A Manifesto of Love: To Continued Journeys, New Beginnings, and Everything in Between by Ruth Rodney & Kojo Damptey

This chapter culminates several smaller conversations and ruminations between the two of us about how our visioning of decolonial futures can be realized. We offer these reflections with love, humility, gratitude, and a frankness about the realities of doing this work as Black people and people of African descent.

Initially, when we began speaking about decolonial futures, we thought about them as more than ‘just a dream’. In this sense, we were thinking about describing decolonial futures in a way that is actualized and goes beyond simply a thought. However, in thinking about it further, we realized that we are unapologetically dreamers– not in the sense that we are living in an unrealistic fantasy, but rather that we believe in a vision of reality that is firmly rooted in our own abilities and that of our communities to continue the pursuit of justice. In essence, “what we cannot imagine cannot come into being” (hooks, 2000. p. 14). Here hooks (2000) is referring to a definition of love that she recognizes would benefit from a shared understanding of what love does. The doing is actioned through honest expressions of “care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust” which are chosen by those who choose to love (hooks, 2000. p. 14). We have come to realize that decolonial futures will occur because the ways in which we are choosing to live individually and collectively as Black communities in Hamilton (and beyond) are actions and expressions of love that allow decolonial and anticolonial legacies to persist into the contemporary period.

We emphasize it is a conscious choice to embrace this way of being because it is not easy, nor do honest expressions of love always replenish one’s energy within the North American system. Rather, the choice to act in love often demands one to experience discomfort – but that discomfort is needed to envision and create possibilities for safer spaces to live and nourish our most authentic selves. We believe this nourishment is essential in a world that continuously attempts to strip us as African/Diasporic/Black people of our humanity. This is particularly integral given that most of our efforts to transform our current realities occur during challenging social, political, and/or economic times, which Kelley (2022) reminds us has been the consistent experience of past generations of Black communities.

Through our shared advocacy together as well as in our own fields of work, we continue to see how the current social, health, and political systems and structures will maintain the ‘status quo’ by relying in part on our communities’ tiredness and/or fed-up-ed-ness with a system that finds various ways to re-establish its colonial tentacles. However, we believe that if we continue to live, create families, and build communities on these Indigenous lands, then we must continue to be in better relation with each other through learning our own histories, writing and telling our own stories, and remaining or becoming more connected (for those who are not engaged with larger pursuits in your communities) to our communities as a means of maintaining our sanity, building strength in numbers, and operating from a shared principle of profound love for our community.

Continued Journeys: Preserving, Sharing, Learning

At the end of Nothing Personal, James Baldwin (1964) concludes his perspectives on living in America by stating:

…And I learned this through descending, as it were, into the eyes of my father and my mother. I wondered, when I was little, how they bore it-for I knew that they had much to bear. It had not yet occurred to me that I also would have much to bear; but they knew it, and the unimaginable rigors of their journey helped them to prepare me for mine. This is why one must say Yes to life and embrace it wherever it is found-and it is found in terrible places; nevertheless, If there it is; and the father can say, Yes. Lord. the child can learn that most difficult of words, Amen.

For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.

The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other; the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us, and the light goes out. (p. 60)

While Baldwin speaks about his mother and father here as the ones who knew the difficult path he would have to traverse as a Black man in America, we use Baldwin’s words as a metaphor to not only reflect on the immediate learning from our own mothers’ and fathers’ wisdom and journeys but also to consider the historical texts, speeches, and music as an extension of this parentage – one that connects us beyond the borders, generations, and languages to wrap us in the village concept of raising children. This village provides us with the tools to understand the systems in which we were born, and we consider it our responsibility and privilege to contribute to this very village by documenting the period in which we are currently living – providing tips and lessons from our own successes and failures. What we are saying is that for every time we might feel alone in our experiences with little to no understanding in our immediate circles about why or how we chose to do what we do, or when perhaps we find ourselves to be the only one or one of few, these resources can and will provide lifelines that breathe life back into our tired minds and bodies.

