hi🌳welcome to deep river cross over.

Read about the name of this blog ->here<-

This is a site for people of African descent who are Black. If you are non-Black & have found yourself here, please disengage from this site. If you are resourced, you can donate some $ to help me and my community survive-but that does not give you access to this blog if you are a non-Black donor. Thank you. CA: $cobbkiana, VM: @KSCOBB

A bit about me:

My name is Ajabu Sakile (Amaka, Isosha, Vikeli, Heshima, Abaza, Okunkun).

“Ajabu” = “amazement”. “wondrous” Swahili.
“Sakile” = “we’ve built”, “secure”, and “established.” Zulu-derived.

I’m a 27-year-old unambiguously Black brownskin dyke. I’m trans-misogyny exempt. Agender. You can use they/them pronouns or just my name to refer to me. At the time I'm writing this, I’m able-bodied, straight-sized, and I generally benefit from conventional physical desirability, at least by Black queer standards and some standards outside of Black queerness. Like many of us, I’m super traumatized and my brain works in multiple ways that affect my social skills, energy for life, and emotional stability every day. These things are disabling for me a good amount of the time. I am a survivor and do-er of difficult things in order to survive. Last but definitely not least, I'm a spirit inside of a vessel, working together with this body to gain knowledge and influence the collective spirit.

I live in the US on the east coast. My mother’s side of the family is from New York (Harlem) by way of Pineville, South Carolina, and my father's side is from (West) Baltimore, by way of North Carolina.

My parents fell for the American Dream so I unfortunately have had a ton of white, government-controlled education and I grew up in suburbia, not living in the city solely among Black people until 17. My family and I have been poor before, but I was sheltered from that reality and I did not experience any true hunger or poverty growing up. Didn't deal with any real money or housing issues until I was in my 20s, and even though I'm broke/disabled/have experienced housing insecurity now, I still consider myself to be pretty resourced because I have bio-family members that would very likely give me (physically) safe housing and food if I was desperate for it. The worldview that this sheltered upbringing had me in was a multi-layered state of ignorance that lasted over 20 years. The grief of that shift and integration of reality is a large part of my motivation for writing this blog, as I need vessel for the pain.

Now I live a slower, more natural, alternative lifestyle and I’m committed to detaching even more from normy-life until me and mine are living outside of capitalism. I’m an artist & organizer. I aim to always know myself as a radical, pan-African anarchist & separatist, etc., but the goals are what matter most to me. Long term, I dream of communal living, where me and my people; my chosen family can be self-sufficient. A group of Black radicals who support and uplift each other and heal after everything we've been through, in whatever ways we need to. A place to take back what was stolen from us and undo what was instilled in us by colonization. Everything I do is in support of that dream.

What to expect from this site:

Overall, this is a Black liberation & decolonization blog (where decolonization is also gender liberation and abolition) and I’m gonna use it to document what I pick up along my radicalization path, what I learn by reconnecting to my Africanness, the MANY pitfalls I experience, lessons, questions I need answered, poems, spiritual ideas, and so on. I also wanna talk about what kinds of psychological barriers I think we need to destroy in order to escape, speaking from my personal experience and from what I observe.

While all of the words here will be written by me, and a few of my thoughts may seem “original”, nothing I create happens in a vaccuum and I consider my knowledge to be a combination of research, (physically living) community wisdom, ancestral wisdom, and lived experience. My soul wants to express this combination of experience and my body is simply a vessel I can do that with. I hope the things I create here will help someone else or at least contribute to the collective Black consciousness.

Full disclosure, this blog is also an outlet for me and exposure therapy for contributing to discourse, trying/failing, critique, and conflict. Perfectionism and avoidance have held me back and wasted much of my life up to this point, so I’m tired of running from progress by not letting my thoughts be known. If you’re someone who likes to talk through things, I’m asking you (yes you!) to email me or comment on my writings so we can commune, learn, and share.

You can email me at deeprivercrossover@gmail.com. Thx for reading! I wish you freedom.