Occupying Space
To all the Black femmes trying to Occupy our space.
Clarity, vibrancy, Ebony, creation, collective voice, voices.
Voices voices.
Voices ringing, screaming for acknowledgment
Acknowledgement
Yet I must know
Know how to create
Know how to change
Change create, change reborn, consolidate
Consolidate your wants
Consolidate your emotions
Consolidate the way you operate and take space
Scratch that
Don’t take up space
Consolidate your body and mind and squeeze into shadows
Pause. Wait. Listen. Breathe.
I just need to breathe
Scratching at my skin.
Take it away
Make cream of me
Milk me so I seep out white, clear, blonde.
Construe the images of myself you have
Construe a girl you want me to be
Construe up the perfect Black Womxn
That fits into your mold of a being
Birth out the mold you’ve crated up
Find a new wave to be made
Made up
In your whiteness
So my body and my arsenal will thrive
And not die
Die die die die die dying in this america
How can I be this Warrior?
How can I live, living to wait in the process.
Waiting for sustainability continuously crippling
Crippling down
I can’t breathe I can’t sustain
Slowly I feel my mind trying to mobilize
What is mobilizing?
“You Must Continue In Occupying Space”
Creating a space for myself to engage in community is weird.
What does it mean to act in a community now that parallels communities that previously, you took for granted? Pushed aside, not realizing the radiant gem it was. and oh how you would long to be back.
Home.
Once I landed in these communities in which I’ve seen myself colliding and holding space, a catalyst of emotions flooded through my body. Growing up as a young Black African in a rural white town resulted in so much confusion. Many things that I carried within myself revolved around who I was, what my body in this space meant, and how I could occupy or dwell in that space that wasn’t created for me to occupy it.
It’s difficult for me to think back and remember my experiences in high school, due to the internalizations that projected onto my Blackness.
Through these internalizations, developed the demonization of my blackness. Demonization when attached to blackness can traced back to colonization and slavery where Indigenous peoples were regarded as “savages.” This condoned the “taming” or “civilizing” of the black beast. In the U.S., the abolition of slavery gave birth to the 13th amendment, which requires that all citizens have the right to emancipation, or to be set free, except in cases of punishment for a crime committed. “This emancipation was not created for people of color, when their movement, education, access to health care, housing, jobs and even mentalities were restricted by law to a ‘coloreds only’ status, purposefully making them less to the ‘whites only’ ways of living, which impeded the growth of a whole society and sustained our society to be dependent on the servitude or enslavement, to the whiteness and ultimately, white supremacism.” (Khavheni Shope). Given this context, I can see that the divide our laws have been set up to sustain, even when labeled as liberating, is still shackled to the dual contingencies of demonizations and white supremacy.
What is most hurtful about these demonizations is how I was dependent on this mindset. There was this colonized mindset that I was limited and inferior to my white friends. Didn’t matter what their actions were, even though they were often coated in racism and xenophobia, it was the implicit aggressions that dictated the way I viewed myself. When the society in which you are placed is set up to have you see yourself a certain way, no amount of complausault (complimentary insult) could remove the weight of my internalization.
Am I worthy of this space?
A space that seemed so polarized in many of the circles I moved through. In Kansas City, I was desperate for Black spaces in which to create myself. Back then, I wouldn’t have realized that what I needed was to affirm my own Blackness as valid. To be proud of the radical Black community I have. Reflecting and growing in my journey, I often question what it would have been like if I let myself be this beautifully messy Kenyan womxn who affirmed her Africanness rather than romanticized or hid it. When it came to engaging in Black spaces, I was able to quickly mold myself into a classic, overcompensated example of blackness. I was so desperate to fit in, and often times just needed to chill the fuck out. In my effort to be “Black enough,” I lost myself.
Stepping out of that space, I realized that my beautiful intersectional blackness was ultimately and always valid. There was nothing I had to prove to justify that I was a Black womxn. Especially when the society around me made it very clear that I was, indeed, a Black womxn. Living within a rural white town, the oversaturation of racism was all around me. That oversaturation becomes your normal. I still have not developed the language around the mentality this does to my view of my Blackness.
Coasting through higher education, I find myself in this weird paradigm. Growing up in a low-income, single parent home, I remember being so angry at my mother for the things I could never have. Capitalism will have you bugging at the dumbest shit. I remember the time I got my first iPhone. I was too fucking excited. I Facetimed a friend immediately soon realized that my mom got the “wrong” iPhone. It was the iPhone 4 instead of the iPhone 5s — eliminating the possibility for me to be within rather than other. I didn’t have that privilege (like most of my white friends) to have expensive, name brand, material possessions.
