A Mutiny of Morning: Reclaiming the Black Body from Heart of Darkness

Nikesha Breeze has taken pages from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, taken his words, and forced them to leave his colonized mind. She has made the words her own in poetic form. She illuminates the invisible Black voices inside, a radical, surgical, and unapologetic Black appropriation, at the same time as a careful birthing and spiritual road map. The resulting poems are sizzling purifications, violent restorations of integrity, pain, wound, bewilderment, rage, and, sometimes, luminous generosity.

The violent, scathing white supremacy of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is traversed page by page and word by word in this brilliant prayer/poem.

– Wende Marshall, co-editor, Insurrectionary Uprisings: A Reader in Revolutionary Nonviolence and Decolonization

This brilliant work will comfort and uplift you.

— Mindy Thompson Fullilove, MD, author of Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It

Breeze has made art for the Black body’s sake. Her poetics flips the script of the shrewd irony of Conrad’s racism by making its ‘object,’ the Black body, into what they actually were/are, viz., Black lives that matter/ed.

— Lou Turner, co-editor, Frantz Fanon’s Psychotherapeutic Approaches to Clinical Work: Practicing Internationally with Marginalized Communities

A Mutiny of Morning reframes and humanizes those who were systemically, forcibly dehumanized and silenced.

— Tinashe Goronga, medical doctor and public health leader in Zimbabwe

Breeze teaches us to unread and hear the ancestors. A Mutiny of Morning is a crushing collection that affirms the ‘old earth keeps rolling’ while not shying from telling truths of the brute force of European efficiency.

— Salimah Valiani, poet and author of 29 leads to love and Cradles

Nikesha Breeze has put her heart and soul into this path-breaking book. I am honored to endorse it.

— Kathryn Hall-Trujillo, MPH, Founder, Birthing Project USA, Ashoka Fellow

ISBN Print: 978-1-990263-35-4

Publication Date: May 2022

Page Count: 160

Binding Type: Softcover

Trim Size: 6in x 9in

Language: English