IN HIS HANDS
This article was compiled and edited by Ms Chermiah Hart FdA BA (Hons) and Medina Ratherton,
August 2014, for the Institute of Black Academics.
PUBLISHED 19 AUGUST 2014 10:00
Our sistah Mujeeda Aleem has taken the title for one of the African worlds first Muslim Female Writer of her time that has made a crash landing into the community and amongst fellow Cultural Engagement Industry Leaders.
Where do we begin, to introduce you to our fellow Sistah in the Faith - Mujeeda Aleem (In the Faith that positivity, togetherness and African Unity are just around the corner?) The Book Launch of . . . ‘In His Hands’ was a success at the Stratford Library, attended by guests in traditional attire, family, friends and Industry Leaders in Arts & Cultural Engagement. The Book launch was only a stones throw away from where Nigeria House was based at the Theatre Royal Stratford, which hosted a series of Productions during the 2012 Olympic Games. Arts & Cultural Radio Station - Bubbles FM hosted a series of provoking interviews on the steps of the Theatre Square.
Are you with us? This is starting to look like a rich tapestry of Victory for the people and Golden Era of Arts & Cultural Engagement in the most estranged communities in the UK. Cultural Team Leaders are opening a pathway, where Truth and Insight can finally have a seat at the table of the ‘status - quo’. Thankfully, Artiste’s such as Fella Kuti and Michael Jackson have left legendary marks of excellence through their music and have been successfully crowned as Royalty in their respective genres, bringing issues of importance that affected us as a community, not only to the forefront but made catchy songs about it, which imprinted itself in our sub-conscious. Surely, this is the traits of Kings? And beacons for generations yet unborn.
The blessings of ‘The Golden Leaders’ are truly falling upon us? And in her own small way, we celebrate The Book of Mujeeda Aleem, who covers titles such as We are the Hollow Women, Landscape within, My Challenges, In My Hands, I am, My baby, My Pain, Can you survive, I am a Victim, I have a story and Do you know how to sing?
The live interview with Hart Culture C.I.C. can be found on the YouTube Channel - Hart Culture TV (www.youtube.com/hartculture), where you can hear her reviewing one of her favourite poems - ‘My Baby’.
Grappling with the current situation that Nigeria has found itself in, we are in the midst of a ‘Dialogue’ with the younger generation of Social Entrepreneurial Leaders called - The ‘Nigeria Dialogue’, who are actively taking a role in how Nigeria could be shaped up in the near future to benefit Nigerian’s and future generations unseen.
Economic turmoil for the Continent of Africa seems to be an ongoing dilemma, that no one human being has been able to quench. However, there are more than 1,5million words dedicated to the entanglement and toll that it is having on the every day life of Africans. African wealth is now a controversial matter altogether, entangled with sustainable corruption rather than sustainable resources for the people? Aleem’s Poem - ‘we live in a world of chain’s gets to the nitty gritty of why ‘securing election votes’ ranks 1st in Nigeria before the ‘rate of Child welfare’ and National habitual stability for 65% of the Nigerian population survives on less than one dollar a day.
Sistah Mujeeda has indeed made a sincere start to highlight the socio - economic issues that stare us in the face, and of which we choose to make absolutely no gesture to even motion to the solution.
We live in a world of chains . . .
Chains of television
Chains of Impressions
We live in a world full of so many chains
Chains of good and bad
Chains of Ups and Downs
We live in a time of chains . . .
No doubt, some have heavier chains than others, and some seems to know how to free themselves of one chain in exchange for a slightly more complex one.
Aleems goes on to express her delights in one of her impromptu poems :
My baby likes to be kissed on the cheek
“Mummy I want to eat”
My baby has a rounded lip a rounded neck
A rounded cheek.
What is great about this particular passage is the fact that the features desired, are also typical African features rather than the un-reachable Eurocentric version of beauty. Poems like this should be encouraged amongst contemporary African Writers, and more writing that professes to love and adore the natural African contours.
Once we see the beauty in ourselves again we can begin to design the ‘best’ for ourselves again. Once we can design again, we can create again? And once we create again, then we can shape the world as it should be once again?
Around Page 11, Aleem writes:
Many falling to both excesses
Unable to observe the GOLDEN MEAN
Not able to keep a stable
Landscape - within
When will we understand how to live in comfortable correlation to all those things around us that actually compliments our being? Wherever we are in the world? And in whatever climate? The natural world that relates to the ‘Golden Mean’ and essentially compliments us as a #GoldenRace? What is the ‘Means’ to an intelligible body of governance of our people and communities? The hosts of humanity and the parents of ‘A Human Race’.
It bothers me and not
At why they look sincerely ignorant
At Truth
The ‘Conscious Shift’ is at the forefront of every cultural conversation on the globe at this moment in time.
‘The Ascension’ and how humanity will make it up the conscious ladder leaving behind all of its troubled ways and dodgy indoctrinations to embrace the residue of truth, left behind by the worlds most prominent prophets and Humanitarians. On top of the conscious cake of confusion is of course the need to rid itself of the sustained effort of ‘negative indoctrination, inferiority and residue of expense wars on ‘cultural Superiority’. We are currently fundraising for an ethical war to reverse the trend of ‘negative mind programming’ in the African community, which has corrupted a #GoldenRace and settled the purest rot in the minds of the next generation causing them to indulge in ‘self hate’ and take each other out in rounds of street gang warfare. Gang warfare has torn through communities from The Bronx, Harlem, South Central LA, to Soweto, to Brixton, Lagos and Peckham. This is the handy work and success of the ‘conqueror’ leaving the Royal hallmark on territory that the this ‘specie’ has conquered, however, as we have seen in the testimony of legendary civil activities movements, Africa has been rudely interrupted
- so, “ can we go home now please?
The potential in our Sistah Mujeeda, scopes beyond what is in between the pages of ‘In his Hands’, but one thing for sure, is that our Sistah Mujeeda in the faith has firmly put the possibility of ‘Our destinies’ right back “in our hands” again.
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