Many have re-told the Ibo tale to remember and to remind others to remember. Paula Marshall�s protagonist Avey Johnson remembers the narrative from her Aunt Cuney. Off the coast of the Caribbean, a great ship arrived, and the Ibos found themselves standing on shore. The Ibos�

They stood, taking a ��good long look�� Praisesong for the Widow. They ��didn�t miss a thing.�� The Ibos saw those enslaved before them and those �freed� in the future. They stood ��studying�� the place: �They seen things that day you and me don�t have the power to see� because those ��pure-born Africans was peoples [who] could see in more ways than one.��

�When they got through sizing up the place real good and seen what was to come, they turned�and looked at the white folks what brought �em here. Took their time again and gived them the same long hard look. Tell the truth, I don�t know how those white folks stood it. I know I wouldn�t have wanted �em looking at me that way. And when they got through studying �em, when they knew just from looking at �em how those folks was gonna do, do you know what the Ibos did?...�

��They just turned�and walked on back down the edge of the river here. Every las� man, woman and chile. And they wasn�t taking their time no more. They had seen what they had seen and those Ibos was stepping! And they didn�t bother getting back in the smalls boats�They just kept walking right on out over the river...Iron on they ankles and they wrists and fastened �round they necks like a dog collar�But chains didn�t stop those Ibos none�They just kept on walking like the water was solid ground�And when they got to where the ship was they didn�t so much as give it a look�When they realized there wasn�t nothing between them and home but some water and that wasn�t giving �em no trouble they got so tickled they started in to singing��

�Those Ibos! Just upped and walked on away not two minutes after getting here!�

There used to be a time when we could remember as a collective. The Ibos would have seen the unthinkable, for remembering is resistance. And resistance requires a collective�s memory of horror. Now, if we remember, we do so in isolation, quietly, as criminals plotting their next crime. Only we are remembering to survive the horror.

We, who remember, live among a people frightened by the power of our memory. Those in power, with white privilege, have attempted remove any trace of our memory. They are like the slavers on the shore staring at the incomprehensible scene before them without the power to see.

Someone listened while I talked about teaching incognito. That is teaching in fear of being discovered that I might be teaching to draw students to remember. It is like living in an infantile world, a world ruled by children.

We are surrounded by people who are short-sighted and see only themselves and what pleasures them. They want all the goodies on Mother Earth and tell themselves and anyone else who will listen that all of the Earth and the goodies are for them, the best and the brightest.

While some reek havoc on the world around them, a good many are uncomfortable with stories they tell themselves about blackness. Generation after generation, these are people who have socialized themselves to fear blackness and that blackness is always outside themselves. Generation after generation, they have added to what they categorize as blackness, adding indigenous and Black people, communists, criminals, terrorists to an ever growing definition of otherness.

A few days ago, a colleague wished me a �happy Thanksgiving,� innocently. Usually, I would hesitate and remember to not remember. But I attempted to correct her innocence - for the record and for the ancestors of Native, Black Americans, Filipinos, Palestinians, Chileans, Congolese, Vietnamese, Iraqis, and Afghanis.

��Genocide day?��

Her head went back: ��You mean Rwanda?��

Where Black people killed Black people.

But, of course, she assumes I do not know of the Belgiums and their parting gift to the �different groups of natives,� writes scholar Mahmood Mamdani, who were �set apart on the basis of ethnicity� (When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda).

�From being only a cultural community, the ethnic group was turned into a political community, too.� The political project of the regime, Mamdini explains, was to �fracture a racialized native population into different ethnicized groups. The basis of group distinction under indirect rule was both race and ethnicity.�

The Tutsi and Hutu spoke the same language and practiced the same religion - until the parting colonizer designated the Tutsi as a superior race of people.

��No. I mean Native Americans.��

Her head jerks back again.

I have clearly upset her. She seems to be looking somewhere - seeing what?

Surely she does not see or want to see the massacre and continued practice of genocide against the First Peoples of Aquasasne who offered a welcoming mat, who offered to share and teach, but who were greeted by violence: guns, knives, and lies. Shoot to kill all that you see - in the name of God!

