[Editor’s Note: This article is reprinted from Volume 32, No. 40 and The Final Call will continue to reprint articles written by our late and great Mother Tynnetta Muhammad.]
“And certainly We created man, and We know what his mind suggests to him–and We are nearer to him than his life-vein. When the two receivers receive, sitting on the right and on the left, He utters not a word but there is by him a watcher at hand. And the stupor of death comes in truth; that is what thou wouldst shun.” –Holy Qur’an, Surah 50, verses 16-19
The Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden,
Is the mapping of our DNA ever twining,
Like twisted fibers of our genetic code unwinding.
I remember being in my mother’s womb,
Catching hold to a fine twig unfolding,
The leaf was velvety to my touch,
which smelled of mint with frankincense and myrrh,
Broken from a tree on an Eastern shore,
Where sky meets earth in revery.
The horizon pierced my line of descent,
From my family tree of destiny.
Why must we travel through night and day,
Cut off from the mysteries of whence we came,
Where life and death co-mingle the same?
When we are born, we are not alone,
There is always a Presence in silent space,
Helping us to remember our sacred place.
We run and stumble and seek to hide,
With our fig leaves draped and aprons wrapped,
We wander through strange land and fields,
Having eaten the forbidden fruit,
While generation after generation live and die.
What is there beyond the grave,
Where the breath of life is sustained,
In a ripple light consciousness to attain?
Dust to dust and from dust we came,
As trailblazers from the archives of secrets kept,
In the midst of the garden I wept,
Reflecting on the perfect face of God,
Emanating from atomic particles from the whole.
This is where our DNA is stored,
In the midst of the Garden throughout the annals of time.
I was born in the city of Detroit on May 10, 1941, in Herman Keifer Hospital seven months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. My birth occurred one year before the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad was arrested by FBI agents on May 8, in Washington, D.C., on false charges of draft evasion. In a way I grew up in my formative years during a time of war at the end of World War II and the post-World War II era. Here was America, a warring nation, fighting with her European brothers which expanded into the Pacific.
America, a land surrounded by the two great oceans of the Atlantic and the Pacific, whose government and people were holding hostage a whole nation and people in the bondage of servitude slavery whose cry for mercy and deliverance night and day continued unheard and answered until God came Himself to intervene in our affairs by reason of our task masters which is being prolonged to this very hour. The cry for freedom, justice and equality of all Black people throughout the world has reached the Judgment Seat of the Almighty God to which he is responding rapidly.
Let us remember that Satan opposed God from the beginning as we read in the book of Genesis he was striving to be given a respited period of time to rule and dominate God’s people. “He said: (Satan or Iblis talking to God) My Lord, respite me to the day that they are raised. He said: (God speaking), Surely thou art of the respited ones. Till the day of the time made known. He said: Then, by Thy Might! I will surely lead them astray, Except Thy servants from among them, the purified ones.” (Surah 38, verse 79-83) We have now come to that time being made known in which God Himself has entered America in the Person of Master Fard Muhammad beginning in Detroit, Michigan, in 1930.
Now, He is Present with his angelic hosts in the entire world and universe as the One Supreme Power against Satan and his wicked world. In 1957, during my senior year in high school, I remembered sitting glued to the television screen watching the launch of the first space shuttle in orbit around the earth by Russian space scientists who called their shuttle Sputnik. This initiated the race of these two world political camps into the Space Age.
In this period of the mid-1950s, we as a people came to the completion of a 400-year period in which the Black man and family were held in bondage in America from 1555. Nineteen fifty-five marked 25 years since the founding of the Nation of Islam in America. Here in America I was born along with some 20 million Black people, with two million Indians, struggling to be liberated from the oppression of our open enemies and captors in this land. We are the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil that God forbade Adam to eat as food for the consequences would be death for his disobedience.
Are we the Black original fruit in the garden of Eden from which the germ of life in our DNA was grafted into the making of the White race through genetic engineering and birth control? Since that time we have produced generations whose life span has been shortened with death and destruction that has endured 6,000 years. Is this now the time of our enemy’s complete death as a result of his disobedience to God’s command?
While growing up in Detroit with my other siblings, which included my dear sister Karlotta, who has recently passed away in this last week, may God be pleased with her, were unaware of the prophetic picture that was unfolding in our lifetime that brought us to this evolutionary stage of our nation’s development for change, whose time has come. “He said: (God is speaking) The Truth is, and the Truth I speak that I shall fill hell with thee and with all those among them who follow thee. Say I ask you no reward for it; nor am I of the imposters. It is naught but a Reminder to the nations and certainly you will come to know about it after a time.” (Surah 38, verses 85-88)
“And the trumpet is blown. That is the day of threatening. And every soul comes, with it a driver and a witness.” —Holy Qur’an, Surah 50, verses 20-22
To be continued.
