I am feeling really down about my lack of phone or internet connection. My mum had to call me from England on my mobile and we could only chat for a few minutes. I feel out of touch with my blogging and all my dearest blogging friends. Bad day. Anyway, I apologise for my absence yesterday. I just couldn’t make it to an wifi-spot and I am too tied up with real life things to be able to really spend time a new post for today.
So instead of being down on myself about it, I decided to re-post something I wrote after a particularly nasty round of attacks on me and my blogging friends.
TO MY FRIENDS
This is something I wrote at the lowest point of my blogging experience. That time has passed, though I am sure I will experience it again. I am sharing it now because so many of my blog friends are closing down and struggling and really suffering. So. Deep breath. Here it is… This is for you…
I have never felt so hated in my life. I’m just glad I found you.
Once, not so long ago, I was a skinny little black girl with unruly hair and fragile heart and very long legs. I remember running wild. Adventure and fantasy on my tongue and on my mind. Everything I saw was something absurd, something unheard, something to be told. My mum said ignore the stares, the slights, the insults. The ignorance. They don’t know any better. Now. Now that I am all grown. My unruly hair is in my mind, my skinny legs grown thicker, my spirit saddened and less than before.
Now that I’ve grown, I see. THEY were not ignorant. THEY had facts. Facts that figure against me. Facts that prove I am not as wild. That I couldn’t be anything I wished to be. Imaginative little girl. FACTS that prove I am a heathen. A savage. A barbarian.
If you told me, when I was six, that I could not be whatever it was I thought I could be, I would have giggled and talked about you behind your back. The thing I don’t get…is why you were so threatened and defeated, by a six year old. A child who only wanted to realise her dreams. Who never dreamed of pain or oppression or stamping on someone’s head to get to where she wanted to be. Naïve, innocent, stupid. Whatever. You think I have no brain. Oh.
But I can see where you are coming from. Exactly. What it is to be the white man. The pure man. I have seen all the reports and news and propaganda and bullshit that you have seen. The sad thing is, you cannot see where my black girl, fragile heart comes from. To that, you are blind. Ignorant. Unwilling to see.
You do not know what it is like for people to be afraid of you. At first glance. You do not know what it is like to have people close their eyes when you start to speak. You do not know what it is like when people draw their handbags closer to them as you walk by. You do not know the joy, the sad pathetic joy, you feel when someone talks to you like a human being. You do not know how it feels to live on a knife-edge. That something you say or do could mean the end. That could be a danger to you or your family or your friends. That if you don’t smile and swallow, you will lose that job, that house, that salvation. You do not know how it feels to be part of something but always be an outsider. To feel your roots are always being dragged up, dug up and scrutinised.
Where are you from? Go back home. With your own kind. Where you belong. With your soul brothers and sisters. You really can’t imagine. What it’s like for a sweet, kind and beautiful (Yeah, I am all those things if you choose to see.) black girl with a fragile heart to take on all those things. And remain human and good and kind and sane.