“How lonely sits the city was full of people! How like a window has she become, she who was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces has become a slave.” (Lamentations 1:1).
People of African descent have been shaped by a continuous and unending existential crisis. Constantly and since the 1619 transatlantic slave trade, our ancestors have been burdened with teaching generations of children how to lament. In other words, people of African descent are taught to lament for the sake of survival. Lamentation then is the people of African descent’s purge and prophetic rhetoric; a rhetoric of the oppressed. It is a creative resistance language shaped as a defense against oppressors and their oppression. Because this is true, pathologically “black folk” have had this rhetoric imposed upon us. This imposition has birthed and bequeathed a peculiar soul. Lamentation rhetoric is expressed peculiarly and commonly by and through the soul of black folks.
Tragically, white mythology reinforces a dominating lust of supremacy, that terrible condition which needs a trope in order to survive inconvenient truth. We define this trope in this way: When white supremacists’ mythology fails to deliver on building its mythological walls, impulsively it blames the oppressed. This misguided trope is the lifeline and fairy dust that sustain white mythology. These provide space for white mythology to be employed in this way: Each time white mythology fails, sooner than later, its proponents place its failure’s blame upon an unwanted and unnecessary presence of people of African descent and colors rather than acknowledge their own gullibility and blind trust in the untrue and false white mythology. This mythology is fueled by pale lusts and paler promises that hegemonic homogeneity remains possible in a world of colors. What is more, wherever there is white mythology, there exists rhetorical and physical violence.
“Jerusalem [has] sinned grievously, [and] therefore [;] she became filthy; all who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans and turns faces away” (Lamentations 1:8).
Ashen is the age of Trump, and people of African descent in particular must decide whether the soulless nation can be saved. We must decide, is it our duty to teach our oppressors rhetoric of lamentation? Thus far, and alone, the Black Lives Matter movement has taken on this unsavory moral assignment of implementing an organized protest march and resistance campaign against an untenable, deliberate, and calculated dehumanization process at variance with black humanity. However, an effort to save black humanity differs from saving the nation’s humanity – which means historically white culture, its mores and traditions that protect, sustain and provide advancement and advantages for white humanity. In contrast with the Black Lives Matter movement, establishment blacks (this includes church folk) have not made a definitive statement about where they stand. It appears that establishment blacks continue to believe that people of African descent in America can be a part of “the establishment.”
This belief continues in spite of overwhelming and aforementioned irrefutable evidence that points decisively toward an entirely different conclusion. This need to belong gravely points near stubborn cowardice and the lack of true self-identity, which is nothing less than double-consciousness. “…This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of the world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his [and her] two-ness … two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
“All her people groan as they search for bread; they trade their treasures for food to revive their strength. Look, O Lord, and see, for I am despised” (Lamentations 1:11).
Hope in the land, if there is hope, must come from the soul of black folk. It is this hope that belongs solely to a disavowed people; a people who have survived through rhetoric of lamentation. Once more, we turn to the prophetic Du Bois. He saw a melting hope-candle with dimming light. “After the Egyptian and the Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro [people of African descent] is a sort of a seventh son [and daughter], born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world … He [and she] would not bleach his Negro [people of African descent’s] soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world.”
Du Bois’ claim that [the] “Negro’s blood has a message for the world” further claims that people of African descent are assigned at the very least a significant role in redeeming the world. That is, the oppressed and the oppressor’s future vastly depends upon the willingness of people of African descent to take the forefront in providing atonement and redemption – and yes – human salvation: Of course this does not mean that we are the Savior but that “the Word became flesh and dwells among us” (John 1:14). In short, the salvific future squarely has been placed in the hands of the oppressed – those who survive by, with, and through lamentation rhetoric.
“Remember my affliction and my wanderings, the wormwood and the gall! My soul continually remembers it and is bowed within me. But I call to mind, and therefore I have hope” (Lamentations 3:19-20).
Rhetoric of lamentation is not only a critique of the oppressor’s behavior that has caused the oppressed pain but indeed it is a critique of the ways of the oppressed that have experienced and survived its pain. The oppressed must not forget its pain – its painful past; its painful present, and more than likely its painful future. The soul of the oppressed (the soul of black folk; the soul of people of African descent and of colors) must remember that lamentation rhetoric provides space for purging unpleasantries that are caused by commission and omission. It is shameful to listen to religious speech spoken and written – in prose or poetry – that sings in denial of the soul of black folk’s human struggle. That struggle is a story of pain and how people of African descent continue to survive through lamentation speech. The story is that of survival – a story of liberation!
Lamentation rhetoric then is an expression that belongs to the democratic – for all who will employ it. Lamentation is not to whine but to purge. Lamentation is not defeatist rhetoric; it is not fatalism rhetoric. Defeatism and fatalism are located in contemporary commercialized religion that is possessed and consumed by white mythology. We know this because it avoids lamentation speech. It focuses on false claims similar to that of the oppressor. We see what it has done to all who believe it: black and white marginalized; and the black and white establishments.
The future belongs to truth, and those who are truthful, and those are possessed by the truth. The future belongs to the faithful and to those who possess a truer self-identity. The future belongs to those who are courageous; those willing to speak truth against power and truth against those who acquiesce to defeatism and fatalism. Lamentation rhetoric reminds us that oppression culture must constantly undergo the severest critique imaginable. The oppressed must critically remember all that can be remembered, however painful those memories may be. Failure to do so is a failure to survive the stormy blast. The newest year may be a turning point and we who are sons and daughters of lament, must be employers of lamentation rhetoric. We must be brave and honestly courageous to see what the New Year brings.
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