Black Requiem Impressions - Sharifa Stevens, Writer
We grieve daily the Black people murdered in this country; the constant scroll of hashtags; the desensitization to our murders caught on video and spread with macabre zeal, the way postcards of our lynched dead were casually sent through the U.S. Mail. This “Christian” nation relentlessly pursues the technology of Black terror. Blessed by the churches. Mandated by the states. Enforced by gangs with badges. Enslaved by private prisons. They try to erase us through history and through murder. Through being locked away through redlining or injustice. The bodies lay in the streets and we are told—in body, in spirit, in emotion—“move along.”
But we are still here.
We cannot move along. We are constantly being stabbed, then vilified for bleeding. We are struck, then chastised for crying out. The shape of our bodies, the volume of our voices, the expressions of our pain and especially our anger, are overseen and oppressed with an otherworldly cruelty.
Still, we sing our requiem. Through sighs and cries, through screens and streets. As we moan our grandma’s spirituals and our uncle’s blues. The requiem moves through our bodies to coat the trauma with the balms of our inheritance. To touch the parts of us left cracked and bleeding. To apply pressure.
America is the best gaslighter. It says pain is not pain when it happens to us; dying at the hand of another is no longer murder. White supremacy is an apparition, a disembodied myth, according to the national gaslighting agenda of the United States. And as America lies, we die—of broken hearts, of weathering. We are murdered by police officers who are commended, hired, promoted, and well-compensated for their viciousness. Rewarded. We are allegedly without value and yet…our bodies bring bounties, as always.
We were not meant to be capital. We live and move and have our being. We are reflections of the Most High. Our blood, the flesh of those alive and dead, cries out—WE MATTER. OUR BLACK LIVES MATTER.
We are still here. We can’t move along. Life and land is also our birthright. God-given.
Nothing can separate us from this truth, because it is from God. We are also from God. What do we scream, what do we cry, what do we say to these things? Can a murdering cop, a state that props up extrajudicial killing, American propaganda and national myths, “nice” white people who are cruelly apathetic, the evangelical industrial complex, corrupt politicians, racist judges, insurrectionist cultists, banal Christian influencers who stay quiet when our blood runs in the streets, sunken-place negroes, white adjacent non-Black people of color eager for white approval—separate us from the love of God? No. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Not even white Jesus.
So we cry out. We cry ugly. We cry angry. To hell with how it sounds to those who would rather we remain silent. WE SCREAM. The dead deserve our most potent lament. Our children, whom we cannot keep safe without the very hand of God, need us to cry out. Our children, growing up with digitized lynching as the norm—they CRY OUT. We are more than a hashtag. More than a soundbyte.
And while we are still here, we will sing our weathering our grief our rage our broken hopes and hopes to come. This is our Black Requiem.
Sharifa Stevens, Writer & Poet
