I have thinking a lot lately about identity and what home and decolonizing means to me on a more intimate level. I’ve also been thinking about the concept of honoring all your grandmothers.
There’s lots of loneliness, confusion and isolation wrapped up in those ideas, and, if I’m being horribly honest, there are some grandmothers I’d rather forget, that would be easier not to acknowledge.
What does honoring and loving all parts of you while eschewing colorism, white supremacy and colonization look like? Is my decolonizing strictly performative (about how I look aesthetically and what I buy, what I say, who I surround myself around and who I date, or don’t) or do I really take it to heart and want to practice it in every part of my life sincerely, not for looks? Do I actually want to return snd muddle through all the difficult and painful parts of community or remain isolated and romanticize them from afar? Do my European Grandmothers deserve scapegoating and less love for the violence they and their people committed against my African and Taino ones? Here’s a(n only slightly edited) poem about it. Happy World Poetry Day.
There is no pull
in any one direction.
No one peoples (peoples, tribe, community) to claim,
or who will reliably claim you,
only a faithful series
of hands reaching
to push you out
(serving as a reminder
that there’s nothing pure in me
and I’ve never had a home.)
Instead, I have found a living in flux,
in loss,
at sea.
Mother’s touches only came
to turn an arm behind my back,
and this land
and my parents’ land
are not my land.
These are the simple bitter sweetnesses
of being centuries away from self,
miles from belonging
and only having a few decades
to sort it out.
There is no here,
or there,
only bits and pieces of it all
contained within me
carried in the blood,
married wildly, sweetly
on my face,
in my limbs.
Betrayal,
loyalty,
submission,
defiance,
survival,
genocide,
resistance,
life,
death
they all preoccupy themselves
with fighting,
dancing,
screaming,
loving
in my chest
and beating the drum of my heart.
I am both none and all
of my ancestors,
I am both none and all
who came before me
or who will come after,
I am their wildest nightmares
and bigger than
their biggest dreams,
I am nothing they could have ever imagined.
In visions I came, perhaps,
a shadowy thing, surrounded by water
but I was yet unknowable
and I am unknowable yet.
There were no words then for who I am,
where I belonged
and there are hardly any now.
To put on another’s love for their mothers
feels cloying, suffocating
to chew on the marrow
of another’s creation myth
hollow,
to drink from another’s well of knowledge
rings false,
so I wander cold,
hungering,
thirsting.
