Silent Ebony

By Jesse Yaw

Silent Ebony explores Jesse Yaw’s most intimate, profound, and heartfelt collections of poetry and prose, which unravels and probes the most intricate and complex aspects of human nature, such as love, rejection, pain, trauma, faith, abuse, identity, war, relationships, family ties and pathology. It also explores racial injustice, trauma, using a myriad of carefully woven tactile and visual imagery, using personification as a means to allow readers to draw close to his mind, heart, spirit, and soul. 
Jesse’s poetry collection fearlessly addresses current political issues such as black political identity, the violation of black female pathology, and the struggle for freedom and racial equality. The collection of poetry serves as a sacred text, which provides healing, community, and an outpouring for the pure and unashamed voices of those who are marginalised, and those who seek rejuvenation. Providing a formidable social commentary on the state of modern society in the global village and life. 

Jesse Yaw is a Ghanaian intellectual, writer, poet, investor, political and economic theorist, and Businessman. He previously released his debut novel, The Deconstruction of Humanity’s Voice, But We Are Still Standing, which has been widely acclaimed and internationally recognised, and catalogued in the Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture in the United States of America, as well as the Black Cultural Archives in the United Kingdom.
He is a racial equality activist and philanthropist, an advocate for global peace, social reform, and justice. Jesse was born in the United Kingdom, his heritage sewn into the fabric of the Royal Ashanti tribe of the Akan people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Edizioni
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9791220149730

Book preview

Silence Ebony Woman

Silence, silence ebony woman. For I say in triumph, the absence of love is the repetition of meaning without purpose, for the currency of love is the identity of beauty without conditions and chains, like the circular iconic whip of semi-violent purple winds amongst the scent of subtle ivory ashes of the volcanic silent empty brown sea.

Silence, silence ebony woman. For I say in triumph, my Black political identity is intertwined with my pending Black political asylum. And thereby the leathery green acidic black awakening, and the political rebirth of our father Kwame Nkrumah is near again, ebony brothers please unite and stay united, fight and fight until the end is near, for our freedom is at stake, once again.

Silence, silence ebony woman. For I say in triumph, my black father was absent like the ebony ivory rocks of the dark night, and in his absence was the invincible torture of rejection, like lightning strikes of sulphur from the green shadowy skies, his absence was only comforted by the singular repeated streams of tears that comforted my mellow brown cheeks as a boy.

Silence, silence ebony woman. For I say in triumph, my black father was lost, and blinded and disappointed by the abuse he had experienced by his father, and like the cyclical curse of death he never forgave him or owned his truth, the same way I have not as his black son, forgiven him or owned my truth.

Silence, silence ebony woman. Like the whispering buzzing sound of steaming boiling water, my black father, and his father before him, never saw the calamity that awaited them, this sizzling steaming boiling water, as it falls upon their laps and burns their black skin, the same way this sizzling steaming water burnt my skin, as it came to comfort me every night, steaming, boiling water harassing my mellow brown skin as it splashes and whips tears down my face in silence.

Silence, silence black woman, with your dark deceptive cocoa ivory skin, silence, silence, as the black man violates you, the same way he violated your mother, your grandmother, the same way his father before him and his ancestors took your ancestors innocence, and you felt the steaming boiling water.

Silence, silence ebony woman, For I say in triumph, love is the absence of thought, the identity of beauty without conditions and chains.

Violation of black female pathology

Black mother you were always the face of beauty as I knew it, even in the face of political death, and despite the invisible chains you created for me to live within as a black boy.  Constantly, hypnotized by the diaries of hopeless dreams, tasteless transgressions of political hope, lustful green poisonous translucent seeds of doubt, like the movements of titanic rain drops.

For it has be foretold: the black mother makes the black man, the ebony child makes the black father.  Her umbilical cord, a black golden spiritual link to her ebony son, adorned with brazen caramel Egyptian honey. The burden of her heavy charcoal spirit, buttressed by heat, mixed with the harassment of envy, pain and destruction.

