The Rooted Verse

Ink, rhythm, and root work. This is where our stories stretch, sing, and stay.

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For the culture, from the soul.
  • WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING?

    WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING?

    (How Forever on Netflix Becomes a Case Study in the Beauty and Complexity of Black Culture).

    Streaming platforms have become the new griots. They archive our stories, amplify our voices, and reflect our communities back to us in ways that challenge, affirm, and inspire. One such story that has quietly bloomed into something powerful on Netflix is Forever, a modern reimagining of Judy Blume’s 1975 novel. This version centers Black love, Black identity, and Black culture at its heart.

    More than a coming-of-age drama, Forever is a cultural mirror. It is a case study in what it means to grow up Black, brilliant, and beautifully complex in a world that often struggles to see us whole.

    The Setting: A Love Letter to Black Los Angeles

    Set in South Los Angeles, Forever is not just about Keisha and Justin. It is about a place, a rhythm, and a culture. The series places Black life at the center. Crenshaw, Baldwin Hills, and Leimert Park are not just scenery. They are living, breathing characters. The show moves away from trauma-centered narratives and instead focuses on community, creativity, and care.

    It highlights barbershops and beauty salons, skate parks, front porches, family gatherings, and the soft beauty of everyday life. It honors spaces where aunties gossip, fathers try their best, and young people fall in and out of love beneath golden California skies.

    By doing this, Forever treats Black neighborhoods as sacred. Not because they are without problems, but because they are filled with life. These are places where generations have survived, created, resisted, and loved out loud.

    The Characters: Exploring Young Black Identity

    Keisha is a confident track star with a free spirit. Justin is a quiet, nerdy basketball player with a thoughtful heart. Their relationship is not just about romance. It is about discovery. Together, they explore what it means to love for the first time while still figuring out who they are as individuals.

    Keisha challenges conventional ideas of what it means to be a young Black girl. She is bold but gentle, strong yet vulnerable. Justin gives us a refreshing version of Black masculinity. He is emotionally present, curious, and kind.

    Their story becomes a reflection of how young Black people navigate expectation, ambition, uncertainty, and connection.

    These characters are not written to be perfect. They are layered, flawed, evolving, and real. And in that honesty, Forever captures something rare. It reminds us that Black youth deserve the space to grow without always being symbols or cautionary tales.

    The Culture: Sound, Style, and Spirit

    Forever is soaked in culture. The soundtrack flows with music that shaped generations, from R&B and hip-hop to Afrobeats and soul. Each song sets the mood, evokes memory, and carries emotion.

    The fashion is intentional. From gold hoops to vintage tees, from laid edges to natural curls, everything worn is an expression of identity.

    Hair, language, family rituals, and spiritual gestures are treated with care. The show includes scenes with silk scarves, braids, kitchen conversations, and hallway glances that feel both intimate and familiar.

    This is not diversity created for performance. This is lived Blackness. It is layered, specific, and lovingly presented.

    The Themes: Storytelling as Soft Power

    Forever explores themes that are both timely and timeless.

    Consent and communication: The series addresses conversations around intimacy and self-awareness with honesty. It invites young people to express needs and boundaries without shame.

    Mental health and vulnerability: The characters feel deeply. They cry, talk, reflect, and seek help. These moments are never framed as weakness but as strength.

    The power of choice: At the heart of the story is agency. The right to choose your path, your partner, your timing, and your version of freedom. Forever teaches that love should not erase your sense of self. Instead, it should help you find it.

    Why It Matters: Centering Joy and Growth

    Representation is not just about showing Black faces. It is about showing full lives. Lives with rhythm, complexity, contradiction, and grace.

    Forever reminds us that joy is not a luxury. It is part of the journey. Watching Keisha and Justin grow reminds us of our own soft beginnings, our own questions, and the people who shaped us when we were still learning how to shape ourselves.

    It also tells young Black viewers something they do not hear enough. Your softness matters. Your curiosity matters. Your love story, no matter how it ends, is worth telling.

    So, What Are You Watching?

    You could be watching a teen romance. You could be watching a story about first love. But Forever offers much more.

