Birthday Flex
*Text first published on 23rd March 2021 on Facebook.*
Dear People,
Thank you so much for the birthday wishes.
It’s very strange to try to celebrate while there is so much hurt in the air, streaming through our blood, burying itself between each, single, breath.
I know three people who have lost loved ones this week, and it’s Tuesday.
Because of them and so many others, I celebrate the fact that I am still here.
That I still breath, that I still get pissed off, that I continue to march on wards to (and hopefully through) 40, that I can complain, that I can lay on the grass in my garden, go for walks in the evening, drink tea, cuddle with my lover, play football with Chairman, harvest mint between giggles with my niece.
I MUST celebrate that the things that prickle my skin and make my blood boil, can only do so, because I am here.
Being angry is part of being alive, and knowing, that we DESERVE better WHILE we are here. Here. Not tomorrow, not in an afterlife unseen.
HERE.
I am grateful to be alive on this beautiful, hectic, violent ass planet. Violent, because we made it so.
I am grateful to be aging because the other option is to be gone.
I am grateful to have anger coursing through my veins, because it means that sometimes I find enough courage to erupt, to burn, and to say NO FUCKING MORE.
The liberation to be a woman and to burn so bright that people fear your voice, but cannot come to your face and silence it….. ahhhhh, it’s like eating cool chunks of pineapple in the afternoon sun, until my tongue stings.
To be an African Woman that can shout my truth and only receive whispers in the wind from those who prefer my silence…. to KNOW that I have brought fear to those who willingly oppress others daily….. it is the scent of freshly cut strawberries saturating my nose.
It is the fruition of my toil.
I wish that all of us could experience this at least once in our lives, for it is simply being a human. Being allowed to occupy space. That is it.
Daily, we operate in fear, silenced in advanced by doctrine, by tradition, by manhood, by whiteness, by the patriarchy.
Fuck all that shit.
Burn Bissshhhh.
Burn.
My anger is born of LOVE.
>Love for my people.
>Love for Afro women carrying too much weight on their backs, while foreigners with lenses exoticize the length of our necks, and our male counterparts pontificate about our resilience with opaque ideas of ‘tradition’.
>Love for my LGBTQI people ducking and diving between shadows because our society worships a white god that banished Blackness and ALL African sexuality, into aberration.
>Love for the people who service our middle class asses daily but every damn time one of us tries to get them better salaries, the neighbourhood committee throws mountains of paperwork in your face to keep poor people poor. (Note for anyone who is economically marginalized, DO NOT trust the Kenyan middle and upper class. We’re too busy imagining we can become millio-billionaires while using the Bible to justify your poverty. At any chance you get, throw us overboard.)
> Love for the fucking effort it takes just to speak your truth despite knowing that some of your friends will feel the need to inform you that they as a person living in white skin (especially the ones in Europe) KNOW the ultimate and only legitimate complete alpha and omega truth about being a Black person. (Fuck right off by the way. Cheers.)
> Love for all of us surviving Christianity through complete cultural erasure and the severing of ourselves from our own Black bodies and tongues, even when we cannot name that emptiness.
> Love for all of us relegated to even lower depths of the hierarchy because we were born with not a penis nigh!
>Love for us additionally ostracized for being the parent that stayed. (Single moms where you at!?)
>Love for women, thrown off buildings for saying ‘No’.
> Love for all of us who silently cry NO MORE even as society uses our bent backs as a foundation for the institutions that oppress us.
Growing up, I was repeatedly told that I as a girl should be quiet, I should sit with my legs close together and cover myself up, I was told it’s not nice for me to be angry, or to swear, nice girls don’t move their hands about when talking, nice girls don’t shout. I was told, “Women don’t have muscles” even as I could tense the rippling sinews on my abdomen and form a juicy waru on my arm.
Anger is perhaps the greatest muscle we were taught to never flex. It was smothered into the most silent corners of our ever silent bodies.
But our anger is bright and buoyant and fucking beautiful.
While others are allowed to tear through nail salons, and churches, and communities, and races, and entire continents, and their psychosis is celebrated as conquest and empire, or noted as depression and ‘having a bad day’…… Our rightful and justified anger has been silenced from our very first cry at birth.
The rage of women, could turn this whole world upside down, inside out.
This woman has muscles. This woman swears. This woman sits with her legs open when she fucking wants. This woman has sex. This woman takes shits. This woman writes poetry and paints pictures. This woman makes films, and my films are fucking legit.
This woman loves herself.
I love myself.
I love myself over and beyond the conditional respect and allowances you may grant me. They are not important to me.
I have no love for your rules and regulations set to limit my freedoms.
If this hurts your sensibilities, try loving yourself instead.
In any case, IDGAF.
Happy New Birth Year to me.
Happy Re-Birth to all the women I know.
We must burn today, because we won’t be here tomorrow. We must burn today, because otherwise, when we are gone our only legacy will have been our subservience; kneeling as a stepping stone for the dreams of others. We must burn today, because that subservience will be celebrated to oppress those that come after us.
Women. Burn.
May our collective anger overrun the shackles that contain us.
Thank you to Mona Eltahawy, for being a constant inspiration for women all over the world.
Heck Fucking yeah!!
