We know state sponsored murder too well. We know ethnic cleansing. We know the grief of loss. What it feels like when our death becomes common place. Too persistent to count, to care. What it feels like to be inside of that consistently. To sow life despite all odds. To insist on life’s dignity when others refuse and efface it. Treat it as dispensable. To survive and make beauty despite it all. The sheer power and love that it requires.

Through the ongoing violence of this time, we want to say explicitly that *this* SWANA family - our SWANA Ancestral HUB - is forever in reverence and alliance to our Black kindreds. That we align with the uprisings across the world led by our Black siblings in the name and defense of LIFE, and will forever commit to uplifting, protecting, and standing with you within and beyond the SWANA context.

We see you. 🌹 We love you. You are a miracle. Your sacredness blesses our lives. Your beauty makes our world go round. We see you. We love you. 🌹 EVERYDAY.

Our Afro-SWANA, Black diasporic, African continental, Aboriginal, Afro-Indigenous, unnamed unknown and intentionally denied and silenced African ancestors of all our lineages. For Black folks in every continent and culture and hue across this earth. For the lineages of brilliance and life you embody. The beauty, the power, the love. The righteousness and liberation you cultivate. The generations before and beyond you. The children and elders alike. Across the gender spectrum.

We honor the sacredness of your grief. The righteousness of your rage. The fierceness of your love. We will continue to carry this alongside you and dedicate our part to the transformation of our world and its systems of violence and exploitation. To the healing of our lineages in the places where we have been severed and colonized and ourselves have adopted paradigms of thought and practice that reinforce these oppressive systems. That create a fertile ecosystem for its sickness to grow in. That tell stories of our separateness and that deepen these places of harm and violation against you, our Black relatives, and thus against all human and non-human relations of our earth.

Your liberation, is our liberation. We are family, literally and forever. We uplift the dignity of Black lives and lineages - from the dinner table to the trenches of our hearts and movements and lands. The eye of our prayers and the compass of our hearts. In both our diasporic AND our ancestral homes. Re-membrance work IS the work of affirming, defending, and realigning with a way that respects and dignifies life. This IS the Cosmic Justice we seek, the world we long to restore.

May our re-membrance bring healing and honor to YOUR precious lives. Transformation of our colonial systems that harm ALL of us. Uproot the spine of what aches. Unveil the greater Justice that seeks manifestation. Integrity to the structures of our world and ways. Alignment with life itself. Inshallah ya rab.

Holding you, heart in heart, today and always.

This love (hub) is our re-membrance. 🧿

This portrait of Malcolm X praying over a map of “Afrabia” is made by the INCREDIBLE Palestinian artist, Suhad Khatib. Please support her work at www.SuhadKhatib.com and make sure to check out her Instagram where she consistently offers insightful wisdom rooted in explorations of Islam, liberation, and life in general.

We thank our Armenian Kindreds over at Lernazang for stating the following in their “Armenians for Black Power” statement. As many of our HUB family were born in or currently live in diaspora in the so-called Americas, we could not have asserted this more clearly and cosign full-heartedly :

” As performers who promote resistance through music and dance, we realize that we cannot carry the narratives of our own history without uplifting the struggles of other oppressed peoples.

First, we acknowledge that in LA we live on stolen lands of the Tongva peoples. The fact that Armenian immigrants fled genocide and violence does not preclude us from being agents of settler-colonialism. As descendants of genocide survivors and refugees, we acknowledge the genocide of the Indigenous nations committed by the US. We honor them and support their struggle for environmental justice and sovereignty.

Second, we recognize that the US was built on the violent enslavement, forced labor, and looting of African peoples. The vicious legacy of slavery and anti-black racism exists today, as violence and state coercion continues to define the daily lives of black people. The murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and George Floyd are only the most recent examples of this and we echo the cries for justice and reparations.

We celebrate the courageous resistance of black organizers, activists, and their accomplices whose call for systemic change has been met with violent state repression and police brutality. We pledge to continue supporting the struggles for freedom by all oppressed peoples against all forms of inequity and systemic violence by ANY. MEANS. NECESSARY. “

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We acknowledge this while also uplifting ongoing efforts to expose and dismantle the anti-Black racism embedded in our SWANA homelands and uproot the ways it has informed our own families and lineages - from the dismantling of the Kafala system, to the colorism in SWANA households, to regional lineages of African enslavement and their ongoing impact, and the systemic displacement and disenfranchisement of Afro-SWANA Indigenous communities for the consolidation of Arab or other national power (our Nubian siblings are but one example of how this has played out). We understand the ways anti-Blackness is related directly to colonialism, and how we cannot heal from colonial trauma without centralizing the liberation of our Black relatives worldwide, and honoring our own African ancestors and Black + Afro-SWANA communities. That addressing racism is explicitly connected to the protection and restoration of our earth and the re-membrance and healing of our ancestral wisdoms, and vice versa. This is at the heart of why we re-member.

