Mother
BY DONOVAN DUGGINS
I felt the heartbeat of mother Africa inside the body of a queer soul
His crown of weed-twigged hair drifted down her strong mahogany back Their hands were large enough to enclasp the sun. I feel that they would have been just a she if i could completely see the woman as strength Because while sleeping under His moon i can only imagine her essence. My mother merengues in red dresses, dances through open bars under skies deep dark blue like her skin She is the Queen from the Cotton Field and the colorist bitter woman from the caribbean Within them i am completely enveloped All of me fits so nichely within Her there is no way there could not have been He within them To understand the rhythm to which my heart beats you must see the rainbow in which it is encapsulated which is to say my queerness is my Blackness is your Blackness is your queerness I think one of the reasons that I struggled so much with queerness is because I could not see how it fit with my Blackness. My community preached about how it needed nothing more than a strong man who feared God, but in becoming what I was told my community needed I became some sort of queer. My validity among my people was stripped away from me the minute they sniffed out my queerness. That’s why I was so pressed. I was being told that I need to be a certain kind of man, but that certain kind of man was something more like a woman? People couldn’t seem to understand that I was just following the rules placed in front of me. Sometimes I feel like being the mixture of things that made me I had no option but to be queer, but the fact that I discuss my queerness as something that needs to be explained or justified is what makes me worry that I have never quite come to accept it—that I wish you didn’t have to use the colors of the rainbow to paint a portrait of me. My queerness is something that I’ve learned to be ashamed of— something that I had pressed down deep below the muscle coating my bone not realizing there is where it would meld and become one with my soul. So below is an apology to my queer soul. An apology to my queer soul: I am sorry that I have neglected you Turned you into nothing but some unwanted roadblock, Characterized you as nothing but the shit I must trudge through to become something stronger I dipped you in Whiteness and became some kind of resentful Searched high and low but was blinded by their White image projected so intense it etched itself in my retina Placed a film between the pupil of my eye and the lens of theirs so that I could never see your propensity in my color Could never realize my deep brown was nothing but all of your rainbow colors mixed into one There is a correction that needs to be made to the beginning of this poem I apologize to my queer soul for letting Whiteness envelop it For letting my poor experiences with them serve as the ruler by which I measured my queerness To the White man who taught me my queerness wasn’t enough Who let me know I was enough for pleasure but too complicated to comprehend Why you can only say you love me when you drunk?? Why it take brown liquor and Black music for you to see the beauty in me? Do they remind you that all the good you have come from color like me? That my White smile look more radiant backed by Black color like me? Remind you you can’t help but be amazed something so pure can come from something so dark? I mean, school always taught you Black was death so I guess I can understand But also school always said you was smart? At least they made it so that we would think you smart So part of me wonder: why ain’t you realize that the same people who say Black is death Is the same people who made my Blackness death? And why you only see my beauty when you in a dark club or a bright church When the sacred got yo secular ass going wild When my beat got yo no ass trying to twerk wild When my soul got you feeling like you could truly survive in my wild But you can’t see my beauty when teacher whip me for speaking like me Can’t see my beauty when Mr. Officer shoot me for being like me You know, I almost wrote this poem in the voice that I crafted for you It was going to be full of indicative metaphors and articulate allusion with ample alliteration But I remembered you’d forget you loved me the minute I quit all that wolfin and stopped tweakin and went back to my real tongue What you scared for?? Scared if you loved me yo people would always put you down but that with my people you’d never be down? Don’t you realize I got more reason to be scared going home with you?? I mean how many trees you seen in our neighborhoods with White fruit growing from em?? And don’t try to tell me y’all stopped doing that shit Because I feel the noose tighter around my neck every time you remind me why my family mad I’m with you When you remind me why they think you ain’t good enough When I feel so suffocated by your Whiteness I can’t even try to breathe my Brown-ness into it Falling for you was the scariest shit I could’ve ever did I mean I ain’t known if I really liked you or if it this was just some sad manifestation of me trying to be you How I supposed to know if this shit real when so many times it ain’t?? How I supposed to keep our love equal when the world keep telling me you better?? But I worked through all them scary thoughts for you Saw past all them strange fruit and saw the roots that made the tree you hang yourself from But you can’t see past the TV’s projection of me?? The slaves y’all got prancing around in the media? Or is that just it?? You do see past all that And you feel ashamed because you can’t believe you ever thought something so great was something so terrible Ashamed because you fell in love with the savage from the jungle and realized they were a human Or maybe I give you too much credit Maybe you ashamed cuz you still can’t see me as human And even though y’all basically practice beastiality with y’all damn dogs my ass is just too far removed Too reluctant to domestication Too damn independent. Look I know this sound like I’m saying I don’t like you But that’s just not it I’m simply tryna figure out why our love can only be mutual in spaces where there is no room for reality And to queer people of all races don’t think i don’t hear you say femme like it’s a dagger bullshit that you didn’t once see me as beautiful maybe that confusion you so desperately try to ascribe to me belongs to none other but yourself i don’t need you to tell me i’m not worth anything when i hear you call me a fuck up it feels something a lot like deja vu sometimes i think you’re right when you tell me i shouldn’t exist because i struggle to believe that God would allow one of his children to exist in a form that is nothing but brutalized you’ll never know what it’s like to advertise only that which can be used because you know not many will find your face beautiful to debate taking a fetish and labeling it love I used to always know I was nothing but a beautiful candy-coated raindrop Dropped from the Son of God Himself toasted chocolate smooth real nice Till you came along and told me I was too dark So dark when you lay with me my skin remind you of night and you wrap yourself in it hoping it can cloak your darkness Wrap yourself in my midnight blue dark skin peppered with self-inflicted scars you mistook for stars You love all the shit I give you--all the fun and all the whims So don’t you dare curse the fact that it come from something a little femme Don’t be mad cuz I’m not frontin like some big dick ass mandigo out her tryna win Score on niggas and got no thoughts worth shit For our bodies are not carcasses Within these bones lays soul sewn in by none other than Black women So don’t curse my form because it is nothing but an ode to the people who made me You’re a lover will never love me in the way i need it You will only treat me as the tit you suckle out of It is the most intimate relationship-- To love a thing that was only meant to take Because I look like your mother, You melt into me as home Because I smell like her And I look like him Because you have never met anybody as comprehensive as me before So I’m not gon let this be bad in me Because on today I am only seeing good Don’t you see me? Don’t you see good? Such a beautiful Mess? |