Water-Light

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be.
                      — Toni Morrison

Thought draws the imaginary of the past: a knowledge becoming.
                      — Édouard Glissant

The Mississippi River spans over two thousand miles. It is the second-longest river in North America.

A single drop of water takes ninety days to travel the length of the Mississippi River. Beginning as a trickle, the Mississippi River flows out of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota and empties into the Gulf of Mexico just below New Orleans. The Mississippi River drains thirty-two US-occupied states, and most of Turtle Island is within its watershed.

Nearly two million metric tons of nitrogen pollution are transported annually into the Gulf of Mexico via the Mississippi River. Nearly half of the lake acres studied in America are too contaminated for swimming, fishing, or other aquatic activities as a result.

I, too, am the Mississippi River and therefore polluted. I am a waterbody being

murdered.

In the beginning, waterways were the only roads.¹

How exactly does one murder a river?

The Upper Mississippi was inhabited by the Sioux, Sauk and Meskwaki, Ojibwa or Chippewa, Pottawatomie, Illini, Menominee, and Ho-chunk or Winnebago. The Lower Mississippi was home to the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Quapaw, Osage, Caddo, Natchez, and Tunica. The Anglophone word Mississippi comes from the Ojibwa words Mshi ziibi, meaning “Big River.”

Before the Mississippi, I was the Nzadi. The Portuguese misheard, and recorded Zaire. The Nzadi begins as the Chambeshi River in the highlands of northeastern Zambia, between Lakes Tanganyika and Nyasa, at a height of over fifteen hundred meters above sea level and at least five hundred miles from the Indian Ocean. At Banana, in the Kongo, it empties into the Atlantic Ocean, or Kalunga, after flowing in a massive circumferential arc to the northwest, west, and southwest. The Nzadi is the deepest river in the world. Scientists still have not reached the depths of the Nzadi. Within the Nzadi, are many creatures—:

Crocodiles, turtles, pythons, and basimbi.

As your guide, I searched for a word that would best hold you and the waters of this page. I needed a word that would invoke my kin.

Reader wouldn’t work. Then, a vision:

A roofless church deep in some primeval stretch of land I can only call a wilderness.² A horde of faceless elders and a blindfolded child, all donned in white, step out. The horde ushers the child deep into the clearing of the wilderness. The child is instructed, Go, and seek—and she is left.

I was the child. I was the seeker. I was the wilderness itself. I sought; I became.

Language, like wisdom, is a sensation which must be sought.

I will refer to you, kindred, as Seeker.

A literal translation of simbi (pl. basimbi) is impossible.³ The closest English translation would be “hand,” or “that which holds.” For example, Simba simbi might translate to “Hold up that which upholds you.” These invisible hands are known to inhabit lakes, rivers, gullies, steams, rocks, and and and. These bodies of land and water are portals of nature. Those portals are basimbi, or cymbee, depending on which land the Bantus in one’s blood were captive to.

Seeker, I am Third Coast Malungu of Mississippi Bantus. My bakulu were tired of living and scared of dying⁴ so they followed the Mississippi River northward where he bleeds into Lake Michigan.

Bleeds.

So much of migration is wound.

Seeker, forgive me. I do not wish to make a genocide of the page. Allow me to revise: Basimbi, the invisible hands of nature, often manifest as snakes. I am Third Coast Malungu of Mississippi Bantus. My bakulu followed the Mississippi River northward where he snakes his way into Lake Michigan.

Seeker, I am not using hyperbole when I say this: We are the Mississippi River. Unlike many myths, ours is simple: We bathed, and we became.

We are not so much a migration as we are a becoming.⁵

Yes. A becoming.

Stream becoming river becoming lake becoming sea becoming gulf becoming.

In the Lowcountry, basimbi were first recorded in the Spring of 1843 by a white researcher. He misheard the captive Africans and wrote simbi as cymbee. Cymbee were documented at the Woodboo, Wantoot, Pooshee, and Chelsea plantations in South Carolina.

Seeker, these plantations are now at the bottom of Lake Moultrie.

A water diviner tells me I have many water spirits. One of which has green, purple, and blue scales, and sharp teeth and nails, and lives in a lagoon. I tell the diviner I have seen her before when gazing into a mirror, something I could not do until my body’s water began to revise itself into a woman’s shape, my soul’s—or moyo’s—shape.

