SAVE THE DATE!

This story is about family

about lost and found

about the past present and future

 We stood there he and I

Mere silhouettes in the narrow stone doorway of a damp ancient slave castle.

Staring into the endless horizon

The taste of ocean mist on our faces.

The waves crashing on the rocks below.

“Uncle Keba, why do they call it the door of no return?”

 "Good question nephew because you know what? we HAVE returned"

~excerpt from featured story by Keba Konte

This #TakinBackSunday service features Wisdom Keeper, Keba Konte-- founder of Red Bay Coffee & Roastery, in a multigenerational circle of storytelling, coffee conjuring, and Ring Shout processional. We begin at the Konte family’s home garden for a traditional Senegalese coffee ceremony from the holy city of Touba. Community is invited to participate in a rites of passage between generations, as Uncle Keba and Nephew Tommy mark the completion of a circle of Diaspora. Spirits rise as we call upon second line spirituals, processing to Red Bay Coffee Roastery where ancestral invocation is facilitated by Queer Black Aesc(th)etic Sonic duo, The Black Moon Monastics. Join us in Takin’ Back Sunday as we return to the magik of food folk medicine, centering coffee as community Freedom practice!

More About #TakinBackSunday, Queering Black Church with #DignityInProcess:

“In the midst of oppression remaining awake becomes a powerful resistance tool and a precursor to contemplation.” ~Barbara A. Holmes, excerpt from Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church

#TakinBackSunday is about stayin’ woke. Facilitated by the gender expansive aesc(th)etic duo, Black Moon Monastics, this Trans-denominational service is an artistic act of Queering Black* Church. Celebrating intersectional Queer/Trans/Two-Spirit/Gender-Nonconforming Life, we reconnect with ritual routes of Indigenous/Creole/Afro-Diasporic* origins. A #DignityInProcess Folk-medicine circle series woven with Black Feminist scripture, Indigenous Creatrix storytelling, somatic-centering, Freedom Song ciphers, and ancestor reverence—our meditation is for Liberation! We conjure healing justice by honoring the use of sanctuary as site for both sacred and social movements. We touch Afro-futurities, bending space-time as we rise in the counterclockwise shuffles and claps of Ring Shout processions. Part participatory performance, part Freedom School, part Shout House, we lean into Afro-Indigenous cultural cosmologies where the community process to Create, steward Wisdom, and Conjure are One.

Simply, we embody the Living church of Queer Black* Magik.

FOLLOW THE SERIES: http://che-art.life/#/takinbacksunday/

More About Black Moon Monastics:

Black Moon Monastics are a Queer Black Aesc(th)estic Sonic duo weaving Soul-Folk, roots & rhythms, healing harmonies, and ancestral incantations to Awaken all beings to Freedom F(l)ight. Reflecting soular light, these expansive extraterrestrials cross genre, time, and space, conjuring unapologetic Black Magik with austronomous audacity. Impossible to confine to traditional musical methodologies, these Black Fe Folk play cast iron skillets, gumbo pots, medicine jars with sticks & stones, igniting our bones. These contemplative conjurings subversively inspire prayerful processionals that mobilize the Invisibilized. Descending with Dignity, this interdisciplinary duet brings reverence for Blackness wherever they land.  #MoonLanding2018 #RootToRise

Black Moon Monastics is the collective medicine of #DignityinProcess Artivist Director, ChE, and Director of Freedom Freequencies, kei slaughter.