Africa is our center of gravity, our cultural and spiritual mother and father, our beating heart, no matter where we live on the face of this earth.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the deep connection and significance of Africa to people of African descent globally.
John Henrik Clarke's quote articulates the profound bond that many individuals of African descent feel toward Africa, describing it as the foundational source of their identity and spirituality. He suggests that no matter where people from Africa live, the continent remains a pivotal part of their identity, influencing their culture and essence, akin to a 'beating heart' that sustains them.
In practice
In a speech at an African heritage celebration, this quote can be used to inspire unity and pride among the audience.
I saw no African people in the printed and illustrated Sunday school lessons. I began to suspect at this early age that someone had distorted the image of my people. My long search for the true history of African people the world over began.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
Anytime someone says your God is ugly and you release your God and join their God, there is no hope for your freedom until you once more believe in your own concept of the 'deity.'
The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
I was torn between the Americanness my mom wanted for me and the Mexicanness my father wanted - they were wrestling for cultural influence over me.
Culture is public, because meaning is
Get the culture right, and everything else just falls into place.
The priest has just baptized you a Christian with water; and I baptize you a Frenchman, daring child, with a dewdrop of champagne on your lips.
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