We Be Walkin' Blackly in the Deep - Thomas Kneeland

From the advent of White Lion to the current state of systemic racism, forcibly woven into institutions of power, we've found ways to combat oppression. If we look at influential figures within our literary landscape, we'll find Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and a host of prolific Black writers. They are the ones who set and reset the literary arts landscape, time and time again, to ensure that we would always have a place in the larger American and global society.

nn nn These writers, most of whom were poets, established the barriers between societal order and chaos. And while those barriers found, and find, themselves cracked by the thunderous, battering ram of injustice, there will always be new waves of literary cement to rebuild and strengthen the indestructible power of Black words. Blackness is an inevitable ebb and flow on the shore of humanity.

In this figurative deep, we find that the moments where life begins, and ends are both black and expansive. Thus, to live in the expanse of Blackness almost always means that we, Black people, exist in a cosmic trench that separates us from the ancestral realm, tethered by a frail thread, and strewn through our psyche by centuries of white supremacy. nn nn nAnd yet, even after being exposed to such opposition and cruelty, we continue to produce life in the form of liberation and literary art. Being Black is everything but a curse, and there is no way we could ever be convinced that our skin deserves to be reduced to an abomination, plague, or harbinger of death.

We are, in fact, both the origin and perfect summation of all who are alive in the world. We be Black. We walk Blackly.n n nn nDebuting this Spring from Marian University's Department of Media, Communication & Design-through ENG 401 Publishing & Print Culture-comes Thomas Kneeland's debut chapbook, We Be Walkin' Blackly in the Deep, a collection that begins the long journey of exploring all who sing blackly beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

This chapbook collection begins to unearth and restore color to the white-washed notions about the dark and terrifying facets of American history.n