Becoming Water: Black Memory in Slavery’s Afterlives – Makshya Tolbert

As our physical and cultural landscapes transform around us, what memories remain held by water? What histories of pain and destruction, what hallowed moments are carried in its currents, taken into its body like shards of glass, and resurface to haunt us, to guide us? In this narrated essay from our archive, writer and poet Makshya Tolbert wades into the liminal, haunted space that exists between water and Black memory. As she navigates Black lineages of thinking and practice, she comes to the meeting place of past and present, life and death, slavery and freedom, and embarks on her own return to water.

Read the essay online on our website: emergencemagazine.org

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