Truth is my Compass, & Wisdom my Helm.

Today is a glorious day for the Queers. For the first time in history, a President of Amerika has supported same-sex love. It must be a brave new world because just forty years ago this very population was institutionalized for unnatural behavior. Society is progressing mighty quickly these days. Slaves waited at least a few centuries before they were considered humans. This is all cause for great celebration.

Maybe Matthew Shepherd and Harvey Milk would look upon this day as a success; similar to how Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman would have looked upon your inauguration.

As a queer Nigerian-Amerikan woman, I’d be foolish to not wonder what provoked this sudden epiphany of yours. Did you come across a Luther Vandross album? Did you realize no nation is a god? Or, did you find yourself running for reelection and thought to appeal to the gay population?

I wonder because I suddenly found myself discussing your support for queers with my fellow queer black women on Facebook. These soon to be engaged black women were very grateful. Two votes come November.  I, ironically, have no faith in this country or its democracy. As stated above, the color of my skin rendered me property once upon a time. As for my womanhood, it too, was and will always be subject to patriarchy and misogyny. So, to now have my sexuality approved by the USA feels a bit anti-climatic.

Furthermore, I was surprised to find myself in disagreement with my fellow queer black women. Obama, I don’t really care what you think about who I marry. I would prefer to hear what you think about Fracking. Do you think that oil corporations should have the right to contaminate groundwater. Should citizens feel safe knowing that their air and water may be polluted beyond rectification? What should Amerikan citizens think if they knew that the chemicals used to obtain natural gas through fracking is considered a trade secret? Meaning, people may never know what’s killing them. Even better, the Environmental Protection Agency seems uncannily nonchalant about the plentiful animals that are dying in lakes and rivers of unknown causes.

I would love to know why you reinstated the Patriot-Act?! Any thinking human being knows that 9/11 was a covert CIA Hollywood operation that leaped into real-time. I suppose we are living in the movies now and I want to know why the director, you Obama, have not called STOP.

Can you please tell me why Amerikans can be detained without trial or jury for an indefinite period of time, according to the National Defense Authorization Act??? This is rather un-Amerikan.

Okay, what’s up with the un-maned drones killing innocent people in Pakistan and Afghanistan? The world is not a video game, the usage of drones is inhumane.

I am very curious about all these threats you and your administration are making to Iran. I can’t believe you put sanctions on their nation. Seriously? Who made you the ring the master of Nuclear energy and weapons? I am also very confused as to why you and your administration continue to fund the illegal settlement of Israel. Are you planning to nuke Iran? I ask because you were supposed to get Amerikan troops out of the Middle-East, but we’ve somehow spread so far out we’re now in Africa as well. You are not an honest man.

I understand the gay issue of the US is one you inherited, and since you have been open to discussion, I would love to know your thoughts on: our fiat currency; bank bailouts; genetically modified food; fluoride in our water supply (along with other contaminants); the privatization of prisons; why fifty percent of the US budget goes to the Department of Defense; why pharmaceutical companies can kill people; how come a private corporation, the Federal Reserve, has been printing the US dollar since the Bank manipulated economic recession of 1913, which led to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913; and why are corporations considered people under the eyes of our legal system.

If you’re going to talk, let’s talk about something that pertains to the health and sustenance of this nation and our planet.

You see, my fellow queer black women from Facebook accused me of being a self-righteous armchair activist. They were pleased to feel better included in the Amerikan pie and to get a tax discount. Trimming that second-class citizenship and another inch towards the Amerikan Dream.

Isn’t that funny? Cancer, obesity and diabetes are rising along with poverty and debt, but I should celebrate your realization that Queer love is a human right.

I am desperate to see the world in five years. Will there be more prisons than schools? Will people be able to drink water from their faucets? Will the world be at war for the third time? Will cancer or diabetes rival heart disease as the leading cause of death? Will there be a constitution to refer to when civil liberties are violated? Will this country be recognizable?

