This is a series I wrote back in July 2024, looking out at Lake Erie.
Water without, moved the water within.
“If I could ever stop talking away my substance”
Reena by Paule Marshall from The Black Woman and Anthology edited by Toni Cade Bambera
You talk too much
Quit runnin that yap
Think before you speak
You talk so fast you must be lyin
Why you talk like yt people?
You must think you smart or somethin
I can’t help but think of Troy in Crooklyn
Hyperverbal Baby I be, I don't know if I was born with a lot to say or if I have just never been allowed to say things my way.
Hear me though I was born with a lot to say about the things that move me
I dont speak on the mundane
The boring
I don’t speak on things that I don’t know
It does not make me an extrovert though
but the label was groomed into me as a dark skinned, first born, afab child
It centered on performance and the need to make sure that I was a reflection of goodness and civility
Look at what massa did for me
that my parents had assimilated in full
and so would I
From enslaved bodies told never to speak unless spoken to, to a body forced to speak, and properly so
They say that thinking
in the age of over thinking
is the thing that separates us as indigenous people from our purpose and communal connection to ancestors and spirit
With the initial still underlying the latter
Magically needing to know how to code switch between the two
A switch my unique brain wasn't given
So my physical body suffered as punishment
Ytness in and on the Afrikan body is the false belief that you can intellectualize your way out of harm
when the harm is in fact an embedded part of society
inescapable
When the body and skin that you are housed in is a symbol for all that is bad
it places you in a cycle of achieving the unachievable
You are left for dead and the cycle continues
Your words though painstakingly chosen are not enough
There is always something about your story and your dialogue that needs to be changed
A web is spun
of work a little harder
shift
tweak
do more
until…
No equity to be had
A lifetime of promises
And I have talked all my substance away
Gave all of my magic and the recipes of me away for free
Cause I was still a cook in Massa’s kitchen
The room now transformed
Into a vehicle of my own making
But it's on autopilot and I have no control
I can scream and no one will hear me
They will just keep asking me to tell my story
“Your words though painstakingly chosen are not enough
There is always something about your story and your dialogue that needs to be changed.”
Reading this part struck me with such familiar pains…thank you for sharing this.
Wow sib. Just wow.
They form it like a question but seldom are they asking. EntitleMENt meant our stories are theirs to hear, theirs to read and yes also theirs to tell. As we reclaim and recollect the bits they left out we’re sat with and on islands of a story of a new Dawn. One of entitleMEANT and that one is not meant for them. They don’t know how to swim like we the watta people do. They came and left in ships because they know, they can’t handle our waters cause water holds only Truth.