Essay on excerpt from Alex Haley’s – 'Roots':

To life, the seed is central. 

The stem and branches of a plant are given their characteristics by the nature of the seed; and conversely, it is their shape, growth-patterns and appearance that enable the external on-looker to know what type of seed a given plant grows from. 

It is this connection of the plant to its seed, and of the seed to its out-growth that completes the vital circle of life-giving and life-taking that underpins the universe.

Just like the plant therefore, the animal kingdom is governed by processes and relations of child to parent, parent to child, which may to the cursory observer appear more complex but are no less fundamental than the relations of the seed and plant illustrated above.

This, to my thinking, is what edges men to points of near-neuroticism when the vital spiritual link between them and their ancestry is severed, as was the tragic case with  the  Afrikan denizens physically relocated to the Western hemisphere during the historical human transactions (read: slavery) of the sixteenth century.

For, how can a man embark on a journey without any idea of his itinerary; how far he needs to go, how early he must depart, which direction to take, which supplies to carry? 

The black man in the Americas and the Caribbean is one such traveler; a people caught in the vortex of disillusionment; because they are physically unable to commune with their ancestry for guidance; and the whirl-wind of denial; because they constantly succumb to the temptation of breaking free from the ‘nagging’ necessity of spiritually communing with their progenitors.

This, to my understanding, is what inspired Haley in his Roots.

           

       - Solomon Manzi,

Jan, 2015.