    You are watching Black culture unfold in gentle, everyday moments. You are seeing a new generation step into their own stories with pride, honesty, and vision. You are learning that tenderness, too, can be powerful.

    So the next time someone asks, “What are you watching?”
    Tell them you are watching healing.
    You are watching honesty.
    You are watching legacy in the making.

    You are watching Forever.

    —————

    Written by Aisha O. Balogun

    Cover Image Via ew.com

  • The Power of Cultural Memory: How Storytelling Preserves Identity in a Digital Age

    In every culture, memory lives not just in monuments or museums but in the stories passed from one generation to the next. These stories are not always written in books. Sometimes they are carried in names, songs, recipes, rituals, or even silence. For African and African diasporic communities, storytelling has long been more than a means of communication. It has been a method of survival, resistance, and reclamation. It is through storytelling that cultural memory is kept alive, and in this digital age, that tradition is evolving in powerful and visible ways.

    Memory as Resistance: The Legacy of the Griot

    In many West African cultures, griots were seen as walking archives. These oral historians and musicians held the genealogies, traditions, and spiritual stories of entire communities in their minds. They preserved collective memory with accuracy and performance, ensuring that the past would never be forgotten.

    A prominent example from history is Amadou Hampâté Bâ, a Malian historian and ethnologist who famously said, “In Africa, when an old man dies, a library burns.” His life’s work was dedicated to preserving oral tradition, and his writing helped document centuries of cultural memory that colonial archives had ignored.

    Griots preserved cultural truth when imperial systems tried to erase it. In the Americas, the tradition of oral storytelling transformed into spirituals, folktales like Br’er Rabbit, and coded language used along the Underground Railroad. In every context, storytelling was a way to say we are still here.

    The Harlem Renaissance: Rebirth Through the Written Word

    In the 1920s and 30s, the Harlem Renaissance became a literary and artistic movement that reclaimed cultural memory through Black voices telling Black stories. Writers like Zora Neale Hurston studied folklore in the American South, preserving stories that had survived through slavery and migration. Her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God reflects not just fictional characters but the deep oral traditions of Black communities.

    Langston Hughes, through poetry and prose, chronicled the everyday beauty, pain, and resilience of Black life. His work was storytelling with soul, rooted in memory, music, and migration. Harlem became the new village, and Black art became the archive.

    Modern-Day Storykeepers: Digital Griots and Cultural Curators

    Today, storytelling takes many forms. In the digital age, the new griots are poets, artists, historians, curators, and creators who use online platforms to preserve and share culture.

    Dr. Jessica B. Harris, food historian and author of High on the Hog, has traced how African foodways shaped American cuisine. Through her work and the Netflix adaptation, millions were introduced to the historical roots behind dishes like okra stew, black-eyed peas, and jollof rice. Every recipe became a story. Every ingredient, a thread in the larger narrative of displacement and adaptation.

    On social media, creators like Hannah Azieb Pool and The Black Archives share cultural history through images, quotes, and family stories that might otherwise be forgotten. These digital storytellers honor the past while building accessible archives that educate and inspire.

    The work of Black archivists, historians, and culture writers is shaping how memory is documented in real time. These platforms do more than share information. They foster collective remembrance, bridging the personal and the political, the ancestral and the contemporary.

    Preserving What Cannot Be Googled

    In a world where algorithms reward speed and virality, storytelling rooted in memory asks for something slower, deeper, and more intentional. It invites communities to remember not just facts but feelings. It asks people to archive not just what happened but what it meant.

    Some stories may never trend, but they hold the truths of a people. A grandmother’s funeral song. A Yoruba or Ewe proverb. A childhood game played under a mango tree. A letter written from a city that no longer exists. These are not just fragments. They are heritage.

    Conclusion: The Future of Cultural Memory

    The work of remembering is sacred. It is also ongoing. Cultural memory must be preserved not only through formal institutions but through everyday storytelling. Through writing, sharing, archiving, and honoring.

    From the griots of Mali to Zora Neale Hurston, from Jessica B. Harris to today’s digital curators, the tradition continues. This is not just nostalgia. This is legacy.