I assimilated and craved deeply for acceptance into that privilege. Much to my disappointment, I would never receive it. I internalized my realities and shielded my home life from the majority of my friends. It was truly like living a double life. When I did open up my home, I was embarrassed by its looks and the smell of Uunsi permeating throughout the house. I processed micro-aggressions through humor. My mind was excusing the consistent tokenization I was experiencing. I excused ignorance for bliss, bliss with connection, connection with love.
When the only attention you receive is dependent on a colonized mindset, the ways in which you navigate spaces are inherently going to be clouded with the dependency of tokenization, ignorance, idolization, and ultimately racism. As I began my college experience, I was gifted with an abundant community. They guided me through the numerous mind fucks I had revolving around my identity. I have never received deep sisterhood like I did my first year of college. It was there that my Blackness began to breathe. I was able to have the two cosmic realms of disillusionment explode into this crazy intersectional reality. My efforts to try and be a certain type of Black girl were getting washed away and something new was forming.
Through all my excitement of who I was becoming, I was developing the vocabulary and the voice that had been neglected. Using a voice that had been silenced for most of my life felt so rejuvenating. It was as if my spirit was birthing out something so sensational that even I wasn’t ready for it. I’m continuing to develop this voice of mine and I find myself becoming more and more skeptical of how I use it.
That brings me to the heart of why I am writing today. I see this sensational voice yearning for the megaphone to send wavelengths of liberation across all communities. I’ve been empowered and driven to deconstruct my actions, which in return allows true justice and reparations to develop. My silence will not be dependent on external projections by those who have no desire for liberation. My silence will be strategically implemented for my own jurisdictions. I will have a choice in my silence.
The tension I find myself having currently is that in these spaces initially set up for mutual humanization, a hierarchy of activism starts to take form. A form that is still dependent on the backs of those with no resources to be heard saying “I can’t breathe.”
When a Black womxn speaks in a space advertised for black lives, it is co-opted into a space bonded to heteronormative practices of activism.
An activism that must have either a Malcolm or Martin and any Sojourners, Marshas, Baldwins, or Janet Mocks will be set aside for the prime camera time but receive nothing in return. The policies that affect them will not affect the Martins and Malcolms.
I question whether this attributed to the paradigm of male inferiority complex weaving himself into the center of the room, diminishing any and all truths Black womxn have within them.
The divisiveness that gets in our heads isn’t separate from what this colonized society makes us out to be. I have found myself being the baggage of not only my own story but the stories of my sisters. The weight of their struggle is linked to my own. It’s the voices of the collective that get lost and pinned against each other.
I’ve begin to wonder why I still feel empty. What is digging into my soul, creating craters of dissatisfaction and disbelief. Disbelief in myself that I am worthy, I am enough. I recall countless times sharing my heart and my knowledge with individuals and received nothing but a muted ear. What would it look like if we became dependent on listening deeply to each other? How can we as young Black organizers, storytellers, activists, be in community with each other and mutually education our minds. I’ve become exhausted, with what it feels at times, single handedly carrying the emotional labor of my community without gaining anything in return.
Consequently, I am not exempt from this epidemic. I am not exempt from my own Anti-blackness. I have most definitely contributed to the problem. I have seen myself be too concerned about my own issues rather than having a deeply genuine awareness to my siblings livelihoods. I have felt my ego rise and almost become dependent on the hollow educational opportunities I have led when creating dialogue. I’ve fell short on putting a call to action after these dialogues and truly acting on what I’m saying. I recognize these failures and I strive to continue to do so. And I ask community to please, keep me accountable.
I can’t engage in these false narratives of community anymore. Balancing my own truths and the weight of my communities can’t be a solo job. It can’t continue to fall in the wombs of womxn in our communities like it often does. I come to my community, as a proud Black Kenyan womxn, calling to reframe the way we fight for liberation. Create a war zone within yourself and conquer through strongly acknowledging your internalized bullshit and stop. Check yourself and lovingly check each other because to see the revolution is to see our own generations stripping our internalizations, heteronormativity, colorism, xenophobia, transphobia, ableism, in order to create silos of purity and radicalism.
From here, how can we, as lovers and spiritual beings strive in mutual humanization and mobilize together for liberation? What is it that can mobilize us?
What is mobilizing?
This piece is part of a series written by college undergraduates enrolled in off-campus study programs through the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA). HECUA programs offer students a chance to think deeply about the issues that matter most, and we’d like to share a piece of that experience with you. Every student post on the HECUA Medium page considers a theory or reading that intersects with that student’s lived experience. For more information about HECUA programs, click here.
