I am integrated and bathing in my own blood

R Mildred left a comment on my blog that I thought was too good to go unnoticed after the events of the past couple of days .

One of hte fucked up things I learnt recently about all those odd little forever wars in africa and asia and south america is that blood diamonds and gold jewellery aren't actually funding them as much as people often talk like they are.

You wanna know what is funding htem?

Electronics; the majority of the silicon, gold and a few of the odder materials used in semiconductors that makes up consumer electronics and computers come from the third world.

You ever get that feeling like you're just constantly wading in someone else's blood?


Nope friend I feel like I'm bathing in my own.


I am from the bauxite mines, the rice paddies , the cane plantations, the slave ships, the potato fields.

The places that sound like faraway lands , and punch lines to lazy nigger, oversexed spic, shifty chink,simple mystical native jokes

are simply home.

The simple simple fact is that as a brown person, as a person who is Queer/supportive , as a foreigner , as a person who is pretty close to 80% percent of the world

It offends me to be called radical

Not because I am ashamed. Oh no at this point I have lept off the political spectrum into the ether and am backstroking through self determination

But it offends me that I am considered radical for believing that 80 percent of the world is better equipped to tell us how they should and want to live than being dictated to by five percent.

is considered an action that could destroy the state.

And it offends me that the recourse I have of it is the system that made them believe they are ill equipped to live for themselves.

When I teach

I literally have to strip away layers of things.

I have to tell children what they think matters.

I have to teach them that they are important.

And i have to do it buildings falling down around their ears.

In schools making nine year olds responsible for the education of 8 year olds who are responsible for 6 year olds.

I can taste the blood when I have to tell them this.

That if they dare to challenge this system.

They will be in pain. They will be smacked down and destroyed. That to become themselves they will have to literally REBUILD themselves.

And if they get there if they are truly good at it .

I will have to pray every night that they aren't disappeared, locked up, or cut down by the pressure.

That to make them live I am KNOWINGLY asking them to look at death.

I taste blood on my mouth when I say this.

That should they decide that they will not be terrorized falsely for wanting to sit under trees and resort to the only things that they have for their emotional defense.

They will be charged as murders for not being barefoot and compliant. For believing that a noose was worse than a Jordan.


Should they believe it is their right to love in public , should they believe that it is no man's right to lay hands on them.

Should they not just TAKE IT and accept abuse.

A DA will spend most of his time trying to convince the world they have no RIGHT to do so and aren't real women anyway, because real women would take it.

And when people spin tales of sisterhood and joyousness. It will be members of this exclusive sisterhood who will send them to entombment.

I cry blood when I say these things.

That asking people who stand with you stand with you and not for you, that people value you as equals, and not points.

That saying your name is not the same as helping your voice.

That making you speak is not the same thing as listening

That pitying your plight, while worshiping your words does nothing for your body or soul.

That even in spaces where it is supposed to be about you may not be safe or welcoming for you and the people who will hurt you most may be your own.

And you will in turn do it to others.

And this will leave you on the floor, laid up in bed, over eating, undereating,drinking smoking fucking just to shit the pain out.

That your words and hope and effort and will be met with worse than nothing.

You will lay yourself out there to feel silence weighted on your body like a millstone


That this life I sell as the only option in many ways to gunshots , violence death and destruction, is be taken away from you after LESS than fifty years.

For no there reason than someone decided the right way to fix your problems was to pretend they didn't exist because you at 7,8 , 17 had had used up your time for being treated as anything but a burden long before you were even breath in your daddy's lungs

Because no one can be forced to treat you as a human in this country

where they no longer teach you civics, or geography,

sandwich you stories in between the monuments to their greatness.

Even if your families built it with their own two hands .

Or are feeding it off their bowed backs

huddled in cargo ships,

pushed onto arid ground,

run from bombs destroying their houses.

You will matter less and be excused for NOTHING , while begged to forgive those who hate you.

who will lecture you on the best way to go about these things.

And you will look at your face every day and know of rape , tuck cowlicks and honest names from dishonest men, in back pockets and not be allowed to celebrate holidays.

Hide force and coercion in mangled traditions given up to a god , used less than 150 years ago to beat you native tongues to dust

Watch as your people run from you because of the curve of your backside the fullness of your lips, the shape of your eyes, the strangeness of your tongues, the sun in your skin

That to do this is noble

that you must do this to live for

moments

like

This

and you are so closed in to the system you must do it

of the backs of my people digging the mines

in the land of my people

pushed onto reserves

fed by my people

farming the rice

watched by the people who raped me into being.

Dripping the blood that flows through my veins

And I ask these children for more.

and to see in their eyes no matter how I make it sound they know exactly what I ask for

or sing about or write about

the truth not just the words

that I sing and breathe and charm them into

More blood

to the never ending beautiful struggle.

No matter whose it is I bathe in my own blood

and then I beg

pray

plead for more.