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–a work of reclamation, redemption, rescue, and repossession. Mutiny of Morning centers the beauty and resilience of blackness under the weight of white wor(l)ds representing centuries of brutal expropriation and dispossession. Breeze’s method is a generative model for reading Eurocentrism against itself. — Wende Marshall, ethnographer of the decolonization movement in Hawaii, a living wage activist, and a leader/organizer with Stadium Stompers, co-editor Insurrectionary Uprisings: A Reader in Revolutionary Nonviolence and Decolonization

I suffered through Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in college, not able to articulate what was wrong. I am so grateful to Nikesha Breeze for undoing the violent dehumanization by lifting out words that help us see the light. 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; Professor of urban policy and health at The New School

Transdisciplinary in its genre-bending brilliance, Nikesha Breeze’s A Mutiny of Morning: Reclaiming the Black Body from Heart of Darkness, which began as a 2020 art installation, is sure to disturb the literati’s comfort with Conrad’s ironic racism. It pushes the sense of those of us who were on the same side of the barricades as Chinua Achebe in his 1977 decolonizing deconstruction of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. With Nikesha Breeze’s installation now becoming a deconstruction-cum-poetic-reclamation of the Black body from the white narrative gaze, 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

The voices and perspectives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in their diversity are often missing in most historical narratives that emerge from the viewpoint of the oppressor. A Mutiny of Morning reframes and humanizes those who were systemically, forcibly dehumanized and silenced. Nikesha Breeze brings the very important context and the necessity for dismantling structural racism, racialized capitalism, and persistent legacies of slavery and colonialism. –Tinashe Goronga, medical doctor and public health leader in Zimbabwe; coordinator of EqualHealth’s Global Campaign Against Racism affiliated with the international Social Medicine Consortium

‘blinding sunshine’ a ‘warning’, ‘black bones against a tree’ a ‘kind of offer’, the ‘stillness of land’ its ‘greatness’… Nikesha Breeze painstakingly and painfully gleans exquisite images from a racist classic. 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.