The diviner tells me I have twins that sit atop my head, both of whom are trans. Among Bantu cultures, twins—along with little people and albinos—are said to be reincarnations of basimbi.

In another poem, I refer to a beloved’s body as dark river, cobalt-black—mine. My words were possessive then, colonial, and American. What I meant was Love, you are the one road to my manifold desires. I meant You river and my path is made clear—:

Rock-smooth.

So much of water is want. So much of water is wealth. We owe the absence-presence of water to Maafa.

My water spirits write this poem with me. They are the bloodwaters pulling my wrist across the page. Within me, legions.

Not the demoniac, seeker—:

But cymbee.

I was baptized in Lake Michigan. The Mississippi flows into Lake Michigan. I was baptized in the Mississippi River.

Ma, can I ask you something?

What?

Have you ever had a miscarriage?

Yeah. . . it was awful.

When?

It was before __________ Terrible. Didn’t even know I was pregnant till I went to the hospital, and they said I lost a baby… well, two.

Two?

Yeah, twins. Why you ask that?

By now, seeker, I am certain you are asking, Why prose? Cymbee are said to fill the spaces they inhabit. Prose fills the page, usurps space. These words, too, are cymbee—:

My ink, black water, saturates the page. My cymbee everywhere.

In the Kongo, my bantu are forced to mine cobalt under threat of life and limb. One might say the laptop from which I type this poem is rich with cobalt. Is this what we mean when we say economy of language? How many Kongolese children died in the making of this poem? How many Kongolese women and children raped?

All water, Toni Morrison said, has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

I am made of many waters and therefore memory. In me, the Mississippi, the Chesapeake, and the Sea Islands. Before: the Nzadi, the Kwanza, the Niger, the Nile, and and and.

If water has a perfect memory, then I am forever a becoming, forever in reach of my Mississippi. Forever in reach of my Nzadi.

A Dibia Afa tells me I am Ọgbanje, a child-like water spirit in Igbo cosmology who repeatedly dies and returns to the mother of a given lineage. My mother never received prenatal care while pregnant with me. From conception to birth, I was her secret. I am unsure how, but I arrived at this realm healthy. According to the Dibia, I am ndi ji mmili wee me ife n’ine, or “among those who owe their liberation to The Water Spirit.”⁶ During Afa, I am told I also hail from a great line of Dibia among the Ohafia people in Abia State, Nigeria, and I am reincarnated from my great-grandfather’s mother, a priestess of Nne Mmiri – the water goddess with abundant healing powers. Auspiciously, I trace the mother of my great-grandfather to a woman named Effie Murray. Murray, her enslaver’s name, means “Mariner,” or “One who has made their settlement by the sea.” The Anglophone name isn’t an Anglophone name at all. Aurally, Effie Murray is Ife Mmiri. Ife Mmiri is Igbo for “Water-worshipper.” Another meaning is “Water-light.”

Seafaring Africans, like all victims of Maafa, took their gods with them. This is evidenced by the trafficked Bantus who first landed at Point Comfort—now Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia—in 1619, most of whom (if not all) were Mbundu.⁷ When these Bantus made port, some greeted and embraced each other as Malungu, which means “Shipmate,” or “One who has traversed Kalunga⁸ (the aqueous underworld of going-becoming-arriving) alongside me.”

In any event I was baptized in an indoor pool of water at Holy David Missionary Baptist Church. Since Chicago gets its water from Lake Michigan, it’s safe to say I was baptized there. After the advent of the Great Migration, most Black folks couldn’t access natural waterbodies up North. Outside practices—like Conjure—turned into inside practices. I’ve never known a Baptist church to be without a pool of water. During my baptism, when I was submerged, I saw a spider in the pool. I couldn’t have been more than seven years old.

When I arose from the water, seeker, I hollered. My mother assumed I was having a Baptist fit and ushered me off into the changing room where I was to remove the white robe sticking to my body. I told my mother about the spider, and she left to inform the clergy as I wiped my body from my body. She returned and told me a deacon drained the pool in search of the spider but found nothing.

