On BARBARITY

My children have suffered!

I see you are back again. Come in. You look concerned. And so you should be. Let us sit down again. I thought that the next time you visited, we would pick up where we left off. I thought perhaps I would share my story with you, tell you how I came to be in this state in which you always find me. However there is a more pressing issue. I need to show you something. You have to watch it and you have to listen. Listen to the crying in there and do not blink an eye. Absorb the images before you and let them sink into the very depths of your soul. I want these images seared into your memory and stitched to the fabric of your being.  Then I will talk to you.

Do you see what your people over there are doing to my children? Do you? Do you hear the gut wrenching sobs of my offspring? Those sobs are causing my womb to contract as though going through birth pangs. Those screams are causing my milk to come to the fore and it is dripping down my belly down my thighs as my tears forge two rivers flowing down my face. Do you see my baby’s head hit the pavement and how her mother is dragged by the beast in uniform? Yes, beast. Barbarity’s real face. In your history books, written by your forefathers, who were the barbarians? Who did they call darkie and dark hearted? Who was the cannibal in those stories you were taught? My children were. Yet as you watched those images, who is the real brute? Who has a dark heart and a twisted soul? Who is the one who hears the cry of a pregnant woman lying belly bared on the road and winces not in sympathy? Who is it that shoves and drags who hits and kicks with relish at each blow that delivers shock waves into a woman’s body? Who is it that reverences not the sanctity of a woman’s body carrying a child? Who? Who respects not the mother with a baby on her back, the mother who is fresh out of the birthing room, the mother who has stared death in the face as she groans and  roars a human being into the world? Who?

That my children are darker skinned than your people does not make them dirty. That they resemble the color of the earth does not make them ugly. That they are the color mud does not make them hard hearted. They are dark skinned yes, but they are not dim witted. They have hair like wool but that has no bearing on their mental capabilities. Your ancestors maltreated them on their own soil. They brutally enslaved them in their own home, casting away their deities, their rituals and replacing them with meaningless religions that have been the cause of more suffering and penury. Your ancestors came here and they plundered me and they took my children to toil as slaves and that is how they built the wealth you enjoy over there. They got rich on the blood, sweat and crushed spirits of my offspring. They gorged themselves on the wealth buried in my belly. They dug and excavated greed and avarice curdling in their veins. They ploughed and reaped, using my issue as labor, 

 until backs broke open under whip and bodies disintegrated under the weight, the weight, the weight of the harness, the plough, the insults, the curses, the spitting, the hate. Your ancestors raped. They savagely tore into the soft flesh of my maidens, salivating at the screams of pain, and basking in the silent screams of shame, screams of degradation and despair. They plucked irreverently at pert breasts, pinching and twisting with malevolent grin and bared teeth. I watched it all in silence. In my silence I saw it all.

In my silence I watched as my children dived off ships, human cargo plunging into the depths of the rough cold waters. I rejoiced, because those were the lucky ones, the ones whose spirit said never. Never will I become a slave. Never will I go to a land where my forefathers never ventured to. We have a saying: where mother’s feet have never trodden, do not dare, for there are no familiar foot prints to guide along the safest path. Yes the ones who hurled themselves bound in chains into the abyss of the ocean harkened to the warning and gave themselves up to death by water, sinking like stones under the weight of chains. I watched and I wept, in silence.

Silence. It hides a multitude of emotions and a myriad of sins. Silence is what I touched when after years of bondage on their soil, my children harkened to the call to arise. They harkened to the call to mutiny and to shake off the shackles that bound them. Blood was spilled. Blood was the sacrifice required to break the yolk. Blood was the offering the earth desired to quench its thirst so that the land could be cleansed of all the impurities and the abominations that had been committed on it. I looked on in silence.

In silence things fell apart, slowly unraveled at the seams, creating a tangled mess of humanity. Confused and bewildered and corrupted, my children had been damaged. Damaged deep in their core. Corrupted. Greed and the hunger for power fueled the destruction of communities. Over there in your land they wondered like lost sheep, buying freedom from shackles but never freedom from the demons of their story, of that tragic and terminal journey to the land where mother had never set foot and sanctified. They wander still.

My children are scattered all over this world, in all sorts of strange and terrible lands, like the land where innocent pregnant women are treated worse than cattle at an abattoir all because they are brown. Your people call them immigrants and say they should leave. But where are they to go when their wealth paves your streets and their deities decorate your museums? Where will they go when their land is now hostile and they flea the bullets and guns you dump there in exchange for oil and diamonds from my belly? You give them death and they give you wealth. Your kind has always given death and you have always taken wealth. While they are busy killing each other you cunningly, siphon the oil, surreptitiously dig up the gold, the platinum, the diamonds. Frighteningly cunning. That is what your people are. How dare they? How dare they raise their filthy blood stained hands to touch my children? After all that they have done, after all the wickedness of the ages that they have heaped on their heads, they dare to touch them.

Silence is no longer my food and drink. The time has come. I shall speak and you shall listen. I know that you will be back. Here is something to take back to your people: Just as they once rose in rebellion and took what is theirs, my children shall arise again. Yes, rest assured, they will arise because the time to say ENOUGH is here.