judy mowatt

black woman

girls like us

There is this moment when you say yes to life as the world says no.  But what else could come out your lips but yes?

Even though yes is a risk, defiance and deviance.

Don’t believe the hype.  The biggest risks in life look like the ordinary moments, like going to prison for the crime of stepping off an airplane.

The first morning in detention you stop me in the hallway and whisper, you have to fight them, you can’t let the guards push you around.  You stand erect, one small hand, brown like mine, resting on your 8 month pregnant belly, the other hand on my shoulder.

There are no stories for girls like us who dream and fight for love so fierce it spills out of our mouths and veins and into the world flooding the man-made lines that slice the sun-drunken sands and recreating oceans and oases, so that girls like us can drink and finally be full.

We do not exist, have never existed, and yet l clutch a pen.  Even though some days I can’t write, cant make words string together, make sentencees, make paragraphs, make sense, make the publication deadline, make dollars, make a life for me and my daughter, because I spend too much time clutching my shoulders in nicotine drenched corners trying to convince myself that i am real. But then my daughter toddles to me and kisses my forehead.  I scoop her in my arms and tell her its going to be alright.  Even if we are surrounded by prison guards concrete walls, wrought iron bars, we will make it through the night.

Girls like us are supposed to be too broken to speak, too stubborn to love, too angry to breathe.
But we are breathing still.

Millions of women and children have been captured in jail cells because we walk on the wrong side of an arbitrary line that slices across the deserts of ancestors who did not exist because we do not exist. Behind the metal prison doors, I bite my lips, pressing back the tears so baby girl won’t be afraid, as I listen to you being dragged out down the hall.  The screams echo through the vents and the guards will be coming for me next.

I don’t know most of the people who will hear these words.  But if you hear them, I want you to know that you do exist, because I do. And I exist, because you do.  We exist.

Even though we have no stories, girls like us keep taking risks, keep insisting on our own existence, keep yelling yes.

And we are not angry this because we will die one day, but because girls like us dont get to exist in the first place.

Cairo, Egypt – When Amank decided to attempt to cross the Egyptian border into Israel, he wasn’t thinking about the likelihood that Egyptian guards would shoot at him. He knew the danger existed, but his main focus was escaping dire economic prospects and rampant discrimination as an off-the-books housecleaner in Cairo.

“I was thinking [about life] after this danger,” explains the Sudanese refugee in the office of refugee legal aid group, AMERA. Dressed in a neatly pressed shirt, the slight man with expressive eyes did not want to use his real name for safety reasons. “If I cross, my life will be better.”

Many asylum-seekers are making the same cost-benefit calculations with deadly results. After a six-month respite in fatalities, at least 15 Africans have been shot and killed trying to cross the 160-mile border since May. Hundreds of others are in detention, in what analysts believe is the result of a migration spike from Eritrea and a clampdown on an alternative route into Europe.

The Egyptian government has defended its policy of firing on border-crossers as a matter of national security. It says it warns people before opening fire. A week after the September statement, prompted by the outcry of human rights organizations, another Eritrean was killed.

Legally, “to use live ammunition to shoot people simply because they are leaving has no justification at all,” says Michael Kagan, senior international human rights law fellow at the American University in Cairo. He notes that a lack of reported killings since the September statement does not signal a shift in Egyptian policy. “What’s most remarkable is that the Egyptians really don’t think that they’re doing anything wrong,” he says.

………………………………..

Both Israel and Egypt will put African migrants they catch in their territories in prison, but Israel also returns some to Egypt.

Despite the danger, Amank says he would try the crossing again in a heartbeat, “because living here is like living in hell.” Refugees are not legally allowed employment in Egypt.

