These words flowed after an intense session in a leadership gathering that I attended and I am still digesting the words…
I bring in with me
The voices of the dead
The colonized, the tormented
I bring in the truths
Oftentimes discarded, hidden
Purposely neglected
I bring in the pain
Of ancestors grieving their lost
Of generations seeking what was taken
The wisdom, the land, the culture
Ravaged, plundered, plummeted
To graves, to stones, to blood tainted lands
From those who called us “Indios”
Lazy, stupid, monkeys
Black and brown colored bodies
Treated as flora and fauna
Set up as commodities
Our mothers and fathers traded
Like pinch of salt and spices
Yet what was done and what was lost
Was put upon my people to recover
To move on, to deal with , “to develop”
For our people have been relentlessly told
We are lacking
We are not progressive
We are not organized
Not fit to rule our lands
Generations upon generations
We were stripped of who we were
Forces to take in our colonizers’ lenses
Our tormentors’ practices,
To bear our colonizers’ name
That to this day hung in all the maps
In all the places
And that our history started
When we were “discovered”
Like lost people faltering in caring
For the lands that we call home.
Ridiculed of our stewardship of our islands
Relegated to slaves to our own homes
Our cultures dismantled to extinction
And our lips speaking our colonizers’ tongues
How do I make sense of these?
That my eyes and my thoughts
And my words carry the bloodshed before me
That I have been living in my oppressed body
The guilt of being a version
Of what our colonizers wanted us to be
Productivity driven, shackled by time
Pushed to perfection, to profess
To either or and never “with”
I live with the knowledge
That the voices urging me
To be grandiose, to scale, to do more
To have a sense of urgency
Were never my ancestors’ words
I live with the truths
That I am unlearning
Generations of imprinting, assimilating, imposing
Learning to redefine myself, my culture, my people
I live with the knowledge
That my very being
Is a by product of slavery
Of oppression, of colonialism
And what about you?
In your white colored bodies
Can you live with the knowledge
That your wealth, your progress, your development
Are tainted by our ancestors’ blood?
Photo credits https://unsplash.com/@valentinsalja?