��Sorry. Have a nice holiday.��

Report me to the authorities! Say that one is - what? Different. Has not been pacified. Tamed. Is educated. No, is too educated. Something other than us. Troubling. Disturbing. Sick. Hysterical!

I think it is a special skill you must have to deal with children who never grow up. It is a skill in which you must learn to perform magic and disappear for them the blackness so as not to make them uncomfortable or worse, starting screaming bloody murder! It is a skill in which you must coat the space in whiteness - some other worldness - at least temporarily until you return to your space, your memory. It is a space in which blackness is dehumanized while something mythical is allowed to live on.

Avoid a collision with change in this space. Too much!

It is hard to talk with a child, particularly a spoiled child, spoiled by those of us who have catered to its whims and even praised and indulged them in serious matters, horrifying matters. This child when given a doll repeatedly beheads it, and requests another, and beheads the new one, announces that the beheading is the thing to do. It lies the doll down with one hand and pulls the head from the body with the next all the while looking up at the adult, anticipating praise and speaking of �success� against the �enemy.�

But we are not talking about dolls but people, instead and Red, Black, Brown, and Yellow people in particular. The child among like-minded children has free range to engage in torture, massacres, murders, assassinations, wars, imprisonment of their fellow human beings. Yet, when questioned, there is the infamous accusatory Look and response: �Who me?�

Such is the way you feel today when you have grown up only to discover that the children refuse to grow up, and they are younger each year! Children are having children of all races, all religions, all ethnicities. So you must continue to watch your step while the older children seek out enemies everywhere and the younger ones dare you hint at their nightmarish strategies to maintain dominance in the world.

And it does not end there! Taking their orders from those they perceive to be grown adults, these children of innocence look to those older children, posing like Mussolini and bellowing patriotic tunes and trying to sound authoritative.

There is always a child of innocence ready to report to the authorities - for the protection and security of the State�s order. The protagonist in Orwell�s 1984 describes the �organization of Spies� consisting of children who are �systematically turned into unrecognizable little savages.� Winston writes, �They adored the Party and everything connected with it.�

And it is, the Party that needs to be abandoned.

The Party, today, in reality, consists of children who see their ordained dominance challenged by insurgent old timers, indigenous, ancient adults. The stakes are high. They have managed to take control of territories and resources, but the pipeline in the Caspian region along the Afghani border is the goal - for now. See the nightmare: Al Qaeda, Taliban, Al Qaeda or the Taliban at the controls of Pakistan�s nuclear arsenal, grinning from ear to ear while aiming at the U.S.!

Forward soldiers!

The children of Wall Street, bankers and financiers, are readying bigger piggy banks; those in the role of private contractors ready new ninja uniforms and high-tech weapons. They signal the leaders who, with all their toy soldiers lined up, rehash the rhetoric: �Americans resist oppression.� Forward soldiers!

Only, of course, the soldiers are not �toys.� But they do not know this! They remember only war!

They never see the tragedy of their own behavior. How can they be expected to see themselves as we see them?

How likely is it, under the circumstances, to produce children, who remember Queen�s ruled, King�s honored the Sun and the stars, and the people so worshipped animals and nature that everything on Earth including Earth itself was a god? A depraved system of spoiled children runs amok in maintaining and profiting from suffering and death and produces more of the same who are unable to know there is anything to remember.

The Ibos said No! Enough! And they found Freedom in resisting!

Come along, their story tells us, if you want Freedom!

As activist lawyer, the Peoples Lawyer, Lynn Stewart said before the authorities hid her away, she is part of something that cannot be stopped; she is part of a movement.

And this is true. Although this movement is not registered and members are not on a list, it is a movement nonetheless. There has always been this movement of those who remember and refuse to forget! There are Bolivians and Native Americans who see and remember. There are political prisoners like Mumia Abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier who cannot be killed - ever. There are the political journalists such as J.R. (of Block Report Radio) criminalized along with countless others who remember. And there are the soldiers, brave soldiers, saying No! Enough! And they are walking!

No capitalist or totalitarian state can kill this movement of people remembering. The world�s largest security agency, the U.S., know it! Fears it!

The people are going to remember that they have the right and the power to start walking in mass!

Look out!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.