Ka'ba
Ka'ba - meaning Summary
Yearning for Ancestral Return
The poem affirms Black identity and collective yearning for liberation. It contrasts confinement and daily hardship with pride in African heritage—masks, dances, communal imagination—and insists on beauty and resilience despite suffering. The speaker calls for a return to ancestral roots and a reimagined bond within the Black family. Urgency and ritual recur: magic, spells, and a "sacred word" are needed to destroy oppression, create renewal, and achieve freedom.
Read Complete Analyses'A closed window looks down on a dirty courtyard, and Black people call across or scream across or walk across defying physics in the stream of their will. Our world is full of sound Our world is more lovely than anyone's tho we suffer, and kill each other and sometimes fail to walk the air. We are beautiful people With African imaginations full of masks and dances and swelling chants with African eyes, and noses, and arms tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place full of winters, when what we want is sun. We have been captured, and we labor to make our getaway, into the ancient image; into a new Correspondence with ourselves and our Black family. We need magic now we need the spells, to raise up return, destroy,and create. What will be the sacred word?
Feel free to be first to leave comment.