Every year on June 19th, Black communities across the United States celebrate Juneteenth—the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Black Americans in Galveston, Texas, were informed of their freedom, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. Freedom is an ongoing struggle, and today all of our liberation is tied to a free Palestine.
For generations, Juneteenth has been a day of joy, remembrance, resilience, and reunion in Black American communities. I’ve celebrated Juneteenth in places as varied as a Harlem street, an Islamic Center in the Bronx, and a church in Galveston, Texas where it originated. For as long as I can remember, Juneteenth has been considered a Black holiday— but I believe it really is so much more than a victory for my race. Though a federal holiday in the United States since 2021, Juneteenth is still not understood or recognized by the nation for what it really is – a marker of moral victory for the entire United States.
“The country could not call itself free while slavery existed within it.”
As Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed reminds us in On Juneteenth, “The country could not call itself free while slavery existed within it.”¹ The abolition of slavery was not simply a milestone for Black Americans; it was a necessary step in bringing the country closer to its founding ideals of liberty and justice for all.
An Afro-Caribbean American Perspective on Juneteenth
I was born in Brooklyn to parents from Trinidad and Guyana. As such, I consider myself as much African American as I am Afro-Caribbean. As an Afro-Caribbean American Muslim woman and conceptual artist, I hold space for both the African American experience and the Caribbean freedom struggle as I recognize that their unique characteristics. My life and creative work weaves together these overlapping legacies of survival, spirit, and cultural reclamation.
Juneteenth reminds me that freedom is a continuous act—a conversation between past and future, ocean and land, memory and imagination. It belongs to all of us.
Emancipation Day in Guyana: Honoring Freedom on August 1st
In Guyana – the simultaneously Caribbean and South American nation where my mother is from, Emancipation Day is celebrated on August 1st, marking the 1834 abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Yet, like in the U.S., true freedom wasn’t immediate. An exploitative “apprenticeship” system extended the bondage of many until 1838.
Emancipation Day in Guyana is one of the nation’s most vibrant national holidays. The streets come alive with the sights of West African fabrics, the rhythms of ancestral drumming, and the aromas of traditional Guyanese dishes of African origin like metemgee, cook-up rice, and foo foo.
Food is culture, memory, and resistance. As culinary historian Jessica B. Harris explains in High on the Hog, our dishes carry history in every bite, preserving African identity through flavors and rituals passed down over centuries.⁴ My 3-channel film Metem is about the ways my Afro Caribbean immigrant family has held onto our memories and culture through storytelling and traditional dishes.
How My Film Metem Preserves Culinary Memory and Ancestral Dialogue
My Metem film documents my mother’s return to Guyana with me after her 52 years away – not by sharing photos or videos of the trip, but by gathering with my Guyanese family around a meal of traditional Guyanese dishes to celebrate and honor our reconnection to our ancestral land, reflect on the the experience and document it through the act of storytelling.
For the longest, without having actually been to my mother’s native-land of Guyana, the food from this place was one of my deepest connections to it. I knew Guyana so because of it’s taste and I preserved it’s culture because I knew how to cook it’s foods. Food comes from the earth and our cultural dishes reconnect us to the land.
That meal of Guyanese dishes wasn’t just dinner—it was a ritual of return, remembrance, and cultural resilience that stretches even further back to that lands of India (where the curry and roti originates), Africa (the origin of Metemgee), and even deeper into the history of the Americas (with the pepperpot dish). In my art practice, I use storytelling and visual media to hold space for these histories.
As in Juneteenth celebrations, the act of preparing and sharing food in Metem is a form of ancestral dialogue. It reminds us that freedom lives not only in laws and protests, but in kitchens, songs, and sacred gatherings.³ Metem, named after metemgee, a hearty Afro-Guyanese stew reminds us that even in spite of the systematic attacks on African culture throughout the diaspora, we preserve our African traditions as we embody and digest it through our traditional cuisine.
A Shared Global Tradition of Black Liberation
Guyana’s Emancipation Day and Juneteenth are threads in a global tapestry of Black liberation commemorations. Across the Caribbean:
- Trinidad and Tobago marks Emancipation Day on August 1st with street processions, drumming, and tributes to African ancestors.
- Jamaica’s Emancipation Day includes religious ceremonies blending Christian and African traditions.
- Haiti, the world’s first Black republic, continues to honor its 1804 independence, won through history’s only successful enslaved-led revolution.²
And in Brazil, Black Awareness Day celebrates Afro-Brazilian heritage and resistance. These commemorations remind us that Black freedom is hard-won, precious, and ongoing.
“We Must Become Fluent in One Another’s Histories”
As the visionary writer and scholar M. Jacqui Alexander once wrote, *“We must become fluent in one another’s histories.”*⁵ That fluency is essential to the work of Black freedom—across the diaspora, across generations, across geographies.
In my participatory art installation, To Know One Another, I create spaces for those braided conversations. Rooted in hospitality and storytelling, the work invites people to sit, share tea, and deepen their understanding of each other’s histories, faiths, and liberation movements.
It’s not enough to know only our own struggles. We must understand how emancipation moved through Texas in 1865, Guyana in 1834, Haiti in 1804, and that the struggle for a liberated Palestine is the freedom movement of today. Our stories are not isolated—they braid together like strands in a cornrow, inseparable and strong.
“If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
The Work of Freedom Is Ongoing
As Toni Morrison urged, “If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”⁶
This principle shapes not only how we remember the past, but how we actively shape a liberated future. It is the heartbeat of my immersive installation The Clinic, a sanctuary of text, sound, and light where the struggles of Black Muslim communities and the ongoing fight for Palestinian liberation are held in sacred conversation.
The Clinic embodies Morrison’s charge: to use whatever platforms, resources, and freedoms we have to tend to the liberation of others. For my enslaved African ancestors, the end of slavery came after centuries of Black captivity across the Americas. This should give us hope that our struggles for freedom today are not in vain. Even the racist settler colonial state of Israel will soon come to an end, and Palestine will be free, inshaAllah. The oppression and genocide of Palestinians is as much of a stain in our world as slavery was to an America that called itself the land of the free. A global ethics of solidarity will free us all!
Toward Collective Liberation
Wherever you are this Juneteenth, I invite you to reflect not only on what freedom meant in 1865—but what it means today, across oceans, generations, and liberation movements.
Let’s honor that legacy by remembering, resisting, gathering in joy, and committing ourselves to the unfinished work of freedom. As Eddie Glaude Jr. reminds us in Begin Again, the Black freedom struggle has always been a moral reckoning for the United States, urging the nation to finally live up to its promise of democracy for all.
And as Alexander teaches, we must learn one another’s histories. Only then can we act in true solidarity, nourishing liberation movements from Texas to Port-of-Spain, from Georgetown to Gaza.
Join the conversation by subscribing to my newsletter, and make sure to check out The Mirror and the Map a FREE reflective art journal shaped by my Full Circle limited edition print series. I designed to help curators, academics and deep thinkers trace their own stories — through prompts, artwork, and writing space — at the intersection of culture, identity, and spirituality.
Click here to download your copy.
📚 Citations
- Gordon-Reed, Annette. On Juneteenth. Liveright, 2021.
- Moore, Brian L. and Michele A. Johnson. In the Shadows of Empire: The Global African Diaspora in the Americas. University of the West Indies Press, 2008.
- Glaude, Eddie S. Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. Crown, 2020.
- Harris, Jessica B. High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America. Bloomsbury, 2011.
- Alexander, M. Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Duke University Press, 2005.
- Morrison, Toni. A Humanist View. 2003.