Much later in this chamber I have called a life, I am told the spider is one of the various avatars of Agwu. An agbara of wisdom, divination, and medicine, Agwu is the sacred patron spirit to all Dibias and Ezenwanyis. Once, Agwu bested the Four Cosmic Houses in a quest for all-knowledge. As Agwu’s reward, The Creator instructed the Cosmic Houses to take Agwu apart and consume him.

First Eke, the primal house of fire, took a piece of Agwu and ate. Then Orie, the primal house of water, took a piece of Agwu and ate. Then Afor, the primal house of earth, took a piece of Agwu and ate. Finally, Nkwo, the primal house of air, took a piece of Agwu and ate.

Orie’s Agwu, or the Agwu of the waters, is called Agwu Mmiri.

Seeker: More than revelation, my baptism was initiation.

Approximately 8 percent of our bodies’ weight is comprised of our blood volume. Plasma makes up a little more than half of our blood, of which 90 percent is water.

The heart also holds water.

I am reminded of how the English language fails our bodies.

In Dinka, my first lover’s tongue, the words Yin nhiaar a puou mean “I love you with my heart.” In Kikongo, this would be Mu ntima mosi nikuzolanga, or “I love you with all my heart,” or “I love you with all the water that keeps me alive,” or “I love you with the waters that have made and unmade me.”

Wintertide. Thirty-four degrees on the South Side. My mother shifts tense between was and is. Her sac breaks. It is morning but her body is nocturne, a sloe dirge plopping red dots in the snow. She is spotting, speckling a blood-smeared trail on 117th Place and Michigan Ave. One could say, seeker, I was born a lingering abortion. My mother, moyo-sore and mpasi-riddled, never told anyone she was pregnant with me. No one ever suspected besides a woman who lives across the street. My mother is stopped by said neighbor, a gold-toothed savior as Black as Kala is. Gal, she says, get in the car so you can have that baby, and she drives my mother to Roseland Community Hospital. A hospital less than eight miles away from Lake Michigan. The woman was named Mozelle. The name Mozelle derives from the biblical Moses which means “drawn from the water.”

To live, as Black as we are, is a blues.

O, how the body holds data. Like-stanza, I trace the oblong blade of his shoulder down the jet black holding captive his wrist’s green ink. I name it Dark-road and shuck a song from the deep obsidian. I make my ink

with his body, the long lampblack line of it.

Like water, we move moonward—:

Beto kele bantu ya ngonda. Anyi. bü ndi. o.nwa.

We are those who are like-moon.

In a dream

at the dock, I blow his smoke, spit whiskey, call

the Mississippi Old man.

¹  I am paraphrasing Yayi Negarra Kudumu paraphrasing Yayi Myesha Pruette here. Note the ripple in the sentence before. I am participating in citational practice. Citation, too, is river, is abundance, is communal care and wealth.

²  The woods are not without water. More than fifty percent of a tree is water, but this is another poem.

³  I owe the impossible translation of simbi to Tata Kimbwandènde Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau. For more, see Simba Simbi: Hold Up That Which Holds You Up (Dorrance, 2007). I also wish to invoke Christina Sharpe’s inquiry from In the Wake (Duke, 2016), Chapter Four, “The Weather”: “What are the words and forms for the ways we must continue to think and imagine laterally, across a series of relations in the hold, in multiple Black everydays of the wake?”

⁴  See Paul Robeson’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” as performed in the film Show Boat (1936).

⁵  I am thinking alongside Édouard Glissant and Natalie Diaz regarding the language of becoming. See Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (Michigan, 1997). See the excerpt of Diaz’s poem “Duned” at https://poets.org/poem/excerpts-duned.

⁶  For more, see Leopards of the Magical Dawn: Science and the Cosmological Foundations of Igbo Culture (Self-published, 2014) by Nze Chukwukadibia E. Nwafor.

⁷  I owe the apprehension of this wisdom to Tata Ernesto Mercer. For more on the arrival of the “20 and odd Negroes” who arrived at Point Comfort, see Tim Hashaw’s The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown (Carroll & Graf, 2007).

⁸  Kalunga Ngombe being the Mbundu Lord of Death I posit Robert Johnson later syncretized with The Devil in his blues ballads.