Convening in the Ark: Black & Sacred Sites of Revelation

In this time of crisis, we are invited to re-member that our ancestors were never allotted a six-foot margin between bodies to safeguard their wellness.

Yet no other peoples in the history of our time dreamt more – or more daringly – while chained and stacked together spoon-like on large floating coffins. As much a vehicle of capture, the slave ship was also a convening site for the manifestations of Sankofas: radical envisionings and returns to Black life before and beyond numerous world endings (Ani, 1994). On these ships, our ancestors plotted and carried out explosive rebellions and inventive poisonings. Some prophesied their futures as fugitives who would escape overboard to an afterlife under the ocean or the swampy outskirts of the plantation. Countless more employed less apparent, unarchived, and uncaptured tactics that nonetheless ensured their (and our) survival.