Redemption Song

You don't erase a people by burning their books. Just silence their elders and teach the smoke like gospel.

Truth that remembers its source does not beg for volume. Redemption Song was Marley’s psalm of resistance—an acoustic transmission for the colonized, the censored, the spiritually severed.

When Marley asked, “How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?”, he wasn’t searching for sympathy. He was indicting systems. Naming what the archive refuses to say out loud: that colonial powers didn’t just enslave bodies—they executed prophets. They burned the libraries carried in tongues. They outlawed the keepers of creation. The griots, the priestesses, the herbalists, the water diviners, the ones who knew the timing of storms by the sway of trees—all labeled witch, savage, pagan, threat.

This is historical record wrapped in breath.
Political memory scored in melody.

Marley’s lyrics enter the tradition of spiritual resistance that includes Queen Nanny of the Maroons, who used coded songs to lead her people to freedom. It includes Fannie Lou Hamer, who said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.” It includes poets like Lucille Clifton, who wrote, “won’t you celebrate with me / what i have shaped into / a kind of life?” All of them carried language that didn’t just name pain—it preserved a pulse.

Colonialism didn’t just break backs. It ruptured frequency.
It disrupted the line of spiritual succession. And in its place, it installed pulpits and protocols, borders and broadcast licenses, turning divine instruction into legal liability.

Bob Marley was not spared. He was surveilled. He was almost assassinated. He died with cancer in his toe, but the infection was in the air around him. The systems that later sold his face on T-shirts once tried to silence the very messages now played in yoga studios and beachfront cafés. This is what theorist Christina Sharpe calls “the afterlife of property”—where even the dead can be commodified, where the rebel can be sold as aesthetic once his truth becomes inconvenient.

But Marley’s voice refused conversion.

In Redemption Song, he did not chant down Babylon with a full band. He stripped everything away. One voice. One guitar. A return to the unaccompanied call—ancestral in function, instructional in purpose.

To sing is to remember.
To sing while exiled is to refuse the terms of forgetting.

And that’s what prophets do.
They don’t predict.
They remind.

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Our first songs tuned the body to the land. They taught us when to move, how to plant, where to pray.

Before captivity, before borders, before paper and pulpit, there were tones—held in breath, passed through bone, anchored in ceremony. Our ancestors did not sing to be heard. They sang to remember. To name the stars. To calm the storms. To teach the babies how to enter the world and teach the dying how to leave it. Song was creation before it was category.

Across the continent and throughout the diaspora, sound functioned as a coded archive. The Yoruba etched proverbs into skin. The Igbo named their children like poems. The Akan used talking drums to send messages across miles without ever touching ink. In the Americas, Indigenous nations turned every river bend into melody, mapping terrain through echo and rhythm. This was data. Doctrine. Direction.

Marley stood inside a tradition of sound as strategy—where melody wasn’t style, but instruction.

When he sang “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery,” he didn’t cite the system. He confronted it. He was channeling Marcus Garvey, yes—but also the elders who knew how to encode instruction into breath. Marley didn’t just sing. He invoked. He remembered through vibration what had been redacted in print.

Audre Lorde once wrote, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Our ancestors knew this long before English translation. That’s why they didn’t wait for permission. They tuned their mouths to the pitch of land and blood and wind and bone. They passed down worlds without paper, without podium. This was curriculum. Sound as method. Song as map.

Even under surveillance, even in chains, the singing didn’t stop. It shapeshifted.

The Negro spiritual wasn’t a song of submission. It was encrypted cartography. Wade in the Water meant, move now. Swing Low meant, hold steady. The plantation heard praise. The people heard escape.

This is the lineage Marley stood inside when he picked up that guitar and stripped away the noise. In Redemption Song, he returns to the unaccompanied voice—the one before production, before policy, before performance.

This is sound, returned to its original function.

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The system is fluent in appropriation. It knows how to turn resistance into retail, prophets into playlists, and liberation into lifestyle branding.

There was a time when the messages inside Redemption Song got people watched, fired, exiled, killed. Now they play softly in boutique hotel lobbies while candles flicker and eucalyptus burns. The industry that once feared Marley now sells him in box sets. The same powers that silenced his teachers, demonized his symbols, and raided his people’s homes now license his face for fragrance, headphones, and festivals.
It’s cultural laundering in real time—cleansing the message while selling the messenger.

Marley sang of mental emancipation.
The market responded with merchandising.

The clarity in his voice—once forged in survival and resistance—has been diluted into mood. Aestheticized. Neutralized. What once carried ancestral instruction is now sliced into twenty-second samples, drained of consequence, and sold as ambient culture.

You don’t have to silence the prophets if you can sell them first.

