To understand us, you must know that the North American African is a postapocalyptic being: we are, each of us, born in a certain year, be it 1619 or 1916, or this new year, and in a certain place, but the origin story of our dispossession precedes us all, and it is because of this other birth that we must reconstruct ourselves in the time we have here in the stories that we tell about who we are and wish to be.
Ayodele Nzinga, the 70-year-old spoken-word poet we call WordSlanger, the activist, playwright, PhD, preserver of stories, She Who Remembers; she, the first and current poet laureate of Oakland, California, has a story that begins in mystery: she has two birth certificates, Nzinga reveals, one from State Line, Mississippi, the other from Chicago, Illinois, and neither she nor anybody else that is alive is entirely sure which is right. Maybe they both are, for just as the rural South and urban North are only interchangeable coordinates in the flight of Black folk out of one frying pan and into another fire, Nzinga’s beginnings and who she’s become form their own continuum.
Yes, she does remember the standard childhood fare: Christmas pageants where she first discovered theater, classrooms where she happened upon Edgar Allan Poe and learned to love literature—but She Who Remembers will tell you that she and her people situated beyond the Eurocentric pale cannot be so neatly spoken of. She was an African griot long before she was Oakland’s anointed wordsmith.
“I do a lot of shit,” Nzinga declares, “and it’s always the same shit.” Put another
