The Promise Returned
When the Flame Refused to Be Possessed

There is a history of humanity that begins in the dust. The promise was never meant to be possessed.

There is a history of humanity that does not begin in Greece and does not end in the West. It begins in the dust, among the men without city or wall whom tradition calls the Habiru (Hebrews); it drinks from the Nile, travels through the Sahara, through the ports of Al-Andalus, until it reaches the outskirts of Seville and the jungles of America.

La Promesa Devuelta traces that spiritual geography: the arc that connects the cosmogony of Kemet with the Akan kingdoms, the manuscripts of Timbuktu with the mysticism of St. John of the Cross, the cante jondo with the African drum. It documents the successive attempts to appropriate that flame and the reasons why none has been able to extinguish it completely. It points to present and future attempts and proposes a response from a specific geography - Afro-Hispanicity on both sides of the Atlantic.