Scholar bell hooks warned us: “The commodification of difference promotes paradigms of consumption where desire is focused on the Other, but only so long as the Other can be commodified.” That’s why dreadlocks are policed in school, but praised on runways. That’s why African spirituality is feared when it’s practiced in ritual, but adored when it’s staged for content. That’s why prophetic Blackness is safe only once it’s been archived, packaged, and stripped of the fire that made it “dangerous.”

And still—some things refuse translation.

He wasn’t performing style—he was preserving signal. And even stripped down to one guitar, Redemption Song still refuses dilution. The tremble. The breath. The conviction behind each string. It resists commodification not because it is immune to consumption, but because it lives in a different register.

You can sample the sound, but you can’t sell the source.
You can remix the rhythm, but you can’t own the root.

Redemption, in its truest form, will never be marketable. It is too unruly. Too divine. Too ancestral. Too alive.

As philosopher Fred Moten writes, this is “the resistance of the object.” Even when commodified, some truths retain their refusal. They leak. They disturb. They disobey the terms of the transaction.

That’s the paradox we sit inside now:
The song plays everywhere—yet so few are listening.

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Some songs never fade. They shape the air until someone with ears to hear breathes them back to life.
A tuning fork for memory. A call to right relation.

To hear Marley now is to recognize the song didn’t age—it aged us.
It found us in moments when we were still uncertain, still searching, still silent—and offered us not answers, but agency.

Because the work of redemption was never finished. It was always ours to continue.

The line “None but ourselves can free our minds” is the assignment.

Ancestral instruction doesn’t rest in melody. It moves through embodiment. Through the daily disciplines of remembrance: what we eat, how we speak, how we gather, what we rebuild. It reminds us that our inheritance is not just endurance—it’s design. Our task is not just to awaken—but to act.

Scholar and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter reminds us that, “What it means to be human is no longer self-evident.” In a world of dislocation, automation, and curated disconnection, Marley’s voice becomes a spiritual benchmark—a return to the real. A reminder that freedom is not conceptual. It’s relational. Embodied. Rooted in how we see one another, how we carry the wisdom of those who walked before, and how we plant it forward.

This is the work now.
To build a future from the wisdom kept alive beneath the ash.

Because Redemption Song continues every time we use our voice with intention. Every time we protect the story of where we come from. Every time we teach the children to recognize a song not just by melody, but by meaning.

It is one thing to hear the song.
It is another to live it.

And still—Marley asks us:
Won’t you help to sing… these songs of freedom?”

What he left behind is a living map—etched in melody, encoded in song. A quiet instruction. A portal we are still learning how to walk through.

The song is not over.
It’s waiting for your answer.

One love, ESS xo

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References

• Redemption Song – Full Lyrics

• Lucille Clifton – “won’t you celebrate with me”

• Fannie Lou Hamer – SNCC Digital Archive

• Christina Sharpe – In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

• Sylvia Wynter – “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?”

• Fred Moten – The Undercommons (Open PDF)

• bell hooks – “Eating the Other” (PDF)

• Audre Lorde – “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (PDF)

• Talking Drums – Encyclopædia Britannica

Where Are You Landing?

History didn’t teach us how to move.
We moved, and they started writing.
There is no such thing as arrival when you come from origin.
The land means nothing without the ones who move it with intention.

The earliest forms of knowledge weren’t written—they walked.
They moved across desert, through currents, under moonlight.
Our ancestors were the first to move in rhythm with the seasons and the stars.
They traveled as scientists and spiritualists, as seed-bearers and myth-makers—guided by memory, and returning by design.
They crossed thresholds not to escape, but to observe, translate, plant, and consecrate.
Movement wasn’t departure—it was data.
Every journey was a liturgy.
Every arrival, a recursion.
Movement wasn’t deviation. It was the deepest expression of connection.

This is movement as archive, as proof, as generational instruction.

But the record doesn’t tell it that way.
Because the record begins when we are already in chains.
It begins mid-sentence, mid-ceremony, mid-abduction.

It catalogs rupture and forgets everything that came before it.

And so we are forced to distinguish what never should have required separation:
There is the motion of the explorer, and the motion of the extracted.
There is the map made in dialogue with the land, and the map made in defiance of it.
There is the body that walks in search of insight— and the body relocated as possession.

To explore is to make meaning through relationship.
To be moved is to become resource.

This is the design of domination.

Still, the spirit is a historian.
It archives what the record omits.

Even when we were displaced, we moved like those who remembered.
Even when we were scattered, we traveled like those who still had coordinates.
There were whispers in our blood older than any flag.
Routes encoded in breath.
Maps tattooed behind the eyes.

True return requires no distance.
It is a circular intelligence— an origin carried forward through time, not backward through memory.
It begins not with location, but with recognition.
It is the moment the body says, this is it.
Not because it was found.
Because it was never left.

