Sunday, March 25, 2012

We Are Life

We womyn, we queers, we trans folks of colour will be the ones to lead this revolution. We the cash poor, the differently abled, the Global South, First Nations People - we are life.

They thought that if they killed our men that we would not continue. They thought that the revolution did not lie in us too. They left us behind, devalued our contributions, didn't even give us the dignity to acknowledge us strong in their narratives, named us as weak, as sissies, as violent, as 'crazy'.

As we worked tirelessly, our bodies raped, colonized, our stories and our majik co-opted, we endured. And we are here on the front lines, in their organizations, held into debt by their institutions, whether it be wage, education, health'care' and we resist.

We dare to wear glitter, and dare to worship god(dess), dare to teach, to learn, to search, to laugh, to love. We are miracles every last one of us. We have been stripped down to our core and what is left is vibrant, willful, creative spirits.

And I say to those upholding patriarchy, whiteness, sexist, heterosexist, economic supremacy -- are you scared, are you scared that behind these systems of advantage and your ill gotten gains, you are nothing? You are lacking in integrity and inventiveness, in soulfulness and resourcefulness. What have you traded your humanity for?

To be 'neutral', to be 'objective', to be the thing that is never named, but suffocates us all? You traded this for the richness of your difference, the varieties of your gender, ethnicity and sexuality. You traded love for towers held up fear, built up lies and surrounded yourselves in fun house mirrors.

We may not live forever, but we live richly, in our relationships, in our stories, sometimes only in our dreams. And we dream of a time where the world can be in technicolor, where no one is disposable, where life is a value and work is a negotiation and liberation is for free.

Instead you dream of nothing but grey skies and beige life.

I am so proud of us, proud our ancestry whose reverberations I feel now. Even if no one sees your actions, no one compensates you for your work, even if no one hears your voice and all the things you want to say (all things that we deserve), know that you are valuable regardless of whether anyone bears witness to you - to us.

Our energy and our spirits persist, the universe is grateful for your brilliant life force and this little brown queer, like a lot of others thank heavens for your presence and the life affirming solidarity that tells us that we are not alone.

I will keep resisting, we all will in our own way. We will fight even though we shouldn't have to, we will teach even though it is not our responsibility and we will be murdered even though there is more than enough to go around.

We are radical just for existing in everything that we are and all that we are not. And again I say, we are life.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Solace

I find comfort in knowing I shouldn’t take any of this rhetoric personally, because I understand that it isn’t about me. It is about the insecurity of people who are afraid of losing their ill gotten gains. Once I realized that, loving myself, loving other womyn, loving us when we are on social assistance, when we are sex workers, when we are trans womyn, when we are womyn of colour was easy - all these womyn are surviving and challenging the patriarchy with every single breath they take. That means I have so many examples of beauty, of resilience, of creatively navigating the system. Every time we organize, we love each other, we forgive each other, we heal other, every time we name this shit, we are a threat. Breathe, play, fuck, rest, resist sisters, we are beautiful threats.
- Kim Crosby
 



“They said, “You are a savage and dangerous woman.”
I am speaking the truth. And the truth is savage and dangerous.”
― Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero”

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Whole


What does silence look like.
What does remembering taste like.
What does loving feel like.

Feels like standing on the edge of a precipice, arms wide, eyes shut
Trusting, knowing that fear gives way into the endlessness of possibility.

My journey with my Blackness.
Silence
Remembering
Loving
And again.
And again.

In the presence of a world that thrives on the absence of ourselves and the desire to sell selves, 
I learned as girl that I did not exist
I searched in critical eyes, fine printed text, swiftly moving images
For some sign that I had been there before
That we had been here before
Girls made of other-worldy browns, tightly wound spirals, thick black plaits with Technicolor bubbles in our hair
Girls who smell of islands, sweetness, blinding brightness lingering on us everywhere we pass

Girls

Black Girls
Brown Girls
Lost and found girls

My mama is 1/4 Venezualan Arawak and ¼ Dutch and half Indo-Trinidadian.
My granny was stolen at 6 by her father and brought to work for her father’s new family in Trinidad.
My Grandpa was 1 in a long line of indentured workers brought to Trinidad to build bridges away from Blackness. Brought after his family watched India ravaged by the British. Brought up in brashness, halfness, neither white nor blackness, remembering a world that once made space for his burnt sienna brown.

My father is Half Scottish White Plantation owner and half West African slave stock, bred in Dominica. My father’s mother did not have the choice, did not have any, many choices, but to have my father,
as my father’s father,
well everyone called him Massa.

Divided and conquered.
Silent.
And I name it my Blackness because Blackness is the presence of all light, of all colours. And it was my Blackness that I ran from.
And now,
It is my Blackness that I run to
It is what surrounds me, what reconciles me, what makes me whole,

whole
whole
full
round
full
deep
full. soft. full.
Whole