YeKengalé

The Greek word Pathos, etymological root of several commonly used English words with variant meanings, focuses its essence in human experience. The things we suffer (experience, allow) shape our inner emotionscape and stamp us with unique identity. It gives a language to the soul, distinct from our intellectual profile. Our heads and hearts may share the same body but are two different universes, two different creatures, two people, each with its own distinctive voice, language, convictions, perspectives. methods, approaches, ways of knowing, and responding to life. Our passions (pathos) and our intellect (logic, logos), it will be fair to say, often profoundly disagree on very basic things like:

• What is happening ?
• What to make of it?
• How serious is it?
• What to do about it ?

Most human beings are absolutely schizoid and only express coherence of being by working out some protocol of truce which gives one partner consultant status and the other executive power. In exploring mentalities that have allowed for Black Survival, and examining them in the light of common strategies for human development, I find it necessary to focus on the one skill or state most essential to African Unity, or unity of any kind: the state of empathy – that which enjoins one soul experientially with another in a common bond of existence, informed each by the individuality of the other, but neither threatened nor provoked by it.

Empathy is the mother’s milk of the human soul, nurturing it, and without which, the soul dries up and withers into something sub-human. The feeling/experience of abandonment is the quintessential cause of all pathological behavior. Antipathy and apathy are evidences of a malfunction of human spirit – negative responses to trauma, and this is the value and logic in the principle of cultivating gratitude for and in the face of all human experience (being thankful in all things): it keeps the soul thriving and expanding, whereas the bitterness of unprocessed traumatic experience sucks the soul by absorbing all energy into insular focus and self-defense.

Consider two distinct (actual not conjectural) responses to deeply felt personal trauma and their varied outcomes:

Trauma: As a result of a nasty divorce, Child A and B both recognize that the roof of their source of natural affection has been ripped off by a whirlwind of turbulence in an apparently unfixable and explosive marriage-gone-wrong.

Response: Child A turns to alcohol, drug addiction and porn as compensation. Child B turns to animal-rearing and gets her necessary oxytosin and dopamine spikes from pet/human exchanges of affection.

Result: Child A spirals downward as an adult in profligate living while child B becomes an energetic, highly motivated and successful farmer.

Trauma: Two single and celibate Christian women experience house break, robbery and rape.

Response: Woman A is profoundly terrorized and emotionally devastated. Woman B, at the point of the rape, managed to calm her mind to rationalize and reduce the situation to its factual components.

• I am about to be raped.
• I might be killed.
• I am physically powerless and physical strategies are unlikely to prevail.
• My best bet of both staying alive and minimizing physical harm is to convince both my assailant and myself that I enjoy the experience and by cooperating, defuse hostility.

Which she did.

Result: Woman A, permanently victimized by her own narrative interpretation of her experienced trauma, reinforced exponentially by the revictimization of social gossip, social taboo and stand-offishness, shame, guilt, permanent fear and profound insecurity and resultant almost perfect social isolation; never subsequently enjoys her life, her sexuality, or relationships with men. Woman B is able to candidly discuss the event with family and strangers alike and encourage and coach women both in better prevention, coping and winning strategies for navigating domestic abuse and violence against women. Her functioning, productivity and ability to pursue her goals remained basically unscathed.

The common thread I find in most successful survival strategies (becuase there are strategies which help us survive but not continue to grow – holding stategies, you barely maintain) is that ingredient that connects us to an inner reservoir of nascent self-affirming worth that settles Bob Marley’s haunting question: Could you be loved? with a resounding ‘Yes!’ In spite of what I have experienced and suffered, my internal christometer or love-mi-meter (as I prefer to call it) is registering high and in the positive. I know I am still loved. Cared for. Needed. Cherished. Recognized and Affirmed in worth, beauty and intelligence. There’s a reason Bob’s Black Survival starts off with the argument “How can you be sitting there telling me that you care” and wrestling with the feeling of abandonment that comes with private (unshared) suffering. Settling the question of Who cares for us? is foundational to settling the resultant questions of Who will we care for? and Will we care at all for anybody?

The current nihilism gnawing at the root of the Americas (meaning the Caribbean, Latin America or South and Central America, as well as the USA and to a lesser extent Canada) manifest in common social pathologies and the highest crime rates anywhere on the planet are all connected to the open gaping wounds resulting from what the UN has now deemed, in an almost unaminous resolution, the most horrendous high crime against humanity ever perpetuated in human history – The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the charged racial antipathies generated through the ignominous process.

These antipathies have buttressed themselves in defensive strategies designed to reinforce their otherwise totally injustifiable hostilities and normalize and perpetuate inhumanity. The goal of Africa Month is not just to present counternarratives on history and race but also to offer therapies that speak to the woundedness of souls (Black and white) trapped in fear, self doubt, or chronic guilt, shame, grief in all its forms (self pity, depression, self-harm and self-sabotage, manifestations of slow suicide syndrome as well as sociopathy, narcissism, disillusionment and delusion. Help us get to clear as we, Africa, tell our own story and sing our own song, and make it a love-story, a love-song restoring our grace and power to pre-trauma levels and beyond.

This is what religion and education are rightly for. However when both are but tentacles of the bloodsucking system designed and used to steal our thunder and redirect our energies to building the dreams of others, that’s a problem indeed. And that problem must be fixed. It will take time and process; and budgeting one month (or two) a year is a start.

The Best Healing and Therapeutic Strategy I recommend this Africa month and beyond, is to see an African/African descendent/Indigene in whatever predicament or posture, of whatever persuasion or passion, regardless of social position or political party, but especially those of us catching the worst hell from the system, on the margins, close to the edge and in danger of dropping out of the race all together; muster the grace and magnamity to extend a big and meaningful hug and put out your best emotionally expressive effort in communicating, regardless of their immediate acknowledgement or appreciation or lack of it, that understanding that answers those basic questions of life; shared empathy. Extend in Jesus’ Name, or Allah, or thru Jah Rastafari, or Yemaya, or in the Name of all our venerated ancestors, whatever your soul language, or just from your own righteous heart: a fitting expression of an

• I see you.
• I care.
• You matter.
• I know who you are;
• I know where you belong.
• You belong with me.

Ubuntu!