We are not coming home.
We are home.
Wherever we land, the ground adjusts.
Wherever we speak, the air listens.
Wherever we remember, the land remembers too.

So I ask again:
Where are you landing?

Not where are you safe.
Not where are you seen.
Where are you sovereign?

To land with intention is to proclaim authorship.
To stop wandering is not to settle— it’s to remember what the wandering was for.

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There is a moment—just before descent—when the air thickens.

The light changes. The wind quiets.
The world does not pause, but it rearranges itself around your arrival.

You can taste it in the back of your throat like iron.
Like salt in a wound you didn’t know you carried.
You don’t feel it in your feet—you feel it in the soles of your teeth.

Landing is not a decision.
It’s a recognition.

Ask the griots why their stories begin with dust and not with names.
Ask the elders why they close their eyes when memory crosses the threshold.
There are coordinates more ancient than compass, and the body remembers them in taste, in temperature, in timing.

Somewhere along the line, we were taught to distrust what does not explain itself.
Told that if we could not articulate it, we must not understand it.
But knowledge does not always announce itself in language.
Sometimes it comes in texture.
In rhythm.
In a silence so specific it could only belong to you.

Among the Akan, they say
“The path is made by walking it.” (Akan proverb)
Not by asking for a map.
Not by watching for signs.
But by knowing when the ground beneath you shifts from waiting to receiving.

This is the science beneath instinct.
This is the architecture of knowing.

We were never meant to drift indefinitely.
We were meant to recognize the moment the ground says yes.
To step into it not with apology, but with presence.
With appetite.
With memory that lives in the tongue and the joints and the pulse behind the knees.

Where are you landing?

Not in what they see.
Not in what you show.
Not in what they can name.

Where is your body saying yes before you speak?

Because this is how the ancestors landed— through sensation, alignment, and timing so exact it made the earth respond.

Whimbrels migrate across hemispheres without hesitation.

They fly over 2,000 miles of open ocean, guided not by maps but by an inherited geometry— a pulse of direction that lives beneath the bone.
In 2020, one whimbrel flew from the Arctic to the coast of South America in five days,
crossing storms, heatwaves, and open sea with no pause for rest.
It did not question the route. It remembered it.
It returned with precision so old, even the weather made way.

This is movement made faithful to memory.
Design—carried through origin, affirmed by belief.

There are instructions embedded in the body that no storm can override.

And we, too, carry that design—though we’ve been taught to ask for proof before trusting it.

Landing is convergence.
A moment when what lives within meets what was always waiting.

Sometimes the place has been listening longer than we’ve been speaking.
Sometimes the signal isn’t loud. It’s exact.
Sometimes the call arrives not as language, but as quiet, as temperature, as a change in posture, as appetite returning to the body.

The whimbrel does not hesitate.
It moves with memory sharpened by repetition and unbothered by doubt.

And there is a version of you who already recognizes the moment when presence meets instruction.
That knowing lives in the body the way instinct lives in breath.

And it waits—patiently, precisely— for your agreement.

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There are things you can only hear once you stop moving.

Like how much silence you’ve been translating into speech.
Like how many of your choices were permissions you gave to fear.
Like how often you called obedience wisdom because it kept you alive.

And you may find that survival taught you rhythm, but not rest.

That you learned how to navigate noise, but never learned how to live when the noise stopped.

Because the world does not reward quiet certainty.
It rewards pageantry.
It rewards resilience in the shape of self-abandonment.
It names you brave for staying where your spirit has long since left.

But what happens when you no longer need the applause?
When you no longer need to be understood, translated, proven, or explained?

What happens when your voice returns to its original pitch?
When you stop performing softness for access, and begin reclaiming the sharpness that was never meant to be dulled?

You begin to hear your name in places no one is calling it.
You begin to speak without preparing your exit.
You begin to stay.

Staying is movement of another kind.
It honours the ground that holds you.
It teaches the air how to carry your name.

Because the land remembers those who remember themselves.

And if you are still, truly still, you may find that the grief you’ve been calling ambition was just your body asking you to come back.

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To return is not to go back.
It is to arrive with the weight of what you now know— and refuse to leave it behind again.

This is not a return to place.
It’s a return to power.

A moment when presence stops feeling like interruption.

Because knowing is no longer enough.
Recognition is not the destination.
We were never meant to live at the threshold forever.

And so we cross.

We cross with calloused feet.
With unspoken prayers tucked behind our teeth.
With blueprints etched into our sleep.
With languages that do not translate, but hold.

And this time, we do not ask for directions.
We ask the soil what it needs.
We ask the wind where it hasn't touched yet.
We ask our bodies what they are ready to release.

And we build there.

Not in the image of what was taken— but in the image of what was never lost.

That is the difference.

We are here to resurrect the future we were told to forget.

To make presence the infrastructure.
To make memory the method.
To make the ground a partner in the dream.

