CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Vessels of Revolution: On Akinsanya Kambon, Suppressed History and the Fire We’re Living Through

Artist: Akinsanya Kambon.

I could have talked with Akinsanya Kambon for hours. As the full, uncut version of our conversation reveals, Akinsanya is simply full of stories — especially history stories. He seems to know the name of every freedom fighter there ever was, on every continent, across the centuries. That’s not an accident, it’s his practice and his beautiful expression of resistance.

Kambon cares about history because he knows what happens when it’s taken away. Take the story of his great great grandfather, a participant in the 1811 so-called German Coast uprising, in which enslaved Africans walked off their plantation and were joined by hundreds more, marching toward freedom across Louisiana. It was one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in American history — and one of the least taught, least known, most deliberately buried. Akinsanya’s ancestor was captured in the act of escape and his murderers put his severed head on a spike. The enslavers and their allies lined the road with severed heads in an effort to send their message: don’t try. Don’t dream. Don’t dare to act free.

But that’s not the message Kambon received, as you’ll hear. The story didn’t intimidate him. It empowered him. It gave him a new sense of what he and his people were capable of, what they had always been capable of, what no amount of enforced forgetting could finally erase.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since we spoke; about what it means to put a head on a spike; about who that gesture is really meant to serve.

We are living, right now, through a fire that is not metaphorical. On February 28, the United States and Israel........

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