‘The Prophets’ Explores Black Love and Memory in a Time of Trauma

What’s so adored at first, after which corroded within the eyes of the others by Amos, is Isaiah and Samuel’s selection to like, their consent, their selecting and selecting and selecting of one another, a selection exterior of drive or order, in a nature we (we!) have lengthy forgotten.

One of many blessings of “The Prophets” is its lengthy reminiscence. Jones makes use of the voices from the prologue to talk throughout time, to character and reader alike. These brief, lyric-driven chapters struck me as instructive and redemptive makes an attempt at therapeutic historic wounds, tracing a map again to the potential for our native, queer, warrior Black selves. These voices are Black collective data given form, the oral custom talking in your face and setting you proper.

One other means this blessing takes form is thru a subplot centering on Kosii and Elewa, two homosexual (I’m utilizing our phrase, my trying to title this outdated factor for us) lovers who precede Isaiah and Samuel. We meet Kosii and Elewa by flashback scenes, on their wedding ceremony day, on the eve of their village’s invasion by Dutch enslavers. From their wedding ceremony to captivity on the stinking haul of a ship en path to America, Kosii and Elewa’s love, torture and eventual insurrection act as a direct echo of Isaiah and Samuel, lovers beloved by their folks, interrupted by the wickedness of whiteness.

Via these characters and their tales, “The Prophets” calls, throughout time, on queer warriors, girl kings, root girls and boys in love to color a protracted queer Black historical past, a historical past of rising in opposition to, of ever making one’s means again to freedom.

Is Jones pointing to the present second we discover ourselves residing in? Black folks, as soon as once more, similar as all the time, dying and combating the murderous avatars of white greed for one more piece of freedom. After one other summer season within the streets combating for our collective life — at marches usually led by Black girls and Black queers whom whiteness and its God have taught us to hate so effectively — I arrived at this ebook each gracefully and loudly saying, “Keep in mind who you might have lengthy been.” Jones appears to be reaching throughout centuries of blood and reminiscence in an try and shake awake a warrior armed with weapon and wit that lies sleeping in his imagined, beloved, Black reader.

All of it — the seven voices, the midnight blue lovers, the warrior girls, the shadows fats with ancestors — pressed upon my Black coronary heart asking me to recollect earlier than the boats, to not flip from the horror of the fields and see what has all the time been most lovely and unkillable in us — our methods, our struggle, our magic, our love. “The Prophets” makes an attempt to provide its Black characters and Black viewers the identical items — our proper names, our Black realizing, a freedom exterior of time and circumstance.