I don’t need you to tell me that I am “a fighter”. To convince me that I don’t need to be coddled; to tell me that I am not just “a bird with clipped wings”, but rather one that has learned to soar with its broken limbs and a mighty trill. I am not a strong-independent-young-black-woman. I am a young girl, continuously stepped on, with dreams and desires impeded; I am a young girl, branded with the mark of your boot on my back. I am just a wounded bird. Not with cracked limbs, but with bullet wounds— when you pushed me to the front, I begged for your mercy. Maybe I am tired of fighting. In reality, I had never wanted to put up a fight at all. And I wonder, what does resistance look like to you? Slick curves, nappy hair? I wonder if its color is chocolate or toffee? Or does it turn caramel if you’re scared? I wonder, has my color you impressed? Well, to me, resistance looks like an imposition wearing a choice’s cloak– you passed me a megaphone, but forgot to let me have a say in my place here. To you, I am ready for battle. For you, I fight the overwhelming currents; beating me down, pushing me behind. And then you drag me to the front again before you run for cover. The behind is where my mother belonged. And her mother before that, and her mother too. It has been passed onto me not as an heirloom, but a hex casted onto each individual generation; the trigger of a cycle ending with me at the head of no-man’s-sea; ending with me returning to the many thousands whose corpses sunk to the bottom; whose corpses the sea swallowed whole, assimilated into the blackness of its depths. I wish I was more to you. You segment me, nominalize my existence. “Survivor,” you say— or whatever other dumb fucking words you conjure in a feeble attempt to empower me. Well, what if I told you that I no longer seek (and had never sought) to intentionally go against the momentum, but to let the power of the tides finally wash my broken, wounded, black body ashore?
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