EMANCIPATION DAY · A REFLECTION

Emancipation Still Coming

Dr Michael A. Clarke

A few thoughts, as we in the Caribbean and in other spaces observe this Emancipation Day. A time of great celebration and rejoicing — and yet a celebration that, even as we enter into it, holds within it the sense in which we do not fully grasp it. For those who lived through the first emancipation knew what it was they were being freed from. The freedom, admittedly, was not in any way to the degree they would have wanted; but it was a step further.

There is a text by Kortright Davis, Emancipation Still Comin’. Through the years I have reflected on it — both its title and its content. And I have come to see in it the “now and not yet” of which we speak within the church, and within the whole theological framework. The now and the not yet. The being and the becoming. These must be held together, because this is the reality we are in: a reality in which whatever needs to be, already is — and yet is also still on the way.

I have always found this a concept to live with, and a helpful one. Helpful, because it helps you to understand that what you are reaching for is already accomplished. That which you are looking for is already here with you.

And so one of the things that has led me through the years is that sense of the unveiling — the unveiling of life, the unveiling of matter, the unveiling of that which is dense. The relaxing. The becoming open. The expansion. These are images I have carried for a long time.

It would be remiss of us, in observing emancipation, not to hold that tension continuously — the being and the becoming. For the moment one believes one has arrived, one has committed a kind of violence against oneself. One wants to stop the process. It gives the impression that where one has arrived is all there is.

But the reality I am wrestling with is this: using that ancient phrase, as above, so below — as we experience these examples of being set free, of being released, we must take on a way of thinking that says there is always something more. Always something to be shed. Something to be expanded.

And for me, one of those great works is the expansion of the self into a greater self. The ability to perceive that this structure I see when I look in the mirror is not all there is of me. It is to understand that the work I am called to do is the work of continuously setting the self free. And the self is set free by coming, again and again, to greater awareness of its limitation. For the very awareness of a limitation means I am also aware that there is something beyond it. So my task is to press against it — to expand, to expose, to grow, to transform, to become.

So Emancipation Day, and Emancipation Still Comin’, is for me a paradigm. A kind of architecture that must be embraced. And the ability to embrace it is what allows us to move beyond where we are.

There is another dimension to this expansion. It is the caution that, as we become more, that becoming must not lose what is of great value. The American philosopher Ken Wilber uses the phrase to transcend and include. For so often, in our setting free, in our becoming more, we abandon some critical part of what went before, and we lose some tremendously valuable aspects of ourselves. So the real work is not only to transcend, to expand, to transform — it is also to keep.

And here I come back to where I began: the being and the becoming. For to speak of the being is to say that everything needed is already here. Everything that is needed is already here. And if everything needed is already here, then in the process of becoming, one cannot let anything that was here from the beginning be excluded. Because that is the being. The complete package. So I am simply coming to an awareness of it all. I am not escaping from. I am not becoming something else. I am becoming that which I already am.

Our world teaches us to run — to get away from where we are. But I am always mindful of that other invitation: to look back. To know where you have come from, and to carry that as part of your becoming.

The Akan people of Ghana give us a symbol for this: Sankofa — the bird whose feet face forward while its head turns back to lift an egg from behind. Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi — it is not taboo to go back for what you have forgotten. But notice: the bird is not retrieving something it lost. It is turning to recognise what was always present — what we had forgotten, or ignored, or been taught to feel was primitive. To go forward, you reach back and gather it up, and carry it with you. That, again, is the being and the becoming.

And what Sankofa says in the language of symbol, the Lord says in the plain speech of the gospel. At the feeding of the five thousand, when all had eaten and were filled, Jesus turns to his disciples and says: Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost. The fragments. The leftovers. What the crowd would have walked away from as scraps. Even these — perhaps especially these — heaven will not let fall. And is this not the very heart of emancipation? That what was counted as refuse, what was made to feel small and primitive and beneath keeping, is exactly what must be gathered and carried, that nothing be lost. Sankofa reaches back for it. The gospel bends down for it. The being holds it. And the becoming cannot go on without it.

To enslave a people is a horror. And to that horror there is only one answer, and that answer is emancipation. Nothing I say after this softens that. Nothing must.

And yet I have come to hold something alongside it. Not as a reason for the chain — the chain has no reason, and it never did. But as something the chain could not prevent. In that very condition, the condition that was built to make a people less than human, a people reached beyond the condition and laid hold of the whole of their humanity. And that reaching, that reaching beyond, is the most human thing there is. It was not taught to us by our bondage. Our bondage taught us nothing but cruelty. It was drawn out of us, by us, in defiance of everything the bondage intended.

And here is a harder thing, and I have believed it for a long time. The one who enslaves and the one who is enslaved are both being called to recognise their humanity. The enslaver, who could not see the whole human being standing before him, was himself made less by that blindness. So this work of recognising our humanity is not finished on one side of it. It is still coming. It is still coming for all of us.

So emancipation was never a single morning. It was never one day, one act, one proclamation. It is a work. A continuous work. It is handed to us, and it is ours to hand on. Because to be human at all is to reach beyond what holds us, so that we might become, fully, the being we already are. Our forebears did this under a weight most of us will never have to carry. They did it, and they left us the pattern. And we are still keeping it.

So as we keep this Emancipation Day, it is important that we truly look back. That we embrace, within our emancipated and emancipating selves, that from which we were emancipated. And that we hold it all together, and know that it is all part of who I am.

I am being, and I am becoming.
Because there is only… the I Am.

HIER Life — Holistic Integration for Embodied Renewal
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