“When someone goes there and finds a better life, of course they will call their friends and tell them you have to leave that hell and come here,” he says.

h/t alice wonder

you cant please all the people all the time.

this is true.  but i say:

no matter what you do or say or write or create someone who you respect is going to hate it.  there will always be someone (who matters, who you love, who usually \gets\ your work, whose work you love, who is a mentor, who is mentee, etc etc) who will be appalled. by it.  come with a knife and a napkin to cut it up and eat it live.

on the other hand.  there will always be someone unexpected who loves your work.  even when no one else seems to have noticed.

this is the way it is. whether you are selling poems on the corner.  or selling your painting half a mill a pop.

this is the way it will always feel.  life is about being unsatisfied.  i dont mean that in a depressy way.  i mean.  the point of life.  is that we are born into this world as partial beings.  and we live as partial beings.  and we will die as such.

what i mean is.  that each of us is whole.  a whole partial piece.  like a puzzle piece.  that’s life.  we have to connect with each other.

what i mean is.  feeling partial, i see, is not a ‘bad’ thing.  or a thing to be avoided.  it is just part of the design/pattern of the universe.

and because each of us is partial.  (and yet still wholly ourselves) we cannot please all the people all the time.

1. been nanowrimo-ing.  (not exactly sure what is the verb form for that.) i dont really do fiction.  and this half fiction/half fact…it is interesting to see where my imagination goes when it doesnt have a lot of time to plan things out.  especially for 50,000 words.  i mean ive jotted down a few paragraphs off the cuff.  even a few pages.  but right now im at 17000 words or so.  and i am watching a story develop itself with me as a co-creator of the story.

other days i feel completely without imagination, or even the energy to imagine.  and so i still type.  out something.

also i am in love with this site.  write or die. something about the competition with the clock makes me type so much faster…

2.  really good books i have read in the past month:

–the enchantress of florence by salman rushdie

*i rave about every novel i read by rushdie and this one is no different.  it is a fairytale.  of empires and men and women.  the language is just lush and satisfying and rhythmic.

–the brief and wondrous life of oscar wao

*fucking awesome novel.  the mix of geek boy culture, post mod meta story telling, dominicana argot, severe dances with irony, and a story telling voice that is just spot on from the first word to the last.

–half of a yellow sun by adichie chimamanda

*this is a story of war.  and the telling of the nigerian civil war is horrific.  but the voice and the imagery are so magical (this though is not magical realism…yes, women of color can write a novel that isnt magical realism) and well…the word that keeps coming to my mind is…paradise.  about a paradise wished for but never achieved and the language and images that she uses bring up the paradise that is here on this earth…in other words…read this book.

3. rumors are that the schools are going to be out for at least a week after eid al-adha, because everyone will be returning from the hajj, and the govt is scared of…yep…swine flu.

The strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare tend to focus around the use of a small, mobile force competing against a large, unwieldy one. The guerrilla focuses on organizing in small units, dependent on the support of the local population.

Tactically, the guerrilla army attacks its enemy in small, repetitive attacks from the opponent’s center of gravity with a view to reduce casualties and become an intensive, repetitive strain on the enemy’s resources, forcing an over-eager response, which will both anger their own supporters and increase support for the guerrilla, thus forcing the enemy to withdraw.

As a second part of the strategy, guerrilla fighters seek to become physically indistinguishable (e.g. Civilian Camouflage) from the communities through which they stage their attacks. Thus, by adopting the general customs & dress of the area they have infiltrated, they make it virtually impossible for an enemy force to distinguish friend from foe.

“The reason whites live longer than blacks..is very simple. They buy, at very high prices, that extra seven years of life from the merchants who have it for sale” (158). “The poor are less healthy for the same reason they have less of everything else: they can’t afford to buy health” (159).

i am thinking about the significance of the asch conformity experiments.

even if only 1 confederate voices a different opinion, participants are much more likely to resist the urge to conform than when the confederates all agree. This finding illuminates the power that even a small dissenting minority can have. Interestingly, this finding holds whether or not the dissenting confederate gives the correct answer. As long as the dissenting confederate gives an answer that is different from the majority, participants are more likely to give the correct answer.

why difference is essential to a morally liberatory community.

why perfection is death.

why we must speak our truth in all its infinite varieties, variations, discords.

i would tell you that at the center of my life has been this deep desire toward freedom.  i would tell you that freedom has no price, it is free.  it must be.  if freedom is based upon money, violence, community, family,  democracy, or anything else.  if in order to experience and engage in freedom. anything was a prior requirement.  if freedom is dependent upon anything for its very own existence, then it cannot be freedom.