The Search for a Land of My Own | Vol 1: Grief
zine of poems on Blackness, longing, and grief | 2024
this collection of writings can be viewed in it’s digital zine format below:
As we’ve entered the 21st century, as African Americans we are at the very founding moments in which “post-slavery” & “post-segregation”, we are beginning to be allowed the space to grieve. To grieve what was forcibly stolen from us. And to grieve the unique & terrorizing abuse our people have experienced for the large majority of the “Modern Era” of this world now that our lives are not constantly in the imminent dangers of chattel slavery.
We can begin to grieve that many of us are not yet even aware of how much there is to grieve… not aware of the inner workings of our century long history on this land, our collective traumas. We can begin to grieve that many of us are unaware because a large majority of us are still navigating life in the hyper-aroused state our traumatic history put us in.
To grieve the fact that, as someone who was born in 2004, many of us don’t even need to look past the stories of our grandparents or great-grandparents to hear first-hand the horrific traumas our people have endured.
And to grieve the fact that although we have astoundingly persevered and survived and made it this far, those traumas are no where near over and are still cyclically repeating themselves in the ways in which this country we inhabit functions and comes to be. In the “justice system”, in the systems of “police protection”, in the jobs we occupy, in the workspaces, in the schools, in the education or lack there of, in every aspect… Most don’t even consider the fact that the unemployment rate is still twice as high for African-Americans than it is for whites in 2024 as it was in 1967 when MLK was giving speeches on the topic. And worse than that, the wealth gap among African Americans compared to whites has increased seven fold when looking at its progression from 1963 to 2013. The racial wealth gap has also increased in severity.
Amid all of this, we grieve the forcible stealing and homogenizing of our culture.
And most of all, we grieve over the reality that given the context of how our people have existed in this country for centuries, the literal existing as an African-American in America is traumatic by nature, whether one recognizes it or not.
July 4th
It all feels obsolete
Hordes of European settlers celebrating the independence of a land…
slaughtered over, enslaved over, bloodied for
they celebrate that which wasn’t theirs to begin with
children crying, screaming to the sound of explosions… two opposing worlds
one of pain ~ one of celebration
this land is not mine and I am not it’s
She’s a Tough Sister
She’s a tough sister, my father tells me with gusto in his tone
She took the hits she was thrown
Made something out of the messed up cards she was dealt
She’s a tough sister
She lived in the ghetto throughout most her life
Being raped at a young age,
She turned her life around, he says.
With two children on her back, went to school
Learned how not to let her fucked up story rule
The trajectory of her life
She’s a tough sister, he tells me.
—
When “Toughness” Becomes Survival:
this is the story of so many sisters…
what, within the Black community, makes us “tough”?
is it truly about our ability to keep going amid it all or is it more so about the unavoidable situation we find ourselves to be placed in that we have no other choice than to rework into a life at least partially salvageable?
where is the choice in the matter?
The Duality of Being Human
You have something I want
Ingrained in your history, in your sentences,
In the place you go back to and call home
You possess something entwined between the threads
Of the clothing in which you feel such comfort
While I find myself hiding behind the tight fibers which bind me
Both suffocating and freeing
Is it possible for something to be both?
You have something I want
The words which flow off of your tongue so fluently, filled with rich history
A culture of which I was starved of
As the words which come out of my mouth are produced with such effort
Stinging with every syllable of the putrid grief of centuries of unspoken pain
This is not my mother tongue
And yet I continue to speak as it is all I have for the time being
Which my tongue can call home.
I want what you have
A home to which you can return
A mother who comforts you when you most need
A father who gives you warmth from his embrace
And not the warmth of the tears streaming down your face
—
we are not a part of the movement. we are the movement.
bigger than just ourselves
we are part of a collective
I’m tired of being silenced
I’m tired of things being taken away from me
Integral parts of me that never should have been separated
I want my identity
I want my culture
I want my heritage
My people
I want my mother tongue