    Cultural memory is how identity survives displacement. It is how Black communities continue to rise, reclaim, and reimagine. In an age of vanishing attention, choosing to remember and choosing to share becomes an act of care and cultural protection.

    Somewhere between oral tradition and digital expression, the story continues.

    Written by: Aisha O. Balogun, For The Rooted Verse

    Instagram: @TheRootedVerse | @AishaOBalogun

    X: @TheRootedVerse

  • Renaissance in Motion: Honoring the Legacy, Shaping the Future

    Renaissance in Motion: Honoring the Legacy, Shaping the Future

    On this day in 1851, Isabella Baumfree (also known as Sojourner Truth) stood before a crowd at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio and spoke words that continue to echo through time. With clarity, strength, and conviction, she asked the world to see her for all that she was: Black, woman, and undeniably human. Her now-iconic speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?”, challenged the social order and exposed the layered injustices rooted in both race and gender. That moment was more than a speech. It was a turning point. It was transformation in motion.

    This historic event invites a deeper reflection on the idea of renaissance within Black culture.

    A renaissance is often understood as a rebirth, a cultural awakening that breathes new life into art, ideas, and identity. While the word often brings to mind the European artistic revival of centuries past, its spirit has long been alive in Black communities around the world. It is not confined to a single period or place. It rises again and again, through words, rhythm, innovation, memory, and imagination.

    The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s is one of the most vivid examples. It was more than a creative movement. It was a reclamation. Through literature, music, art, and thought, Black creatives affirmed their humanity, challenged stereotypes, and redefined cultural identity. The work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Duke Ellington, and Aaron Douglas helped shape a new vision of what it meant to be Black, expressive, and free.

    Today, a new renaissance is unfolding. This one transcends borders and is amplified through digital platforms, virtual communities, and global storytelling. Contemporary Black writers are redefining literature. Artists are painting truth and memory onto new canvases. Musicians are blending ancestral rhythms with present-day soundscapes. The energy is rooted in tradition, but it reaches forward, embracing what is possible.

    Technology plays a vital role in this current renaissance. Black creators are not just participating in innovation. They are shaping it. Afrofuturism, for instance, blends science fiction, history, and culture to imagine liberated futures through a distinctly Black lens. It is a form of storytelling that is both visionary and grounding. It preserves the past while designing new possibilities.

    This renaissance is not just about revival. It is about remembrance. It is about reinvention. It is the future blooming from the seeds our ancestors planted. Seeds of resistance, hope, wisdom, and beauty.

    Black culture continues to rise. Not only through resistance but through rebirth. From the soul of Harlem’s jazz to the vibrancy of modern Black art, literature, and technology, each era brings its own awakening.

    This renaissance is memory turned into motion. It is identity reclaimed. It is the future unfolding through the creativity and courage passed down across generations.

    And in remembering the voice of Sojourner Truth, that legacy lives on. Her words are more than history. They are a reminder that the path to liberation has always been lined with both fire and vision.

  • About TRV

    About TRV

    Welcome to The Rooted Verse,
    where culture breathes, and stories bloom.

    There is something sacred about presence. The way light wraps itself around brown skin, the weight of heritage reflected in posture, and the quiet in-between moments where stories live and linger.

    This space, The Rooted Verse, was created from that presence.

    Inspired by ancestral echoes, clay vessels, sunlit textures, and the timeless beauty of Black and African expression, this blog is an archive of storytelling, soft power, and memory. It is where art meets truth, where digital ethics meet oral traditions, and where we celebrate the richness of being rooted, radiant, and ever becoming.

    Here, you will find essays, reflections, cultural notes, and digital narratives shaped by tradition and technology. This is a space for culture bearers, quiet dreamers, Afro-tech lovers, and those who believe that tenderness, too, can be a form of resistance.

    The Rooted Verse is more than a blog.
    It is a language.
    A way of remembering.
    A way of becoming.

    Whether you are here for ancestral poetry or modern reflections that speak to your spirit, welcome. You’ve found your place.

    Let’s build something that remembers who we are.

    With roots and rhythm,
    Aisha B.