Journalistic Poetry.
Mark - Aether Element
Light years ahead, you look back on how it started
And remember your childhood self
Your school had no rule of thumb
For a brown kid with a Nigerian dad and a Fresian mum
Standing out as an anomaly
Made you want to know yourself properly
So you made every school project about black history
Expanding your view to include Martin Luther King and Haile Selassie
You remember finding it crazy how most stories began with slavery
Or savages in the bush
And you needed to really dig deep
To learn of the Fulani Empire, Mansa Musa, or the Kingdom of Kush
You tell me how it felt to get angry when your blackness was referred to negatively
A racing heart, constricted access to air
Crackling electricity signaling the collective side-eye
Of generations no longer there
You say deep down you knew it didn’t matter
But matter transfers energy
And energy knows no boundaries
And I imagine a cosmic interconnectivity
And collective memory binding us all together
Like the phenomenon called the aether
Spread across time, gathered in space
an element science believes in but cannot trace
It’s said to permeate the cosmos, an in-between sort of place
Filling the distance between planets and the distance between cells
Conjuring the illusion of individual selves
And I imagine how knowledge of self brought you face to face
With the skin deep delusion of more than one race
Gifting you the superpower of vision beyond surface irrelevance
And a direct channel to sacred intelligence
You tell me you fell in love with words
How they formed stories that opened your mind
You loved how they transformed sounds into rhyme
One deliberate verse at a time
You tell me you were looking for answers to specific questions
And then hip hop came along with a lyrical education
And you admired storytellers like Kendrick Lamar and Jay Z
Saying, ‘they were depicting life in a way that school couldn’t teach me’
You mention how it’s weird that the school system’s hierarchy
Puts money-making above original thought and creativity
When the greatest change-makers were speculators
For what is science if not knowledge gained from experimentation
By ways of the imagination, ideas shape reality
And speaking the word is the beginning of creation
It reminds me of your ability to freestyle rap
A whirling formation of meaning and metaphors that match
Expanding from your gut, a word universe from scratch
Glittering grammar shoots from your chest like stars
Dreadlocks orbiting your mind like a spacecraft
Your teeth tear through words, slice into syllables
Letters dissolve into particles that spread
Over an eager crowd of bopping heads
You tell me you like to make use of informal slang
And I imagine a local ignition of energy evolving into a big bang
Like modern language creates an interconnected web universally understood
In the beginning, there was the word and the word was good
“It reminds me of your ability to freestyle rap
A whirling formation of meaning and metaphors that match
Expanding from your gut, a word universe from scratch
Glittering grammar shoots from your chest like stars
Dreadlocks orbiting your mind like a spacecraft”
I ask you about being in between blackness and whiteness
You say sometimes its a trip to look in the mirror and see a ‘black’ likeness
You say that doesn’t begin to describe how you feel
It was the first sign that race couldn’t be real
You tell me your track ‘Halfbloedje’ helped you heal
From the violence of being called half black and half white
You felt it diminished the fullness of your humanity
And that just didn’t sit right
Now you have the space to keep it humble
Knowing that it’s less half and more double
You say some slights come through subtle
With underhanded compliments like, ‘Your Dutch is so good’
You say the slap comes with the assumption that this is not your neighbourhood
And you question the definition of Dutchness
Highlighting that much of it is imported culture from colonial travels
The more you try to pin it down, the more the thread unravels
So Dutchness including only whiteness cannot stand its ground
And you say it’s similar with being brown
And begin to break it down
Saying the common experience of having been capitalistically colonised
Doesn’t mean the various cultures connected to one skin tone can be homogenised
And while you support black consciousness saying
We own what we are
You think defining it as a race takes it too far
It gives the fabrication of the racial construct credibility
And I think about how belief shapes identity
We can choose
And just like the aether fills up the in-between
With waves that are felt but not seen
The 5th element is not detectable like the other four
And I notice your silhouette starkly black on the floor
As a bright slant of sun streams in white through the door
And I’m struck by the agency of those in-between
To embody either, or and neither, nor
You tell me your Igbo name is Onuoha
The Igbo being one of the primary tribes of Nigeria
I look it up and it translates to ‘Mouthpiece of the people’
And I think about which ‘people’ that claims
When I ask you what unites different ‘races’ you say – pride and shame
And it opens my mind to how pride in one thing excludes another
And how shame comes from standing out as ‘other’
It makes me think of the human ego and its function to define
Mediating between the conscious and unconscious mind
A labeling agent naming what is me and what is you
Essential software that the cave-human used
But as the universe’s most evolved, sophisticated technology
I think of how we form one human body
A global network of encoded mindsets
Separate manifestations but all still, one internet
Like the aether - an intangible medium interconnecting space
It is nowhere and all over the place
It stitches together our reality like glue
It is me, it is you and the space between us too
In South Africa, we call it Ubuntu
I am me because you are you
I am me because you are you
I am me because you are true to you
I am true me you because are
Because because
Me cause you
You cause me too
Notice, the crumpled question mark between your brows as order shifts
Now notice the option of being a witness
To the human reaction to difference
You share with me how it’s important to observe patterns
How people may not outwardly hate
But may be running survival software that discriminates
Its what the ego does out of primal habit
But it also dictates our innate talents
We can choose
We are the data, the servers, the algorithms
Beyond afro- we are human futurisms
A collective overthrowing of systems that keep us asleep
Pinch the crowded air between your forefinger and thumb until it clicks
You are awake
Concentrate
Con-zen-trate
To collectively transform and see
That how we relate creates the shape
Of who we could be
Hessel Du Mark is an independent rapper and performer based at the Treehouse Community and is of Nigerian and Fresian ethnicity
“The 5th element is not detectable like the other four
And I notice your silhouette starkly black on the floor
As a bright slant of sun streams in white through the door
And I’m struck by the agency of those in-between
To embody either, or and neither, nor”
Xx
