A Charge Against Amnesia: A Poetic Meditation on the Wound, the Witness, and the Way

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
—William Faulkner

“The white man’s happiness cannot be purchased by the black man’s misery.”
—Frederick Douglass

There is a land where history was buried alive.

They told us:

Forget.
It’s over.
That was long ago.

But bones remember.
Soil swells with stories it can’t digest.
Cotton still hums with the hymns of hands
stripped of lineage, land, and language—
tethered to the ghost of a name that never belonged.

We are walking over graves,
some marked by marble,
others by silence—
America, a nation built atop a mass grave
with memory chained like a felon.

They buried Black bodies.
Then they buried the truth.
Then they buried the act of remembering.

They manufactured myths & mildewed minds.

O say, can you see—
a country that lies to itself
with the brilliance of a branding iron?

We were never meant to know.
Not the genocide of the Yamasee,
Not that Wall Street once auctioned men,
Not that Virginia’s 1705 Slave Codes made flesh capital.
Not that Ida B. Wells warned us,

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”

But the textbooks told us Rosa was just tired.
Not that she was trained.
Not that Malcolm bled truth on the altar of transformation.
Not that Reagan’s War on Drugs was just another plantation
with syringes and laws instead of lashes and chains.

This is the recycling of chains in modern tongues.

History doesn’t repeat.
It evolves.
A new dialect of domination each decade.

The Alien Enemies Act, 1798—used now in 2025.
The internment of Japanese Americans
reborn as deportations of Venezuelan boys
called “enemies” for surviving their own empire’s ruin.

Each law a ghost.
Each policy a pharaoh,
commanding the deaths of firstborn hopes
from the margins of society.

They say, “We don’t do that anymore,”
even while they do it—
with cleaner fonts and bipartisan pens.

Their amnesia is not innocence.

White children recite founding fathers,
never founding crimes.
Not the whipping posts.
Not the Trail of Tears.
Not the 1921 bombs over Greenwood.

What is whiteness,
if not a curated forgetting?
A myth so fragile
it must erase its mother—Europe—
and paint itself new on stolen soil
with stories of nobility carved from blood.

“They will write history with the pen of the conqueror,”
my grandfather said.
“But the truth will survive in the bones” of sacred texts and silenced prophets.

Even the gospel was defanged:
Love thy neighbor—
but only if they look like Caesar.
Render unto Caesar—
but never question whose face was stamped
on the coin that bought Judas’ betrayal.

They burned the Gnostic gospels.
They rewrote Paul.
They used Christ like a club
but forgot His whip at the temple.

What of Nat Turner,
who read the same Bible
and found thunder in its pages?

What of the Orishas,
the gods of our ancestors,
buried beneath crucifixes and shame?

We were told to pray,
but not to remember.

The earth is rising.
The bones are speaking.
The myths are cracking like clay pots in fire.

We are not post-racial.
We are pre-reckoning.

There is no justice without memory.
There is no peace without apology.
There is no healing without truth-telling.
There is no freedom without radical self-examination.

This is your inheritance:

Blood in the mortar of every courthouse.

Dust of ancestors in every courtroom broom.

Shadows of children stolen by the school-to-prison pipeline,
still screaming inside solitary confinement.

So Now—What Will You Do?

Will you live as if history is a distant echo?
Or as if it’s the drumbeat under your every breath?

Will you forget,
or will you forgive—but not unsee?

Will you inherit the myths,
or demand the truth?

Will you be a citizen of amnesia—
or a warrior of memory?

Will you dare to ask—

Who benefits from your forgetting?

What has your silence bought?

What would your ancestors call you
if they saw you now?

Will you remember—
not just what was done to you,
but what you must now do?

"To remember is to resist."
To resist is to awaken.
To awaken is to become dangerous—
to every lie, every chain, every system
that fears your memory.

So choose—

The dream that demands sleep,
or
The truth that demands fire.

"Man know thyself—and thou shalt know the gods and the universe."
—Kemetian Inscription at Luxor, before it was defaced.

“The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
—Toni Morrison

“You may not be responsible for the wound. But you are now responsible for the healing.”
—James Baldwin

And So It Begins.