The Afro-Arab Corner

Allow me to take you somewhere you have never been

[ohtatertats-deactivated20240804]

[mystuffsince22]

inshallah

[iambrillyant]

“allow the pieces to fall apart no matter how rough it feels, allow what doesn’t want to stick to crumble away beautifully, allow what has no desire to stay to find a home elsewhere, allow the energy of everything shifting from you to create space for everything that you need.”

— iambrillyant

[theafroarab]

💚

[perfeqt]

“The future depends on what we do in the present.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

[theafroarab]

👆🏽

[fyblackwomenart]

Moisés Júnior MJ

[theafroarab]

[poetry-siir]

In life, there are no winners or losers. It’s about the believers and non believers.

[theafroarab]

[theafroarab]

Black people of North Africa

“This painting is thought to be a portrait of Ira Aldridge who was one of the first black actors to play Shakespeare (just a quick aside here: Ira Aldridge was forced to leave the segregated US and go to Europe in the 1800s so that he could actually have a career).”

Source: http://yatesem1.msu.domains/dangers/introduction-to-othello/ 

The term “Moor” has been used to characterize the reign of Muslims in Spain, Europeans of African descent, and others for centuries.

In fact, this term is ascends from the Latin word “Maurus”, which was originally used to describe Berbers and other people from the ancient Roman province of Mauretania (today considered as part of the North African region). On the verge of the Renaissance period, both “Moor” and “blackamoor” were also used to describe any person with dark skin.

[theafroarab]

“Culture is not just a legacy inherited, it is also a vision that is accepted.”

- Mouloud Mammeri (Kabyle writer, anthropologist and linguist).

The meaning behind the colors are as follows:

Blue (amidad) represents the Mediterranean Sea, whose shores have been occupied by the Imazighen (plural form of “Amazigh” referring to the Berber people) for millenaries.

Green (azegzaw) represents the green land of North Africa, which has been cultivated by the Imazighen since the Prehistoric times.

Yellow (awragh) represents the Desert, primarily. However, we also like to describe it as the color of joy and gold.

Finally, the ⵣ (ezza) letter is situated at the center of the word Amazigh. The latter means "free man". WE ARE THE FREE PEOPLE. 

[quotespile]

“Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later… that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities

[theafroarab]

[theafroarab]

[theafroarab]

NEW ERA

From the 20th century, we have been indoctrinated and blinded to believe the form and carelessly neglect the content of our reality. The Utopian vision of post-independence Arab nationalist leaders negated audaciously the marginalization and impoverishment of black communities. We have been silenced and censored on our own misery. We have been reminded ceaselessly that we are nothing but second-class citizens. Our history, past, traditions and customs have been eradicated. We have been forced to internalize a present that does not belong to us. They manufactured it in various shapes and forms to orchestrate us. They made us live in a Freudian state of denial. 

Henceforth, we refute what have been preselected for us. Afro-Arab people accept what Afro-Arab people decide. 

[theafroarab]

I am a flow. I follow along. my life is fueled with flowy feelings.

[theafroarab]

Some people may say:

“Black and Arab are not mutually exclusive”

I would say: 

“Growing up as a Black-Arab, I never felt distinctly included”

[theafroarab]

If you don’t know where you are going, remember where you came from

OUM

[theafroarab]

https://www.jstor.org/stable/44947358

[theafroarab]

The 25th March was,  as usual,  commemorated as  the day  Britain officially abolished its Slave Trade in 1807. But how many recall that Arab slavers were the first, and last, in modern times to ship millions of Africans out of the continent as slaves? And that Arab slavers preferred more African women to men?

George Pavlu

[quotespile]

“Maybe memories are like karaoke — where you realize up on the stage, with all those lyrics scrawling across the screen’s bottom, and with everybody clapping at you, that you didn’t know even half the lyrics to your all-time favourite song. Only afterwards, when someone else is up on stage humiliating themselves amid the clapping and laughing, do you realize that what you liked most about your favourite song was precisely your ignorance of its full meaning — and you read more into it than maybe existed in the first place. I think it’s better to not know the lyrics to your life.”

— Douglas Coupland, The Gum Thief

[theafroarab]

Happiness can be synonym for ignorance

[theafroarab]

Who am I?

I was always expected to choose a sphere to fit in. I was taught and lured to fit in. I was confused but obliged to fit in. I learned how to fit in. I submitted to their sphere. The one that they have drafted and designed for themselves. As if humanity was presumed to fit in. I am who I am and I create my own sphere.