However, we are currently living in a time when there has been a shift in how information is consumed. There has never been a time in history where the production of knowledge has moved with such speed and this shift seems to have contributed to a growing apathy for reading. What tends to receive greater traction are small bits of information or soundbites that can be listened to or read in a social media post. While we recognize the importance of utilizing these various mediums to reach differing and larger audiences and galvanize community support in the pursuit of shared interests, the importance of sustaining our own curiosities and self-learning should not be diluted by wanting to receive ‘the bottom line’ with immediacy. Our lives and histories are too complex, too rich, and too varied to be reduced to miniscule fragments. If the world continues to move too fast, we should always be questioning: what is being missed or erased? The speed in which life and information is trending has not resulted in less destruction of our environments, nor, arguably, less inequity in our systems, nor less ignorance, cruelty, and intolerance for that which is different – rather, it has exacerbated these issues and made a more concerted effort to make obsolete any record of who we are and what we stand for at this time.

Therefore, it is important to continue sharing resources, to make them as accessible as possible, and to preserve them through keeping alive the practice of building our own physical libraries and archives along with the digital platforms that are available. The meeting places for refuge and recharging are often in our own personal homes, these are also the spaces for our own children, nieces, nephews, and their friends. If we enter each other’s homes, we must be able to borrow a book or resource, and/or learn about an artist that perhaps we did not know about. There is something almost ethereal about holding a text in your hands that was written decades ago, to read the words, and to allow your senses to feel and smell the pages that not only hold the content written, but also transmit the energy of the writers who were able to document their insights in a written form. We (Africa’s people) are everywhere if we only take the time to look and appreciate the value of our works. I, (Ruth), remember being in the main office of Red Thread, a feminist women’s organization in Georgetown, Guyana, and finding second edition copies of two children’s books authored by Walter Rodney: Kofi Baadu Out of Africa and Lakshmi Out of India. Knowing that Kojo would value these texts, I brought copies home for him to have and store in his personal library. While this may seem like a small or insignificant act, our attention in various spaces offer us opportunities to continue sharing knowledges with each other. Each of these texts, editions that cannot be found online, are important stories that are also intergenerational in nature enabling us to teach the next generations. As García-Peña (2022) indicates, “all official history is no more than partial truths, pieces of stories told as remembered by those who had the right to do so” (p. 90). Knowing more enables us to transcend temporality and builds our armour and resolve in our own knowledges.

Online platforms also have an important role to play in terms of making information freely accessible to our communities. One such website that provides an important example of collective responsibility and shared ownership is The Hamilton Black History Council’s database for local Black History (https://www.hbhc.ca/database). This website is also a living project in the sense that any community member can submit information to contribute to this database. This is a critically important feature that acknowledges the expertise that exists within our community and disrupts the notion about who has knowledge and who can teach. Rather, it is an open invitation for us to define what we deem as important – writing our own history so that we are aware of the contributions that our community members made to Hamilton. However, we have also learned (not in relation to this database) that the strategy to advertise online platforms is crucial – if not more important – to the usefulness of the site in meeting the objectives of gathering more information and disseminating content. The communication strategy has to be flexible and tailored to different audiences to maximize its impact and reach, recognizing that our communities are dynamic and always in flux.

We also want to emphasize the importance of owning our own websites and being aware of the platforms in which our information is housed to ensure that it is always accessible as new technologies emerge rendering previous versions or platforms outdated. By engaging in digital platforms, we must ensure that we are not participating, albeit unintentionally, to the disowning or erasure of our own information. What comes to mind here is an interview by Jamaican reggae artist, Buju Banton, where he speaks about how the changing mediums to house music now means that he must pay a membership fee to access his own music. If he does not pay that fee, he cannot access his artwork. He compares this to earlier forms of vinyl records or compact discs (CDs) that he could physically hold and know that he owned, and that did not require ongoing payment for access. However, many of the current music platforms are profit driven even if it means separating the creator from their artistry. Therefore, continuing to develop free and accessible digital content pushes back against a capitalist system that benefits from us as consumers but is not necessarily concerned with our enlightenment or well-being.

