Written, composed and read by Char Jeré.
Excerpts by Essex Hemphill, Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison
Oder my steps by women of worship
I’m staring at the pulpit
I’m staring through the pulpit
I’m reading the scripture and I’m thinking…
When racists die
Does racism die
Or is grandma still battling them on the other side
She told me to ignore his old white ass but I simply could not
I’m afraid I’ve been pushed too far
Black don’t crack
(Breathe)
I met me on the street and I said to myself
The internet is a Scorpio
Facebook = Meta is an Aquarius
Twitter = X is an Aries
Google is a Virgo
Ebay is a Virgo
Instagram = Meta is a libra
Amazon is a cancer
Do with that information what you will
(Breathe)
ESSEX HEMPHILL SPEAKING AT THE CLAGS BLACK NATIONS/QUEER NATIONS? CONFERENCE IN 1995.
The book the maroons written by Louis Timagène Houat was banned in 1844 for its critical approach to slavery he says this:
“It is said that the Africans – most of whom were abducted from Madagascar and Mozambique – enslaved by the French would climb all the way up its treacherous peak to escape the horrors of the plantations.* It is also said that, when faced with the choice between plummeting to their deaths and yielding to the patrols of white men sent to retrieve them they favored the former, …”
“You cannot be everything in the atmosphere, but you have to be yourself without enclosing yourself in a circle or behind a wall, or in a nationality, a clan, a tribe…It is the only way to oppose holocaust, destruction, oppression, domination, and imperialism. It’s a saying that’s difficult to accept, but I think that, as long as we don’t, calamities will persist and we’ll continue on blindly slaughtering each other-the Hutu against the tutsi, the Israelis against the Palestinians, the Irish Catholics and the Irish Protestants, etcetera.” 67-68 Glissant
“Why write this book? No one has asked me for it. Especially those to whom it is directed. Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.” Fanon 7 1967
“At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into a real hell. Man is not merely a possibility of recapture or of negation. If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding. Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies. Uprooted, pursued, baffled, doomed to watch the dissolution of the truths that he has worked out for himself one after another, he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him.” Fanon 8 1967
Spoken in Tutnese
wut-ee ar but-eaut-iful put-eep-ull wut-ee wut-ill ov-ut-er-kut-um
(we are beautiful people we will overcome) repeat forever
A homemade lathe recording of the Black national anthem
Toni Morrison Laughing
Extended version can be found here
(c) 2025 Char Jeré