Liberator 4.5
Remarks from a Refugee Turned Maroon.
words: Jeri Hilt
 

I am forever changed by the events of late August 2005. I sit typing these remarks from a desk located in Great Britain. I am originally from Louisiana with the majority of my family members having previously been New Orleans residents. Despite my family’s loss of most of their homes and possessions in the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, I am currently enrolled in an African Studies graduate program in the United Kingdom. On Monday, Aug. 28, I watched the news announcements from Washington, DC. When I learned that the levee had been breeched in the lower Ninth Ward I knew instantly that there were hundreds who didn’t leave, who were now trapped.

My familiarity with the region meant that images of devastation for me preceded the news broadcast of New Orleans’ poor blacks. I was not surprised to see their faces. I had seen them before, they raised me, fed me, took me to church, and played hopscotch and double-dutch with me in summers past. The starved, roving people being displayed fishbowl-like in the midst of their despair were my family, friends and community members. The lower Ninth Ward is an area almost entirely black and is also the location of all the homes of my family members from the city. Fearing the worst, I waited for a call. I learned that almost everyone had gotten out except for three who were still unaccounted for.

Most of my family traveled to a small town less than two hours north of the city to stay with relatives and friends. Despite the blessing of most of my family having escaped the city, I was not comforted. Each community elder and child that played ball in the street of our neighborhood was on my mind. Every hour I had a new detailed vision of the horrors that the largest population of the poorest African descended people in America would be vulnerable and possibly subjected to, as they lay trapped in Louisiana.

These feelings came before the delayed response of food and water, before the government’s mistakes, decisions, or indecision. This feeling came from deep within, a river overflowing with the hard bought lessons of nearly six generations in Louisiana. I knew, we all knew--the black population affected by the hurricane--that we were on our own. Although there was nothing in the historical context of being black in the American South to provide a legitimate belief in our government, the atrocities allowed to occur were no less inhumane and inexcusable.

The first time I heard the term refugee I remember thinking immediately of those who had fled the Sudan to bordering countries, and refugees who had fled the genocide in Rwanda. I even thought about the Haitians who had been devastated by hurricanes the previous year but were unable to flee due to their locale on an island. While Rwanda experienced genocide and Sudan might be still, the effects of Hurricane Katrina on many from New Orleans has been eerily similar.

The government of the United States responded to the crisis in New Orleans as if it were a “tribal war” between rival groups. Whites were airlifted out of the city similarly to the manner in which the Belgians flew out their citizens (and other Europeans) leaving the Rwandans to negotiate their own civil war. Military with heavy machinery arrived before safety was established or provisions of food and water were made. Though the usage of the term refugee was inappropriate politically, I found it fitting. Any other term (like evacuee) did not reflect the reality of the lived experience, and, to be fair, the term U.S. citizen has never been entirely accurate for blacks in America. As my worst fears were materializing and the outcome became continually more grim, the emotional and psychological turmoil that ensued was captured only in music.

The desperation articulated by the young black men and women of the American south to the background of the newest reinvention of age-old African rhythms -- known in the youth vernacular as beats or tracks -- became my only place of solace. I allowed my inexpressible thoughts to pulsate with the heartbeat of what has come to be known commercially as Hip-Hop music. Songs like “Soul Survivor” by Akon, a Senegalese rapper, provided backdrop to images of Massai war dances and the spirit of victory and survival that African people have clung to for ages. At the point in which I moved beyond my anger (if such a thing is possible), muddied water receded to lay bare some new certainties. The first was my absolute rejection of the American identity. Reflecting on W.E.B. Dubois’ internal conflict of identity that he describes as “a twoness, wrestling in one dark body,” I affirmed for myself that there is no longer a “double consciousness” of black and American. The latter drowned slowly along with the thousands of blacks left to die on rooftops and bridges. The only survivor is black me. Further more, as a refugee now living in a different country, I chose to identify myself with no nation-state rather but as a maroon.

Maroon is a term used to represent those African-descended peoples who successfully established free communities within the slave states. Like the Maroons I feel that we must make the preservation of our collective identity and cultural continuity the paramount goals. As we continue to live within nations, which demonstrate time and time again that African lives are not as important to them, let us value our own lives above the comfort and complacency of ignoring the pain of others. This requires the recognition of the social and political realities of our circumstance.

Hence, the current conflicts and issues plaguing the continent must remain of grave concern to each group of diasporic Africans wherever they may find themselves. Africa’s welfare and stability must be seen as worthy of, not only our attention, but also our resources as external representatives. Conversely, there would be not greater demonstration of a Pan-African consciousness than for African nations to open their borders as a gesture to those children of the continent now deemed refugees--or self elected in the maroon tradition.

But we won’t be surprised if they aren’t.