As a high school student I fell in love with the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Every year, in February, I got an annual visit from Harlem Renaissance poetry during Black history month. One year it stuck with me so deeply that it drove me to my high school library which I had not frequented previously, I must say. If there was an internet then, I did not yet know how to access it. So, I began to copy down, by hand, the poetry of Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay and others. Poetry that I found, no doubt, by searching in the card catalogue.
Afterward First:
because wouldn’t it be nice to benefit from hindsight in the beginningHow is this musing encouraging me to grow? It is creating a reality where I get to ask: Why is it so easy to be led by the parts of me that are ready to expand?
But the Harlem Renaissance is only one of many renaissances. A renaissance is characterized by a revival of or renewed interest in something. As you may well know by now I am a proponent of a Queer Renaissance, not the revival or renewal of Queer meaning LGBTQIA identity but of spiritual practice. Spiritual practice that I feel is uniquely prevalent in those who transcend binaries and limited categorizations. (I have an older post about that.) There are also the following:
the little known Gay & Lesbian Renaissance (called a Queer Renaissance by some) in the late 1900s;
the Harlem Renaissance of the early 1900s centered in Harlem New York;
the American Renaissance (aka New England Renaissance and American Romanticism) of the mid 1800s;
the Renaissance in Italy and England moving from the Middle ages (aka Dark Ages) to Modernity in roughly the 1500s to 1600s;
And since the so-called west ignores 3/4 of the worlds history (aka the roots of life, science and culture on this planet) that’s about all I know, being that I am educated mostly in “western” contexts.
To me renaissance and Queer are somewhat synonymous because whatever is emerging on the edges of culture, the edges of society, that gets named renaissance often originated with the LGBTQ/artist/spiritually peculiar community to begin with - the queers. In MY experience, eventhough I delineated them with slashes they are one and the same community. They have a resonance that reaches beyond the norms, thebinaries, the mores and conventions of their time-space.
Sankofa is a word that comes to me/us from Ghana. ^1 The proverb that I associate with it is says, "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten." When I think about renaissance I remember that there is nothing truly and inherently new. Everything is an iteration of what has come before. The form may change; the function may change but creation may only repeat. Multiply.
^1 Akan Twi and Fante languages of Ghana that translates to "retrieve" (literally "go back and get"; san - to return; ko - to go; fa - to fetch, to seek and take) and also refers to the Bono Adinkra symbol represented either with a stylized heart shape or by a bird with its head turned backwards while its feet face forward carrying a precious egg in its mouth. Sankofa is often associated with the proverb, “Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," or “Sankofa w’onkyir” which translates as: "It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."
