In 1989, 6 years before I was born, my Uncle Ruiz was shot by the police on the southside of the Bronx.
He wasn't my real Uncle - he was my tia Anna's baby daddy, the father of my cousin Christopher. He was a drug dealer, and a real son of a bitch, according to reports. But Anna loved him, and she always said he would have been a great father. Would have raised his son right.
The murder of Ruiz has been spoken of in my family since then. 28 years isn't so long, really. I know Anna still thinks of him, his name is still spoken at the occasional domino board.
Baldwin's Just Above My Head reads to me as a story of dismemberment - "to partition or divide up; to cut off the limbs." It is a colonial tool - the murder of our families, the dismemberment of our bodies and our communities. It is handed down from the colonialists of old, it is an ancient tradition. To take our children, our uncles, our cousins, our parents. Here, our brother.
"If there was any jiving done, the people jived you, my brother, because they didn't know that they were the song and the price of the song and the glory of the song: you sang."
The price of playing for the oppressors; the price of your own commodification. Your body owned, your history altered by an uncaring hand. The reality is that this is old news. That the culmination of your history was never yours to begin with.
It was always out of our hands.
He wasn't my real Uncle - he was my tia Anna's baby daddy, the father of my cousin Christopher. He was a drug dealer, and a real son of a bitch, according to reports. But Anna loved him, and she always said he would have been a great father. Would have raised his son right.
The murder of Ruiz has been spoken of in my family since then. 28 years isn't so long, really. I know Anna still thinks of him, his name is still spoken at the occasional domino board.
Baldwin's Just Above My Head reads to me as a story of dismemberment - "to partition or divide up; to cut off the limbs." It is a colonial tool - the murder of our families, the dismemberment of our bodies and our communities. It is handed down from the colonialists of old, it is an ancient tradition. To take our children, our uncles, our cousins, our parents. Here, our brother.
"If there was any jiving done, the people jived you, my brother, because they didn't know that they were the song and the price of the song and the glory of the song: you sang."
The price of playing for the oppressors; the price of your own commodification. Your body owned, your history altered by an uncaring hand. The reality is that this is old news. That the culmination of your history was never yours to begin with.
It was always out of our hands.
That the culmination of your history was never yours to begin with. The tear, the break, the cut.
ReplyDeleteBut (perhaps). Repression and Amplification. The more-than. The excess in the totality. Not the hole, but the whole. What else can be heard in the interstices, what other (his)tory?