But I don’t want to piss on the Queer Marriage Party. As long as Amerika gives it’s marginalized populations a crumb from its delusional dream, Amerika can ransack the world and still believe itself to be Great and Just.

Go Obama!                               Go Obama!                                You the man!

I was five when I established my first best friendship. She was white and her parents called me her “nigger friend.” I didn’t care to make a fuss because we enjoyed each others company. However, as I grew older and we lost contact, I always felt that racism was unsettling. It has never made sense to me. I’d look at white people who have the same number of bones as I do. Ten fingers and toes. A pair of legs and ears. Two eyes and one nose. I have always felt in my heart that racism is a mental disease.

I was fourteen when I walked into Lane Bryant and knew I was being followed. I was fifteen when I was harassed by a female white officer for not appreciating her request to search my bag on a boardwalk in Long Island. These interactions were highlights in my desire to understand what offense I had committed by existing.

If I had the support of a black family or community, I might have assumed racism to be the white man’s totem pole that was designated for my skin.

Fortunately, life has dealt me a peculiar deck of cards. My mother and her mother were never loved properly and never learned to teach themselves self-love. My mother wanted out the hood and she thought a man with some dough could do the trick. Three years later she had me, no man, back in the projects, and a torn heart. My father told her to abort me and she refused. For my first six years, I felt her regret. She hardly spoke to me or touched me. There was a steady distance that was carefully maintained. It was agonizing. I never felt safe around her. I always thought I was doing something wrong. But I was what she did wrong.

Racism is a white disease and black women have internalized misogyny.

My mother had twin boys when I was six and I swear a new woman came out of hiding. This woman loved her boys. She didn’t care for me anymore, nor could she hide it. I became invisible and all the words she never shared were flickering off her tongue. She would beat me with a belt. She would demand that I clean her house. I’d do laundry and she’d complain about a spoon in the sink.

Trifling fathers reappear when their words are overvalued. I was eight when my father reentered my life. He told me he’d love me and I believed him. He took me back to Nigeria and within two months, I learned that he raped his maids. His wife despised my presence. She tortured me with words and loved to slap and flog me. I told my mother about the abuse I endured but she belittled my experiences. By my tenth birthday, I became a maid in my father’s house. Instead of eating with my five siblings, I ate with the maids. I’d stay up to midnight waiting for my father to return from work so I could serve him dinner and wash his dishes and hope that he’d remember that I was his daughter. By my eleventh birthday I feared that my father would take a liking to my girl body that was morphing due to puberty. I would never have believed it possible, but a maid once said I’d become a maid and a year later I was; when another maid said he’d come for me, I knew better than to doubt her.

I was twelve when I returned to the US. Mother barely looked at me. Within four months, she said if I didn’t like her rules, I could get the fuck out. I tried to fit in at school. I was teased for my African accent. I eventually turned to the hood-rats in the neighborhood. I started getting into fights and shoplifting. By the time I was fourteen I was kicked out and forced to live in some private group home. I had Americorp volunteers treating me like some chapter in their sociology textbook. It lasted three years.

By the time I was fifteen, I had experienced racism, colorism, sexism, sexual assault, homelessness, and homophobia. Oddly, I experienced most at the hands of people of color. People I thought would love me because I looked like them. But when people hate themselves, the hate self-perpetuates.

As life would have it, my first love was a white woman who volunteered at the group home. She hugged me, and that’s all it took.

I was sixteen when I decided to apply to Smith College. I was a baby dyke and a staunch feminist. I knew that racism and classism were a part of the package. I was seventeen when I enrolled. I thought I could do it. Blend in. Be a happy brown girl. Represent for my peoples. But my wounds were too deep. I tried to mingle with blacks, Africans, queers, those on financial aid, and every other social pocket that I could identify with. But everyone thought that someone else was their enemy, their oppressor, or their competitor.

My feelings wavered with each interaction because I wanted to believe that -izms were easy to diagnose and treat. I wanted to believe that black power is where it’s at. I wanted to believe that hegemony and heteronomativity were the enemy. I wanted to believe that the rich would never understand me. I hypothesized whiteness to be the true culprit? It got silly after a while. If I learned anything in college, I knew all -izms were social constructs. I lost loyalty to all notions and slogans.