New Beginnings: Evaluate your Movement, Create Space

We have often mused that the Black community in Hamilton can be loosely organized into two overarching groups when addressing systemic oppression and inequities experienced in the city: namely the Martin Luthur King Jr. camp and the Malcolm X camp (with community members also falling somewhere on an invisible continuum between the two). We don’t believe that this make-up is necessarily unique to Hamilton because the naming alone refers to two important civil rights leaders in the United States of America. However, the reference to these two historical figures speaks to the differing, yet connected, approaches to the liberation of Black communities that tends to play out in various geographical locations and time periods – from our vantage point as Black people and residents of Hamilton, we consider the city to be one such area.

Given the similarities in challenges and tensions that continue to arise for each generation, we think it is a useful exercise to provide our reflections on how these differing schools of thought have impacted our community organizing locally. Our intention here is not to oversimplify the complexities and convergences of these two historical figures, but rather to provide a reference point that can foreground the tensions we have experienced – ones that we believe will continue to occur in various capacities. With our discussion here, we hope to minimize the possibilities of future divisions and strengthen the resolve of burgeoning movements locally.

On one hand, we have the Martin camp. This group of community members hold firm in their approaches of addressing systemic and structural racism and oppression through constant dialogue and engagement with systems – pursuing greater accountability with a tremendous amount of patience and resolve. In essence, they align with King’s approach of pushing for systemic reform through collaborations and partnerships within systems, including those that historically (and in this present) moment tend to be problematic towards Black communities. The lines of communication always remain hopeful and open, often attempting to appeal to the moral conscience of leaders despite the slow and inconsistent forward movement. When reform is demanded or there are periods of heightened community anger and emotion, the protests are measured and are organized to raise awareness or bring attention to an issue – but not necessarily to disrupt.

On the other hand, we have the Malcolm camp. This group of community members are quite comfortable with challenging the system and directly calling out the duplicitous decisions and actions of systems within the city. While they will engage with discussions to advance the well-being of Black community members – and by extension other Hamiltonians based on the discriminations they are addressing – they have little patience for participating in conversations where the intentions of those very systems are unclear. Like Malcolm, their approaches advocate and action a way forward that centers a self-reliant and/or abolitionist-alternative approach. They are less concerned with maintaining the current structure and are open and willing to create a new system(s) that better reflects a vision of a more equitable city. Given this starting point, the goal of actions or protests are to disrupt ‘business as usual’ particularly when previous efforts to engage in meetings or discussions occur simultaneously to repeated experiences of marginalization and discrimination within the city.

While these two groups often work together successfully to advance less contentious issues within the city (i.e. Black history month events, celebrating achievements, supporting each other’s organizational activities for the most part) tensions tend to arise when a strong collective community voice might mean taking a stance in uncertain times. What tends to inform the decisions around the collective voice is the determination of risk. Here members who represent organizations that have mandates or governance structures that include boards or are interconnected with systems by virtue of the community members they serve must consider what impact it might have on future work given the fickleness of the system. Some can or choose to withstand more risk than others (which tends to be those in the Malcolm camp) given their positions of power, privilege, proximity to the system, or just sheer courage. Determining how best to move forward during these times has meant the need to have many discussions, hearing each other out, and most importantly being upfront and honest about the motivations that are informing the positions being taken. Often, we end up reaching a reasonable consensus that most are comfortable with, but in the process have not consistently acted in ways that express “care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust” towards one another (hooks, 2000, p. 14). This can impact the coming together of the group for future actions – especially if past grievances are not directly addressed with a genuine agreement to move on. Most importantly and should be of great concern is that we have contributed to the ‘tearing down’ of our own community members who are fighting within the same systems that we are working to change. This is where we believe that we can and should do better in terms of actioning these expressions of love.

