Well-Read Black Girl by Glory Edim

Author:Glory Edim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

Long ago, in the time before now, black people were all kings and queens.

This is not true.

* * *

—

There is a strange emptiness to life without myths.

I am African American—by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just…stops. As if there was nothing there.

I could do what others have done and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian,” most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore.

These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.

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