Black boy, if only you knew that everything is like the predestined ebony kite, whipping, blowing and lashing in the Ashanti winters across winds of metallic clouds of dancing milky white yoke. The Black boy will one day, speak his truth to his black mother, he will utter in desperation: I don’t trust women, the first black woman I loved broke my heart. She loved me on occasion and broke me on novation.  Yes, black mother, you were the first woman who broke my heart.

For I wasn’t her first love, but her chance to re-mould her former lover, who had stolen her youth, dreams, hopes, ideas and her soft volcanic spiritual beauty that lay dormant. I thought that I knew love, the black love my mother had shown me, but I knew nothing of love, as the love she gave me was mired in agony and pain, reflections of her former black lover was all she saw as she held me as a black baby boy. Yes, it was her time to take back control. This black specimen she had conceived in hate with this black lover, would be her outlet for her insecurities, vulnerabilities and distastes.

So, I must say: I was her first black son, but indeed I became her first black emotional husband. The years of abuse, that my black father a broken man, thrashed out onto his black wife, an innocent uncorrupted vessel from god, a black woman of pure grace and spiritual beauty. Resulted in the creation of piercing circular black holes, like a persistent ringworm that never seizes to stop burrowing into the pure and divine black flesh, leaving scars, insecurities and shame upon its victim.

For it has been foretold: the black mother makes the black man, the ebony child makes the black father.  Her umbilical cord, a black golden spiritual link to her ebony son, adorned with brazen caramel Egyptian honey.

Black mother you were always the face of beauty as I knew it, even in the face of political death, and despite the invisible chains you created for me to live within as a black boy.  Black mother, I see your pain I hear your rage, I feel your spirit dribble to the dance of Judaic horns, beautiful black woman you are still silent even now, in your freedom. You want to avoid the hot furnace and tides of hate of the Black man. Black mother, it is time for you to be free, and speak your truth!

Birth right of Ancient African identity

My birth right is my natural Black hair that shimmers like dark sugar cane, plaited into velvety soft braids. With patterns as complicated as the skin of the iconic leather Nile crocodile. My afro is my sacred halo that sits silently on my invisible African crown. The careless knots and fist of hair that spring from the seams of my scalp, do not and will not conform to Western society’s demands for my African hair to lay dormant. So keep staring your stare, your eyes wide open. For my emancipation awaits me at the door. Do you not know that conformity is the brother of repression and the sister of enslavement? And I choose to be free, to live in my freedom, and to own my unaltered beauty.

My birth right is my dark black golden ivory cornrows, twists and braids that possesses its own heavenly spirit and smile. It laughs and giggles shyly as it throws itself against the mercy of the violent green winds. Before they took my mother upon their slave boats, I remember my mother would string the strands of my hair that harassed my face, the same way she would string the bows of the Ashanti arrows. She would play a sweet soft Ewe flute that had the power to arrest this century. Against the dark red mahogany of my black ivory skin, against the sticky Ghanaian Ashanti winds that blew the whiskers of my thick stubborn woolly hair into a confused, jumbled wire of insecurity, mutiny and hopes of revolution.

My birth right is the maze of curls, growing from my scalp, and the history that came before me. I remember many years ago, I heard a distant slither, the rattle and demonic crack, just like when the European foreigners fired guns on our peaceful seashores. Just like the slither and crack of the hard red history of black enslavement, the sweaty grease from the blood of my ancestors caressing the lines in the dotted molecules of my scalp, like the harvest of the wheat bursting forth from the angelic Gabonese earth.

My birth right is the lines and cracks in my hard African feet, pressed against the hard ground of colonial manipulation.