I was twenty when my soul came back online. I had been a sleeping spirit moving through the world. I’d watch CNN obsessively, and during the swine-flu scare, I became curious about currency inflation and the incessant war mongering. I realized that this world was turning into shit. I had this crack in the center of my skull and all these questions were pouring through. I no longer cared about race or gay stuff because Gaza was being blown up for reasons some attributed to religion. It became evident, to me, that all -izms are a mask for domination, exploitation and a justification for dehumanization.

I wanted to obtain knowledge that was not solicited. I wanted to know if the economics and politics of the institution of slavery was different than outsourcing. I wanted to know if the bible was a historical text that had been taken too literal. I wanted to know who named the sun and the planets. I wanted to know if I was born into a world I knew nothing of because I was consumed with frivolous conflict. I quickly learned that I live in a world stranger than fiction; and although I am a Queer Woman of Color, it is a slight way to self-identify. I am a human, a goddess, a starseed, a sound source, a spirit on a journey in this dimension.

Yes, Amerika is my country of birth, but I am more than what my father tells me I am.

I am twenty-three years old and I don’t fit in. I am not politically correct or fashion forward enough for the QPOC’s who attended liberal arts colleges. I am too socially aware to deal with racist, heterosexist and passive aggressive hippies in communes. I am too black, too female, too queer, and too poor to find those who are preparing for an economic collapse, food shortages and martial law.

There are days when I feel pleased with myself. On those days, I enjoy being a lone soldier. But there are too many days when I feel like I’ve been traveling the desert all by myself.

It gets lonesome and I feel exhausted. But I believe it’s all for something.

Baby,

I will never have you because I already love you. I can’t bear the thought of bringing you into a world that I wish I was never brought into. A world that operates by invisible strings. A place in which a societal demise is imminent.

If I brought you into this world, I would never have the means to feed you food from an organic garden we grew on our own;  I would never have the time to teach you what schools would never have you question; I would never be able to tell you how much I love you because the world would compete by telling you how much you should hate yourself; and I would never feel like the mother you deserve, for that reason, I would rather spare your conception.

I will always dream of you. I love you

Truly,
Mama Zisa Aziza

I am standing at a crossroads between trite and trivial
And the world seems to be going nowhere at lightening speed

I’ve been composting my former self
Itching to plant new seeds and can’t find land

Most days I feel like a baby screaming as I exit the womb
But my waist to my toes are in the sack of a dying mother

Every now and then I want a muffler and an invisible cloak
So I can sing and dance in the street and not look insane

Sometimes I want to hug strangers whose eyes look like pearls
But I know they would rather run than embrace me

I don’t know how to live and I can’t fake it
Because the world feels like a stranger

Popo think they the Pope of the land
Prison Guards think they the God of bars
And Banks swear they own the Monopoly Board

Jiggle. Jiggle. Ring. Ring.
Where the fuck am I?

Dr. Seuss and Mickey Mouse playing hickory-dickory-dock in my mind
Green eggs and Disney land got me in a daze

I be sucking on pacifiers cause mothers stay hating
Fathers be MIA as if it were a prophecy

I need some holy water to exorcise the Matrix
I think I am the Virgin Mary; Red pill got me tripping

I must be the blind humble bee ‘cause all I want is honey
Jesus kissed me on the cheek and I wanted to burn money

But birds be dropping out the sky and fishes belly up
I don’t know where to run or how to hide

I ain’t fucking no beast, but I gotta get mine
I’m straight streaming on that third-eye

I be sitting in a tree singing,
Begging the stars to come save me

Ring. Ring. Jiggle. Jiggle.
Where the fuck am I?

I’m trying to get home!

Robot:

When you are no longer a consumer or citizen
When no law or money can distort your love for humanity
Then, and only then, will you be free

I:

I am standing by a bridge to nowhere
A place we’ve never been
For freedom lies there