Reading Zake: The Sacred Never Runs Out

–MUSIC– This is a really long youtube video of David Murray/Black Saint Quartet performing live in Berlin, but the energy shared between the musicians makes it well worth watching.

“There’s no music I hear without sensing you.”

This line is written in a letter Zake addresses to and in memory of her father–later to be used/edited for inclusion in Gloria Wade-Gayles anthology Father Songs. The quote made a circle in my mind that brought me to my first post rewriting Fanon, in which I talked about how laying claim to history and looking to the past as a way of informing one’s future is an important healing practice. This quote brings forth that feeling as truth. It brings forward the feeling that music is an art form capable of being inhabited (by soul/reality/existence/being/life) for healing. & to listen to music//really//listen to the music/ is to open oneself up to the voices & presence of the sacred.

Father Songs, ed. Gloria Wade-Gayles

“I wish for a book that brings Black women and Black men together in a dialogue on Black fatherhood, a dialogue that comes not from sociological studies and statistics, but rather from memory… I was taught early in life, that a book has the power to confirm and reaffirm truths we already know…it is a given that our sons and our daughters need a book on our fathers written by Black women and Black men who dig deeper into the soil of memory, and truth.” –Gloria Wade-Gayles, Father Songs xii

“Mi novio, Elmo, who’s a Black Puerto Rican bluesman from Chicago (I thought you’d like that!), anyway he’s promised to help me lay handmade glazed bricks in a typical Zocalo formation to let everyone know wherever you are is hallowed ground. That you are yr own tradition & yr space is a place for spirits & people to gather when they’re in need of solace. Though Victor Cruz & Alejandro cda blessed the place with poems in tongues & some leftover pine spring water we found by the Russian River years ago. The sacred never runs out, Daddy, only the profane is short-lived.” –Ntozake Shange, Dear Daddy, Father Songs 241-242

To be yr own tradition is to be both ancestor, passing down precious ritual & belief, as well as descendent, inheriting said tradition. It is to also be that tradition//to embody it. To be yr own tradition changes the entire nature of looking to the past to heal/cherishing memory/finding solace in history. The movement is different–as in there’s a shift from seeking healing spaces outside of oneself to recognizing the place of solace that’s within. It’s a movement toward yourself.

In the same way energy can neither be created or destroyed, so too does the sacred that Shange speaks about at her letter’s end exist. The character and soul of her father lives on. In the same way that he cared for the 1968 protesters–as Shange notes in the letter–Zake cares for the spirits and people in need of solace. Adorning her father’s supposed grave site as a means of welcoming the afflicted to a place of comfort and healing–a sacred ground–is exemplary of the care she has for them and is, further, an example of the way “the sacred never runs out.” This line is especially important to me, because it reaffirms my interrogation of inter-generational communication as a means of passing down traditions of healing & survival. The line suggests the character/the holiness/the soul that is her father could & will never die. So spirits and persons alike are welcome to take part of his tradition//because it never runs out.