Najee H.F.

There are ghosts living in my hands

There are ghosts that live in the hands of children who have labor in their lineages

There are ghosts that live in your hands

Hiding in your fingerprints

A whorl or a curve 

that can play the same notes the same way your great great grandmother played on her banjo/piano/harp 

pressed into your fingers like a vinyl record. 

Your breath the needle, 

your will the song, 

an ear worm all your mothers mothers hummed into you 

with the vibrations in the blood of their beating hearts.

Thump thump.

You are here because they were here. 

There is a list of names in my blood I can’t read. 

There is a list of names just under my tongue that I can’t speak. 

I long for the names of those hands

the hands that touched to make me before my grandmother’s mother hands knew how to touch.

Everything we do is guided by ghosts. 

I am Black. Blackness is globally complicated. I am proud, angry, honored, scared, elated, mournful, and joy-filled in moving through the world in this black body. It is both an imaginary and viscerally real state of being. I believe that we know who we are when we know where we come from. Being a black American descended from enslaved people there are gaps in this knowledge that take work to fill. It takes work to find yourself in a world that is structured to erase you. My work is split between pulling apart my blackness as it relates to whiteness and reaching to uncover what my blackness is outside of white hetero-patriarchal ideology. I do this work with my hands. Hands can caress or sting, build or destroy, weave and braid, clap for joy or wipe away tears. My hands are a site of memory that goes past my own time on this earth. The flesh and blood of my hands holds all the rage, care and resourcefulness of the people who’s lives touched and intertwined to form me.

My ancestors believed in ghosts; they developed technologies of protection that I am (re)discovering. There was a belief held in the sea islands among the Geechee Gullah people, that the color blue is a protection against evil spirits. Before the creation of synthetic pigments the color was derived from indigo plants my ancestors were forced to grow, harvest, and process to make the popular pigment that stained their fingers and palms a deep blue hue. This same labor is said to be the origin of a light blue hue, called haint blue, that can be found painted all over the porch ceilings and outdoor entryways of homes in the sea islands to this day, though the pigments are now artificial. These porches are a remnant of the belief that this practice of painting the point of entry of the home with blue was protection against spirits, or haints, who wished to do the family harm. The blue would be confused for the sky, where the spirit will not fly at the risk of being obliterated or water which the spirits cannot cross.

I believe in ghosts. It is a fact that the energy of a person or peoples and events can linger in the world of the living long after their physical manifestations have become dust. We, All of us are haunted every day by the ghosts of colonialism and white supremacist patriarchy. We are haunted by the spirit of chattel slavery and the displacement of bodies from sovereignty in their native lands. These are malevolent spirits, that hide in plain site as learned prejudices that drain our energies and keep us separate from each other as humans.

With my hands, my wits and my memories, the tools of my ancestors, I’m attempting to expose, capture, identify, exorcise and protect myself from the spirits that would do me harm in order to heal, make space and welcome in the benevolent spirits of my ancestors.