Maafa UK Edition Preface

My collection of poems on the un-martyred antiheroes that emerge out of the genocidal impulse is being reissued with new writing included next spring. I'm sharing the new introduction here first

Is the messiah who emerges from crisis more effective than the messiah who emerges from bliss?  The Maafa is the crisis and its emergent insight comes to life as messianic archetypes that couldn’t exist without it. The crisis therefore becomes an object of desire, and therefore feminine, seductive, this new archetype, this woman writing and inventing and becoming her through a procession of personal crisies projected as atonal rhythmic cry, into the world— black song. And the longed-for mafia in maafa is as the longed for diasporic family for which we invent black songs and dark songs, and switched on in the blight of her flair for decoding in code, (encoding), these elegies and invocations. Maafa, a hush in the center of a low moan, tunneling omen of a girl coming forth as skins, then flesh, bones last, gutted, extracted, reconfigured, algorithmic, Eurythmic, truth-or-trick, Maafa is ecstatic at the end of unadulterated despair.