Vessels of Revolution: On Akinsanya Kambon, Suppressed History and the Fire We’re Living Through

I could have talked with Akinsanya Kambon for hours. As the full, uncut version of our conversation reveals, Akinsanya is simply full of stories — especially history stories. He seems to know the name of every freedom fighter there ever was, on every continent, across the centuries. That’s not an accident, it’s his practice and his beautiful expression of resistance.

Kambon cares about history because he knows what happens when it’s taken away. Take the story of his great great grandfather, a participant in the 1811 so-called German Coast uprising, in which enslaved Africans walked off their plantation and were joined by hundreds more, marching toward freedom across Louisiana. It was one of the largest rebellions of enslaved people in American history — and one of the least taught, least known, most deliberately buried. Akinsanya’s ancestor was captured in the act of escape and his murderers put his severed head on a spike. The enslavers and their allies lined the road with severed heads in an effort to send their message: don’t try. Don’t dream. Don’t dare to act free.

But that’s not the message Kambon received, as you’ll hear. The story didn’t intimidate him. It empowered him. It gave him a new sense of what he and his people were capable of, what they had always been capable of, what no amount of enforced forgetting could finally erase.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot since we spoke; about what it means to put a head on a spike; about who that gesture is really meant to serve.

We are living, right now, through a fire that is not metaphorical. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched deadly airstrikes across Iran, assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and triggering a torrent of retaliatory missiles and drones across the entire Middle East. Five weeks in, the human toll has reached at least 2,076 killed and more than 26,500 wounded in Iran alone. The US/Israeli assault has hit bridges and schools and destroyed a century-old medical research center, the Pasteur Institute in Tehran.1 Iranian missiles have set Kuwait’s largest oil refinery on fire. Good Friday services were canceled across the Middle East. Jews in Tel Aviv held Passover Seders in bomb shelters.2

Iran has closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly twenty percent of the world’s oil and gas supplies pass, disrupting global trade and sending energy prices soaring. The fire engulfing the Gulf is being felt in every household that heats with oil, every country that ships by sea, every family with someone in uniform or in the crossfire, not to mention all those who rely on the food that travels on those waters.

All this, to change a regime, or eradicate Iran’s nuclear capacity, or rain holy hell on infidels. The motivations morph, and the men on the murder-spree seek to manage our memories of what they’ve said, what history teaches, what we know and feel in our own bodies.

And this is happening alongside — not separately from — a domestic assault on memory itself. The current administration has moved with striking speed and deliberate intent to scrub, sideline and eliminate whole chapters of the American story from public institutions, public memory and public life. MAGA bureaucrats have dismantled diversity offices, boxed up archives, chiseled history markers off national monuments and more. The word mangler in the White House has ordered the words equity, inclusion, resistance to be removed from official documents, as if erasure of the word erases the thing. As if you can behead the idea of freedom by severing the head that held it.

It isn’t new. Every generation of power has tried some version of erasure. What is striking now is the velocity and the breadth. This isn’t a skirmish over one textbook in one state. This is a coordinated effort to determine what the country — what the world — is allowed to remember about itself, and therefore what it is allowed to imagine for its future. You cannot build a different world from a history you’ve been told doesn’t exist.

Kambon has spent his life pushing back against memory loss. As a sculptor, a muralist, a former Black Panther, a storyteller of ferocious precision and warmth, he has devoted himself to making visible what others have worked to hide. His art is not decorative. It is documentary. It is defiant. It is, in the oldest sense of the word, revolutionary — not because it calls for building barricades but because it insists on turning, and turning again, back toward the truth and longing.

I keep returning to one thing Kambon said. He talked about the people who came before him not as distant figures in a textbook but as living presences, as relatives, as sources of instruction and strength that he carries with him. They inform how he sees, what he makes, how he moves through a world that has never made things easy for people who look like him or think like him or refuse to be quiet like him.

That is a kind of memory as survival. Memory not as nostalgia but as fuel.

I am seeking that fuel these days, and thinking about what keeps people going when the fire is hot; when the smoke is visible from satellite, when the sirens are real, when the body count climbs daily, the diplomacy appears fake, the UN Secretary General is warning of a wider war, and everywhere trust stands at zero.

My partner Elizabeth and I have been thinking a lot about memory, too: what survives, what gets lost, and who does the remembering.

Spending time with Akinsanya Kambon, I came away convinced of something I need to be convinced of regularly in this moment: that some stories, like some people, cannot finally be suppressed. That beauty can come out of fire. That a head on a spike is not the end of the story — it is sometimes, against all odds and all intention, only the beginning.

In the weeks ahead I’ll be sharing something more personal here — about art, communication, memory and what happens when the stories we tell begin to change. More soon.

Catch my interview with artist Akinsanya Kambon this week on Laura Flanders & Friends and subscribe to access the full, uncut audio.

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