I AM NOT BLACK. I am Yoruba. I know that in this world, for many, to be Yoruba, is to come from the legends and the Afro fairytales, a sort of myth through which a narrative can be imagined, that it almost exist only in the museums and exotic books written by white anthropologists and art historians. But no, I am Yoruba and I am here, now.
I think it is important for me to state it clearly, at this point of my own history. Blackness isn’t an identity. Blackness is a construct that can only exist beside whiteness, blackness is an antithesis of whiteness, a juxtaposition, a gauge for its sense of self supremacy, the blackthing and it’s white double, so blackness must always centralize whiteness, both of which were invented in the USA in a particular point in history, a construct offered to the “thing” that can only be seen from the surface, i.e, the thing is black and black is the thing.
The thinghood of this black surface without a face, without a name nor prior memory, shall only be useful as a machine or a tool, for the delivery of the promise of an industrialized world, so it will matter less whether this black surfaced thing is defiled, violated or dehumanized, this thing shall only be treated as a black thing, which is the prerequisite for achieving the much nobler goals of capitalism. Now the thing fights back by owning the black as a consciousness. And yes, we all can only understand why so. It is an arrangement that empathize with, but I’m not a part of.
Again, I reason that being black isn’t an identity, it is in fact, the attempt to move from thinghood to humanhood that brought about the various technics of survival, a way to recover and rehabilitate the spirit, the mind and the body, through various methods which includes singing, dancing, music, poetry, fashion, food, graffiti, ways of being, ways of disappearing, ways of appearing, and so, a culture was formed by a people in pain, as a way to reclaim their humanity in the hands of a system that works only to dehumanize them.
Within the Yoruba conception of auto imagination however, whiteness is not only absent, it is entirely inexistent. And so, as I move about in the world, I’ve noticed a growing interest, both by so called white people and black people, to want to deliberately, include me within that construct, and never have I been vehemently resisting that category intentionally until now. Let’s say it bothered me less before, when I was based in France, but now that I am in the USA, I’m reconsidering.
For there is an attempt to make us all equal downwards. No. The Yoruba are sure ahead in their conception of a raceless world, where humans and their powers can be the center of progress, and not humans as capital. It’s time to up wake. Yoruba futurism is what I’m considering next.
Yoruba Futurism presents for the world, a way of looking at the future, aesthetic beauty, cosmology, philosophy and science through an alternative cultural lens. As an artistic aesthetic, it is a method of self imagination and healing. It intersect the sphere of imagination, technology and mysticism. As an artistic aesthetics it bridges literature, music, dance, visual art, design, artificial intelligence, gaming, architecture, film etc. It is the radical use of the imagination that is most significant, because it helps us imagine ourselves in the future, in our own names, in our own voice and in our own terms. Without being debased to a point of centralizing whiteness as the standard to contend with, whiteness, which is merely a construct.
*Onikeku is Director of Q Dance Company and promoter of
www.thespiritchildproject.com