As Edwards (2018) indicated, when there are more than three of us in a space, the system is there in the minds, ears, and eyes of people. We cannot be naive to assume that we are all on the same journey or at the same point of our own decolonization. As Lorde (1984) has indicated in her reflections on Paulo Freire’s work in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the hardest part of decolonization – or in her words, revolutionary change – is looking for that piece of the oppressor within each of us (p. 118). This is important because without doing this self-reflection, we do the systems bidding of turning the microscope on each other, playing into the tropes of some community members as ‘the good Black people’ who are easier to work with as a way to dismiss those community members who will challenge and resist as a few that are simply disgruntled. The system has always found ways to infiltrate Black movements, and we view this as one way that they do so in Hamilton. Instead, we should be using our community collectives as spaces in which we can become more firmly rooted in the anticolonial anchorage needed to constantly withstand engagements with a colonial system (Dei & Lordan, 2016). It is in these spaces Dei and Lordan (2016) have alluded that we can transform our “subjectivities, creating ourselves from history, culture, and Indigeneity” (p. VIII).

Here we would like to offer three points that we believe are important to this anticolonial anchorage – these of course are not exhaustive, but ones that stand out at this moment reflecting on our work to date within the city. First, the number of Black-led organizations, associations, and cultural or community groups has grown exponentially. This reflects the heterogeneity within our community as well as the leadership, knowledge, and commitment to creating spaces that meet the varying and layered needs of Black Hamiltonians. These organizations, that join other longstanding cultural organizations and associations (and we should also not forget individual actors) provide access to history, culture, and Indigeneity for Black Hamiltonians (Dei & Lordan, 2016). However, given the surge in differing populations of Black people now in Hamilton compared to decades before, we must continuously evaluate our community tables to see who is not there. As (García-Peña, 2022) has stated, we must look for the spaces of the ‘unbelongers’ and if one does not exist, then we must create it. This is critically important for an anticolonial grounding and the interconnectedness of our liberation.

Secondly, we have learned that every space may not last forever. Movements, spaces, and people may come together for a particular period to achieve a certain outcome or goal and may change into another form or come to an end – this is okay, because time is fluid; and as mentioned above, as life changes, community needs also shift. In addition, the reality is that despite our best efforts, not everyone can work together – this is also okay. Sometimes, the pressure to contend with colonial systems places unrealistic expectations about consensus building that is not always achievable. Rather than classify these disbandments as failures, what we can do is learn from these periods where we did come together, ensuring that we treat each other with care through these transitions.

Thirdly, everyone cannot show up in the same way in our collective spaces and we have to manage our own expectations about how people contribute to our movements. We think what is important here is the intention behind how people show up – if this intention is genuine then people will give the best of what they can when they can. Here we draw on the words of Walter Rodney when he reflected on his role as a Black historian at the 1968 congress of Black writers by stating, “…one must not set up any false distinctions between reflection and action. We are just another facet of the ongoing revolution. This is not theory. It is a fact that Black people everywhere, in Africa and in the Western world are already on the march. Nobody who wants to be relevant to that situation can afford to withdraw and decide that he is engaging in what is essentially an intellectual exercise” (Austin, 2018, p. 128). The most important aspect is to keep showing up.

Everything In Between: Experiencing Exhaustion, Celebrate the Wins

The spirit of Black communities has always been one of strength; however, our ability to excel in some of the most challenging situations does not necessarily reflect the heaviness of the work that we do. Certainly, there has been growing acknowledgement about centring Black joy and rest (see Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggets, Kleaver Cruz, and others for further reading) even though our joy has been that ancestral thread passed down in the rhythms, sounds, laughter, smiles, and light in each other’s eyes. There have been many times over the years where we have shared food together, created spaces and moments to vent, consoled each other through life’s inevitable and unpredictable challenges or to just ‘be’. We have created friendships. We have created family bonds. We have learned from one another. There is a way that we can catch each other’s eye from across a room and say so much without saying anything at all! Ha! We LOVE us! This is the invaluable and priceless treasure of being in community.