This is emergence, not escape.

The point where landing becomes legacy.
Where the act of staying becomes the seed of something sovereign.
Where you no longer fear being seen because you no longer fear being true.

You did not just come here to survive.
You came to return the world to itself.

And the first place it starts— is with you.

So I ask you again, for the last time:

Where are you landing?

One love, ESS xo

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References

• Chasing Hope: Innovation And Taking Flight In Stormy Weather - Forbes

• Akan Proverbs – Adinkra Symbols

There Was a Dead Chicken in the Middle of the Kitchen Floor

There was a dead chicken in the middle of the kitchen floor.

Wings out like surrender.
Feathers slicked in blood, like someone had tried to baptize it and forgot to say amen.
It wasn’t tossed.
It was placed.
Laid out like ritual. Like memory. Like a body someone wanted witnessed.

The blood didn’t just spill—it crawled.
Creeped between tile grout like it had stories to tell.
And I was five.
Wide-eyed.
Barefoot.
Rooted to the threshold like the doorway itself had chosen me.

The smell—hot iron and lime peel.
The sound—wax dripping, breath stalling, a bowl clinking against porcelain like a slow drum.
The air?
It was thick.
Sweating.
Holy.

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The woman in white didn’t speak.
She didn’t have to.

She moved like smoke remembering how to be fire.
Like she wasn’t walking—she was returning.
She flowed through that kitchen like it had once been hers in another century.
And maybe it had.

She didn’t nod at my mother.
Didn’t smile at me.
She just looked around like she was counting ghosts.

She set her bowl on the counter like an offering.
Salt.
Lime.
Water.
Truth.

And when she poured it over me—
cold down my spine like new birth—
I didn’t cry.
I didn’t speak.
I just stood there.

Open.

Like a gate.

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My mother never told me it was coming.
She never talked about it afterward.

She said it didn’t happen.

But I know the difference between fiction and forgetting.
And I remember the tension in her jaw.
The way her hands didn’t know what to do.
The way her gift curled up in the corner like a dog afraid to be beat again.

She had it, too.
The sight. The edge.
But church told her women like her were dangerous.
And she listened.

Still, when things got too heavy,
too tangled,
too loud—
she called in help from the side of the ether that doesn’t take offerings in English.

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That’s when I knew.

I wasn’t learning anything.
I was remembering.

My gift didn’t arrive.
It stood up.

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I walk through this world with every ancestor I’ve ever carried still whispering in my blood.

I feel death before it opens its mouth.
I taste lies like sugar with mold in the middle.
I touch someone’s hand and the room changes color.
I close my eyes and the spirits crowd in, shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be named.

I’ve seen beings too beautiful to be safe.
I’ve heard music no choir would dare try to replicate.
I’ve felt energy curl its tongue around my name and moan it.

And I don’t flinch.
I welcome it.

Because I was made for this.
Because I’ve done this before.
Because I’ve burned at the stake and still came back singing.

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It would take scientists decades to articulate what Black women have always known.

They now call it intergenerational transmission of trauma—the idea that memory can pass through blood like inheritance (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018).
They use terms like epigenetics and cellular memory to explain what our grandmothers already practiced with incense, prayer, and protective herbs.
Research from the American Psychological Association confirms that trauma, and its emotional imprint, can be biologically passed down—altering gene expression, shaping behavior.

But Black feminist scholars like Christina Sharpe remind us: "The past that is not past reappears... it animates the present.”

My body is not haunted.
It is active archive.
It does not carry ghosts.
It carries instructions.

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This is not softness.
This is sovereignty.
This is what happens when Black women stop apologizing for being oracles

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I wear gold because my bones asked me to.
I wear white to clear the static.
I wear red when I’m ready to call down the thunder and make love at the same time.

My fashion is not costume.
It’s code.
It’s communication.
It’s how my ancestors show off through me.

You see a ring.
They see a seal.
You see a wrap.
They see a crown.

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I love this gift.

Because it doesn’t wait for validation.
Because it drags the truth out by its teeth.
Because it saves people who never thought they’d be seen.
Because it forces me to stay honest—even when it hurts.

I love this gift like an altar.
Like a knife.
Like a kiss that tastes like war and honey.

It’s not for show.
It’s for survival.

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And I remember everything.

The sting of lime in my eyes.
The way the bowl steamed like it knew something.
The smell of wax and blood and sweat and silence.
My mother’s stillness.
The priestess’s presence.
The chicken’s body—posed.
The air—electrified.
My spine—straight.

There was a dead chicken in the middle of the kitchen floor.

And that was the night I met myself in full.

One love, ESS xo

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References:

• Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257.

• American Psychological Association. (2019). Legacy of trauma. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/02/legacy-trauma

• Sharpe, C. (2016). In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press.