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In Defense of My Voice

“No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"... No woman has ever written enough.” ― bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

I can’t stand writing anything that feels like a news article anymore. Not right now and not with the the words I have left. Making use of pen and paper now for anything other than evangelizing on my five-foot soapbox about why Black people deserve better and what it means to be intentional in your activism feels like wasted breath. This is anything but. Shifting focus from a world that prefers your silence and choosing to recenter yourself in the building of your own narrative is the only way through. I’ve traded in well-written arguments for well-intentioned blocking and redirecting. It matters far less to me now whether or not I am correct. It matters more than I said something, anything at all, and that it was well informed enough to not cause further harm. Piecing words together to create a record of Black thought, Black consciousness and Black experience in this time is a revolutionary act in its own right. If the dust settles and there is nothing left behind to remind us of what it felt like to breathe in this air, as bitter and as thick as it may feel going down, then we’ll find ourselves stumbling backward into this moment in another time far removed. 

I am not a good writer. I am a decent liar and a terrible cook but I am not a good writer. What I am is a woman and Black and too far away from other beings that are woman and Black in the same time and space as I am. I don’t write to be good or to be right but to stick my honey-covered hand outside the window and hope something bites, latches on, and finds itself a home between words that feel familiar or make a rough thought feel warm.To feel affirmed and to affirm yourself enough so that you see the value in your contributions to this effort is a journey with no end in sight. 

“I write for young girls of color, for girls who don’t even exist yet so that there is something there for them when they arrive” - Ntozake Shange

I’ve long retired from the business of spoon feeding information to those who do not find it within themselves to seek out the written words of Black women and Black queer people in order to inform their activism. I can’t carry any more weight than what sits against my own spine and the spines of those whose own humility allows for them to seek out the words of the better informed. If it is within the goals of the most privileged among us to minimize Black queer voices and set aside Black women’s experiences, then there is only more reason for these stories to be transformed into written thought. I do not know whether or not my grandmothers ever wanted to come to America, whether their ears still find the voices here too dull or the air too frigid. I don’t know what they wanted out of my grandfathers at my age or if they felt entitled to expectations at all. Had they written these thoughts down and handed them off to me, I would have worshiped them word by word. Maybe that’s what I want. I want the tangible chronicles of a time tangled up in itself. If your identities overlap and tangle themselves together with sharp edges and thin stems, give the world the gift of your thoughts preserved in a time capsule of the intersectional Black experience. The more words I say and things I scream, the harder and harder it gets for those who come long after these words are said to tell others I never existed. To tell others we, the multi-identitied and under-identified, never existed. 

How Baldwin Taught Me to Be Multiple

Our Collective Fashion (non)Sense