Happy Birthday to Me: Reflections on Sankofa

I have always loved to write. In the 5th grade, I won third place in a poetry slam for my poem “Colors Mixed In”. I climbed up to the navy blue stage of my school cafeteria as my name was announced, the entire middle school looking up at me as I stood a mighty four feet tall. In what is now classic Asile fashion, I recited a self-authored poem that was a profound critique of race and unity using the colors of the rainbow as a metaphor. I have always been infatuated with wanting to see Black people win, even though at the age of 10 I was probably also thinking about my extensive knowledge of Crayola colors (I kept the 128-pack with the sharpener on deck)! Ahead of my performance, I even made the executive decision to match the theme of my poem. I requested cornrows with rainbow beads to match the occasion. Again, classic Asile behavior. 

As I publish The Sankofa Series on my birthday, I can’t help but feel proud of myself. 3rd-place poetry slam-winner Asile – in her cornrows and rainbow beads – was so fierce, so courageous, and so passionate. 10-year-old Asile would be so proud to know that I am continuing to do what I love after all of this time, and I am still courageous in my passions. If you have arrived at this site, I am so grateful for your time, energy, and interest in what I have to share.

A little about me: I am a facilitator, strategist, organizer, beyhive member, wine enthusiast, and recovering member of elite academia and the nonprofit sector. I am from Atlanta — I was blessed to experience Black representation, teachers, mentors, and guides as the foundation of my childhood. I moved away from home at 14 years old to attend boarding school in New Hampshire, which was my first experience being around a white majority. From there, I (barely) matriculated through college, then moved back home to Atlanta to pursue social justice and liberation work. 

 I have always loved studying Black history. Initially, I understood Sankofa as the practice of looking back on the histories of Black people to recognize how this history affects us in the present day — my African American Studies degree has solidified this practice. I love recalling organizing movements like the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, the Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work movements of the Great Depression, and the Black feminist manifesto authored by the Combahee River Collective, just a few of the canned rants that I love to share with anyone who cares to listen. I think of Harriet Tubman, bell hooks, Baynard Rustin, Septima Clark, and countless others who displayed radical imagination of a better world and courage in organizing on behalf of that vision. I think of my mother, her mother, and her mother, as I live through experiences that they prayed about for me. I am inspired by their imagination when I feel hopeless or discouraged. I look forward to The Sankofa Series becoming a dedicated space where I share some of my favorite insights from the digs that I am reading, learning, and reflecting on. 

Beyond my love for Black history, I am realizing as my life progresses that I have had some miraculous experiences! God really showed out crafting the twists and turns of my childhood, exposing me to worlds that I never could have imagined while I watched The Cheetah Girls as an eight-year-old in my bunk bed in my family’s Vine City apartment. I have reflected a lot about the culture shock of experiencing predominately white spaces for the first time, and how that impacted my Black ATLien perspective growing up. I think about my journey from Atlanta to New Hampshire, to New York, to Paris, and all of the life-changing journeys in between. I think about the possibilities that young Asile couldn’t have imagined –  the love that I’ve experienced, the lessons I’ve learned, the friendships that have given me strength and tenderness. I think about the trauma that I didn’t have language for yet and hold my younger self tenderly as I retrieve and reflect on those formative memories. 

This brings me to intention number two of this series because my understanding of Sankofa has grown through this journey. This blog is space for me to practice healing in real-time, to make space for Asile in my past, my present, and my future. Sankofa includes a personal journey of digging into my own life, deeply sitting with the previous versions of Asile who was doing the best with what she had. Sankofa feels like looking back with forgiveness, reconciliation, and courage on my history thus far, to move forward better, more compassionate, and forever evolving. The trauma that comes with surviving within white supremacy manifests through ensuring that we are all physically, mentally, and emotionally time-consumed, so there is barely any space for reflection, dreaming, and joy as a part of our practices. Of course, this is by design — capitalism expects us all to be machines, leaving no wiggle room for anything other than productivity. I have felt the pressures of being overly consumed by capitalism in multiple areas of my life. I am tired of feeling rushed and exhausted by imaginary standards that white supremacy has bestowed upon me.

One of my favorite quotes from Toni Morrison reads: ”The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing”.  Through this blog, I am reclaiming my human necessity to reflect on my past and dream of my future, and I am reclaiming my time from being distracted by having to prove myself in white-dominant spaces. This blog is also a space for me to celebrate the wins and lessons that have made me the woman that I am proud of today, and to expand the possibilities of what is possible when I take time to pause and reflect. Through this blog, I can just exist. 

Liberation to me feels like space, like the ability to slow down, think, self-determine, and have the capacity, resources, and community to speak life into our dreams. Writing this blog from the “I” perspective is relatively new for me as a liberation tool. As a practitioner in the social justice and racial equity spaces, I think that it is safer for me to detach from my personal experience and rely on my brilliance and intellect when doing this work, not even realizing that I’m dissociating myself from the history that I’m learning. It is a new and exciting perspective for me to understand Black history as a personal legacy that I am navigating in real time. Not just as a legacy of excellence, but a legacy of Black humanity, elders, and ancestors grappling with their own communal matrix of wonderings, thoughts, and feelings within white supremacy — just as I am in the present. I think of generations before me that have been formative in who I am. What legacies of love, pain, trauma, sacrifice, joy, and life lessons have been poured into me? What experiences, past and present, have shaped who I am as a person? My values? My beliefs? My capacity for love and liberation in this life and the next?

The Sankofa Series is a space to recall the strength of all that have come before me and speak courageously on my learnings and wonderings in real-time. I will be sharing blog posts monthly as an example of what it looks like to learn in public along my journey. I will invite you all to reflect with me as well. Each blog post will have reflection questions for you to ponder upon in your own way. This can be via journaling, recording yourself speaking, or being in community with others to unpack your thoughts. I highly encourage this option, as I will not be partaking in this reflection alone. I enlist and am abundantly grateful for my righteous ancestors, my elders, the Black liberation and Black feminist thinkers that have come before me, as well as my friends and family. I lean on their experiences and guidance through the form of close reading and conversation, as you will see in my blog posts. Ultimately, I am a student of this work and I invite curiosity into this learning journey.

A couple of affirmations as I step into my power within this space:

• I release all academic expectations and judgments of perfection from this space. I am not writing for a grade, I am not writing for an award, and I am not writing for approval. I am writing for me, and those that find curiosity and representation within my writing.
• I release all expectations of the white supremacist gaze on my lived experience. My experience is valid and my voice is enough.
• I am learning as I go and am brave in my approach to learning in public. I invite learning and curiosity into this work.
• My worth is not defined by an algorithm. I am enough — in my past, in my present, and in my future.
• I speak life, love, and possibility into myself and the readers of this blog through my writing.

Happy birthday to me!