Approaching, closer and closer is order and harmony, to the confused and muted data follicles that characterize the strands of my afro hair. As my mother pulls me to her and rests my arched back in between the harmony and peace of her thighs, she sits me in between her ebony thighs, which are sewn with Moroccan black diamonds, and wild incense from Eritrea. And she begins to pull the three fibres of the strands of my dormant thick brittle African hair, pressing her soft translucent apricot fingers into an arc of three, three that symbolizes freedom, emancipation and self-empowerment.

My birth right is the symbiotic pattern my mother began to weave in my hair, using her two fingers of her right hand to bend and discipline the thick strands of my stubborn hair, into perfect unison and the single finger from her left hand to intertwine the third strand of my black ivory hair into an interlocking triangular pattern of harmony. One straight line of black community and black power. My black mother, weaved and weaved, intertwined and pressed the whiskers of the fine threads of my head, using the same movement and thrashing of the cocoa and mango she would pick from the fields in the deep bushes of Kumasi. The same thrashing, she would later use on the cotton fields in Georgia with a whip to her back, when they conquered our small village in Kumasi. Like the old African saying, three heads have always been greater than one.

You see like the hypnotic African dumbs, and electric patterns of the Kente clothe that my mother used to clothe me in, when she carried me on her back, into the vibrant Kumasi market to sell palm wine to the Egyptian and Algerian merchants. Her Kente clothe and its electric patterns, was a secret code, that drew the paths and gateway to our hidden black golden crowns, our rainbow-coloured jewels, the intricacies and keys to our wisdom, knowledge and intimacy, that sat hidden in the purple Ashanti mountains shrouded in Egyptian honey, black wine, Tunisian blackberries.  Guarded by black lions with blue eyes and black panthers with white golden amulets around their necks and tails, black birds and black bees, that flew in the same patterns my black mother would plait the cornrows on my brittle African hair. Into a triangular arc of three, that three that symbolized, freedom, emancipation and self-empowerment.

For my Ghanaian mother once told me, the patterns that I plait in your nappy hair, the black thread that I wrap around the strands of your hair, the wisdom and dexterity in the design is not about you or fashion. But it is about the future of the Ashanti nation and protecting our culture and heritage. It is about the secrets to our identity, the secrets to our destinies and the codes to awaken black consciousness. Ask Yaa Asantewaa, she will tell you...It tells a five-hundred-year-old map, passed down from generation to generation not through folk story or a drawn map.

But through the patterns we weave onto each of our daughter’s heads when we cornrow onto the fibres of their brittle African scalps, the map and golden nutrients to the unbiblical cord to our ancestors which will forever be. They found the Ashanti stool, but they never found the map to the Golden white amulet, the purple gold ring of life or the purple Ashanti mountains shrouded in Egyptian honey, black wine, Tunisian blackberries, black purple gold.

As I said, when I first met you, my birth right is my natural Black hair that shimmers like dark sugar cane plaited into velvety soft braids, with patterns as complicated as the skin of the iconic leather Nile crocodile. My afro is my sacred halo that sits silently on my invisible African crown. They found the Ashanti stool, but they never found the map to our consciousness or the golden unbiblical cord.

Theft of Foreign poisoned love

As I cover my half-baked eyelids, glancing across at the pulverising auburn sun, the Jabal Natfa beckons at me, her soft translucent sunburnt apricot skin burns me like wild thick iconic Smokey rosemary, thrashing itself across my dark red skin, she sings whispers of hope and racial equality, as I wipe the salty petrified sweat that tickles her face, like the violent bubbles of the deceptive biblical deity, Delilah. I wonder, if time was circular, like the motionless reflection of a stale mirror, and nothing was truly new, would you have warned me about this poisoned love?

Foreign girl, if I forcibly commanded my glittery soft dark chocolate cocoa fingers to gently remove your tight long black acidic cape that masked so perfectly your mischievous sexual beauty, your forged identity, your intimate fear, the scent of your thick black stubborn curly hair dribbling dangerously off the sleeves of the dimple in your olive bare back, and consequently, I saw