A Sneak Peek into My Next Literary Project
By Natisha S. Jordan aka Benu Ma’at
A Hum Before Language
Before the dual suns, there was the deep hum.
Before the Lodestone, there was the Ogdoad’s song.
These words began as an epigraph – a brief verse tucked at the margin of a larger story I’m calling the Ledger and The Crown series. But some songs refuse to stay at the edges of a page. They grow. They wind outward. They gather force. And before I knew it, what started as a single stanza had become its own living thing: The Creation Hymn: A Spiral of Song.
This post isn’t a final release – it’s a threshold. An invitation to step in before the book does.
From Epigraph to Movement
I recently had the opportunity to submit a spiral poem for an open call. As I worked on “Ledger of the Living Song,” something unexpected happened: the material demanded expansion. The epigraph wasn’t meant to be a footnote. It was meant to be the foundation.
Now, in development as a prose-poetry hybrid, The Creation Hymn maps a vast spiritual geography. It moves between two vital poles—the ancestral heart of Africa and the concrete canyons of the Bronx – and across the immense, vibrating expanse of the African Diaspora that stretches between them.
We do not navigate this distance with compasses or drawn borders. We navigate it the way it has always been navigated: through resonance, through rhythm, through the stubborn continuance of collective memory.
Why the Spiral?
You might wonder: why spiral? Why not a circle? Why not a line?
Because a circle repeats. A spiral returns – but each return arrives from a wider position, a deeper vantage. What you encounter again, you encounter differently. History, in the spiral’s logic, is not a straight line moving away from us. It is a continuous, widening loop of survival, adaptation, and transformation.
That is the shape of this work. Each section turns on the same core frequencies – sound, breath, rhythm, migration, voice, memory, song – but each turn reveals something the last position could not see. You will not read the same idea twice. You will read it deeper.
What You’ll Find Inside
The book unfolds in two movements:
- First Movement: Ledger of the Living Song – Grounds the work in the embodied world. The cities, bodies, and daily acoustics of the diaspora.
- Second Movement: The Creation Hymn: A Spiral of Song – Moves into the doctrinal and ceremonial. A hymn tracing the original frequency from its source through every form it has ever taken, and delivering it, unbroken, into the present.
Together, they form a single sacred ledger. Not a cold archive, but a living record of resilience written in the language of vibration, movement, and the enduring beat of the human heart.
Themes Explored:
| Theme | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Breath as Witness | Our breath has always been the archive – fragile, invisible, and impossible to fully confiscate. |
| Rhythm as Law | Before language had grammar, there was the beat. First code. First covenant. First algorithm of survival. |
| Migration as Geometry | Not a line, but a coil. A sacred and continuous unfolding across centuries and oceans. |
| The Choir | Polyphony of voices converging across time zones, languages, and generations. |
| The Ledger | Memory and record – not kept in vaults, but carried in skin, braid patterns, recipes, and street signs. |
An Excerpt to Consider
“It lives beneath language, beneath memory, beneath the oldest name anyone has ever carried. It is a vibration in the bone marrow of existence – the pulse of the djembe at dusk, the ocean’s slow exhale against a distant shore… My grandmother, her knuckles gnarled like baobab roots, would tap it out on my palm – Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. The rhythm of continuance.”
I understood, even then, that she was passing something ancient from her body into mine. That this was not nostalgia. It was instruction.
Who Is This For?
This work is for anyone who has asked:
- Where am I from?
- What did they leave me?
- How do I carry what came before without letting it weigh me down?
- What does memory sound like when it refuses to be silenced?
If you are a reader, writer, grant committee member, curator, or fellow artist working at the intersection of cultural preservation and literary innovation – I invite you to witness this work as it takes shape.
Our laws are not stone. They are song.
Stay Connected as This Project Takes Shape
This excerpt represents only the opening turn of the spiral. There is more to come—including additional movements, companion pieces, and collaborative opportunities in music, visual art, and performance.
If you’d like to be among the first to know when chapters release, workshops open, or grant partnerships form:
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The choir has been assembling longer than you know. The ledger has a line waiting for your witness.
Step in. Listen.
The music is already playing.
