Saraqueena- For Lena Waithe
In the confines of the Jungles in South Los Angeles, Saraqueena, the auspicious and environmentally anointed royal highness of the ghetto, is being sauntered through the dilapidated province to find the courtship of her betrothed to be. However, her suiters are the Neterhu, spirited seers who see the world as it will become who are less flesh and blood than they are flitting matter and enchantment. In order to mate her preordained significant, she must court the embodiment of African Proverbs in order to create one so that she can gain dominion of the enclave that her ancestors birthed but that was pilfered by the village under-seers.
In her ceremonial selection trial, instead of sitting-in to occupy the Lodge of the Loomers, she stands-up to confront the institution that decides the vaccination protocol of the clinics in the ghetto and she and her cohorts are summarily punished by being stricken with abnormal plagues: They all look the same, they men have flowing luxurious locks while the women struggle to grow any length of hair, men and women collectively sleep all day and, as a collective, they defy the evolutionary domestication to be groomed by the deities to become the spiritual heads of community. In order to break this curse, Saraqeena must find the African Proverbs that scattered from her uprising and re-create them to reflect the guidance of the urban indigenous.
As war breaks out in the province, she must pass the test of all tests to stop the war before the plagues take the community. She must give life to an African Proverb and sacrifice it by giving it over to the census bureau at 16 to change the data that lawmakers use to make Black people believe they are a group on the verge of extinction. If she fails, the child will remain nameless and one of her three daughters will be fatherless, left to find Moostafa and his evil brother Scab’s sons to mate with to beget the deliverer who will undo the un-evolution that her people have been stricken with. All the while Saraqeena must battle the pernicious Fetter Neter, who created Ebonics as a language to hold back the genius of the native people so that their profundity can’t be heard, only scoffed at and marginalized. And when the war subsides Saraqueena must find the teachers in the community who are descendants of parents who went to segregated schools to arrange marriages between them and the remaining African Proverbs to undue Fetter Netter’s spell on syntax instantly undoing the plagues.