However, there are also those times between the laughter, the in between spaces, where the weight of the work can feel like a boulder. As García-Peña (2022) stated, “we are a very tired bunch. Our exhaustion is ancestral” (p. 46) because history is always present, and we carry with us the awareness that there is no other alternative but to keep going to achieve decolonial futures. There have been times when we have needed to turn to each other to process our exhaustion. There have been other times where we have needed time alone to breathe, to decompress, and to acknowledge with gratitude the opportunity to do so. There are also those times when we have had to step back and let others carry a bit more while we recuperate and then return. We have realized that each of us must decide what sacrifices we can make for this work. For us, our willingness to sacrifice comes from the awareness of our interdependency (hooks, 2000). Additionally, our choices also reverberate in ways that we can term ‘sacrifices by association’ by our partners and children when our evenings, weekends, and spare moments are consumed with community organizing and work that most often are alongside our day-to-day employment. This can occur even despite our best efforts to ensure that we are including our children in our community organizing so they begin to understand the importance of collective solidarity and resistance from an early age. In essence, experiencing exhaustion and fatigue is not a feeling that we should view as a sign of weakness or one that we should hide. Rather, it is an inevitable outcome of challenging systems and creating alternative realities. The doing of love during these times is to be each other’s aunties and uncles through acts of care that insist we rest and centre joy (García-Peña, 2022; hooks, 2000). Therefore, it is important that we name it, acknowledge the ways that it can impact us and those around us – particularly those closest to us – and then work towards identifying steps to address it.

Given the longevity of our movements in spaces of struggle and difficulty, it is important that we take time to celebrate our achievements, no matter how small. Our spirit to always look and move forward can impact our ability to be present and acknowledge how far we have come. This is not something that we ourselves have mastered but are working towards and raise it here as an ongoing area of focus. Taking time to celebrate our wins provides opportunity for reflection, a moment of pause, and a space to evaluate what worked. It also invites others into a space of optimism and certainty that our work can and does produce change in ways that are meaningful and impactful – no matter the number of setbacks or roadblocks that we may face. This, we believe, is also important to continue nurturing our ongoing growth.

Well Wishes for You on Your Journeys

The language of ‘conclusion’ does not seem fitting for this point in the chapter or the end of this book. Rather, we leave it open for further reflections and insights that will continue to arise. We wish all who will engage with this book much love, inner peace, and continued energy with the endeavours and pursuits that you are engaged in. Take the best care of yourselves and each other.

Kojo and Ruth

References 

Baldwin, J., & Avedon, R. (1964). Nothing personal. C. J. Bucher.

Edwards, H. (2018). Moving Against the System New Directions for the Black Struggle in David Austin’s Moving against the system : the 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the making of global consciousness. Between the Lines. Toronto, Canada. (pp.197-202).

García Peña, L. (2022). Community as rebellion : a syllabus for surviving academia as a woman of color. Haymarket Books.

hooks, bell. (2000). ALL ABOUT LOVE: NEW VISIONS. Harper Perennial. New York, New York.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2022). Freedom dreams: the Black radical imagination (Twentieth anniversary edition.). Beacon Press. Boston

Lordan, M., & Dei, G. J. S. (George J. S. (Eds.). (2016). Anti-colonial theory and decolonial praxis. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. New York, New York.

Lorde, A. G. (1984). Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. Trumansburg, NY. (pp.110-119)

Rodney, W. (2018). African History in the Service of the Black Liberation in David Austin’s Moving against the system: the 1968 Congress of Black Writers and the making of global consciousness. Between the Lines. Toronto, Canada. (pp.127-142).