We trust the power of this work, and we affirm the inherently liberatory nature of it and commit to continue tending it. We cultivate our re-membrance as a roadmap, a resource to navigate forward with wisdom through these times of great change towards a radical transformation of our world. Some ways this may look that have helped me personally involve:

• offerings of gratitude and acknowledgement to the earth we live on

• praying and listening closely for guidance forward from deep inside ourselves, our dreams, our bodies, the land, our ancestors

• respecting and aligning with our unique purpose and the cultivation of it with authenticity, care, and integrity

• honing our intuition and heeding the messages we receive with discernment and care

• taking cues from the natural world about how a life-affirming world is designed and learning from the balance of relationships within it

• tending the wounds and places of severance and violation in our own lives, families, and lineages with compassion and towards the restoration of balance

• lighting candles for the souls of those lost

• offering prayers of guidance, love, and protection to the righteous forces transforming our world in their name

• tending life in all its expressions as we take care of our relationships and lands on a daily basis. protecting our young and our old, our waters and our seeds, and our loved ones who need extra care thru this time.

• respecting our own life force by tending our bodies, minds, and hearts to the best of our ability

• anchoring in love and letting our reverence for life be what guides us in every step of the way

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We encourage folks to follow our instagram stories for ongoing resources and ways to contribute to actions, organizations, and campaigns, as well as ways to confront the inflections of anti-Blackness in the intimate spheres of your own lives and families. We encourage folks to learn about the movement efforts happening locally in your own area and learn from the long legacies of Black Liberation and histories of colonialism that preceded and built up to this current moment. There are an abundance of folks tending these layers of work in our communities and we urge you to connect to them if you need support cultivating on this level. One place to start could be to read this compilation of articles about Black-Arab solidarity compiled by our friends at Dardishi. (While not all SWANA folks are Arabs, these may offer insights relevant to non-Arab SWANA folks as well. We also offer this knowing that some Arabs ARE Black as well, and we do not participate in the erasure of these intersecting identities, but rather hope this can be a deepening into a more nuanced holding of our expansive communities at once.)

In the spirit of re-membrance, we also invite folks to educate yourselves and explore the ways that our ancestors, our Indigenous, our spiritualists, mystics and healers, our artists and creators, our land tenders and mothers, our ancients and other tribal and traditional paradigms outside of the contemporary and leftist movements for liberation have responded and interfaced with moments of communal trauma and systemic violence. (Hint: there are a LOT of examples. Consider sharing with the HUB so we can learn together as a community).

Some guiding questions you may consider to support this process:

• How do we navigate these moments of earthly transformation from within a decolonial and/or sacred paradigm of practice?

• What has the place and position of healers, mystics and spiritualists through times of political change looked like through the course of history? How about mothers, farmers, tribal elders and advisors? Dreamers and artists?

• How do we engage in liberation in a way that honors the multi-dimensionality of our world, centralizes the integrity of life/the earth, and addresses the root of what ails us both materially and spiritually?

• What looks different when we approach political liberation through the lens of our ancients? What about through the lens of the natural world?

• What are the spiritual, ecological, relational sources of imbalance that lie underneath the current conditions we seek to change?

• What would a radical transformation look like that included all these dimensions of our human experience?

• What do our ancestral cosmologies and stories reflect to us about justice and where it goes awry? What insights for healing and restoring balance do they suggest in between the lines?

We welcome folks to take this on as part of your own ancestral and re-membrance studies, embodied research and practice. And remember, the deepest “study” often happens outside the realm of books (though we love those too). Talk to your elders and collect local histories. Find local sources where possible. Talk to your plants. Listen to your body. Listen to your hearts. Create, dream, and soften your gaze so you can sense between the lines for deeper clarity and wisdom that you may have not seen otherwise. Get off social media every now and again. Take space to reconnect with your internal landscape (and your geographical one) as you digest and uncover things. Tend the relationships around and inside of you. Before and beyond you.

Offered with great hub (love), from our HUB.

Layla K. Feghali is an ancestral re-membrance tender, community worker, archivist + story teller, and plantcestral medicine practitioner. She is the founder of River Rose Re-membrance + the vision tender of the SWANA Ancestral HUB. She is currently based between her ancestral village in Lebanon, and her diasporic home in Tongva territories (Los Angeles, California) where she was born and raised.