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.
Whatever you say about popular culture, people like people who know things, who are experts, and it doesn't particularly matter what they look like.
There's a tradition - in New Orleans it still exists - where people play in the street. People play outside of the venues. Food, music, and that cultural exchange, it happens anywhere.
The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily.
The gitano is the most distinguished, profound and aristocratic element in my country, the one that most represents its Way of being and best preserves the fire, the blood and the alphabet of Andalusian and universal truth.
Hip-hop gave a generation a common ground that didn't require either race to lose anything; everyone gained.
I often look ridiculous in Japan. There's really no way to eat in Japan, particularly kaiseki in a traditional ryokan, without offending the Japanese horribly. Every gesture, every movement is just so atrociously wrong, and the more I try, the more hilarious it is.
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