that came from her shores throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Bodies of Africans were parceled from the infamous Elmina dungeon castle and countless other castles along the Cape Coast. I can never explain how chilling the feeling is to know that one of those souls maybe my ancestor. I wonder if my stock is Ghanaian, if my great, great, great grand dad was an Asante elitist who had many wives and adorn colorful kente. I wonder how much I’ll stand out in Ghana; will being a Black American, with mixed blood in me, make the natives look at me differently? Will I actually feel like I’m home? What will become of me when I get back to Harlem? Will I be an African? An African American? Would the American media have already changed the name for Black folks to something else by the time I get back? In some crazy way, I’m hoping that feeling fully African can help me to feel fully American, and ultimately make me feel fully human.

To be honest, that’s the reason I decided to go to the College at Brockport in the first place. The Ghana program was my prize and now I and Emily will further discover and dialogue as we embark on this 5 month journey…