it’s time, ya’ll. i leave for somalia tomorrow morning. i will have VERY limited access to internet, so i won’t be blogging until september. but i will be back (inshallah), and i will have so much to share with you all.

i have been emotionally preparing for this trip for such a long time. the emotional preparation has been difficult. i have been thinking of diaspora, of identity, of myself and my relationship to my culture and my family history. of the vast amounts of learning and unlearning i must do when it comes to all of this. i think that is part of why this trip is such a big deal for me. in a lot of ways i am going ‘home.’ and i think that so much of my perception of home has been defined by western philosophy. my people are nomads- home is not a fixed spot on a map, not a piece of land you can own and call yours. 

my conception and longing for ‘home’ is rooted in my perpetual loneliness, in my lived experience as a lonely black girl in white amerikka. in my simultaneous visibility and invisibility as a woman of color in a white supremacist patriarchal society. of being subaltern, of being outsider and other.

this trip means so much to me. i will live in a household of women all summer. learn from my grandmother. ask her why she got married so young, what it felt like when her husband died, why she lived the rest of her life as a widow.

i will, for the first time in my life, be in a country where everyone looks like me. where there is an extreme concentration of poverty. where there is a famine. and i am realizing that even as i prepare to leave, i can’t leave. that i do not know who i am outside of the framework of whiteness or colonialism or patriarchy. that i must learn and find out. that it is a struggle. that pain is inevitable.

this trip will be both my mooring, and unmooring.

as a child i asked my mother if the ocean was a woman, but some questions we are born into.

the answers a pile of salt in the belly.

till september. <3

shephilosophy:

I know hating goodbye is the most cliché phrase, but its clichéd phrasing masks the truest sincerity. Maybe speaking in clichés removes how close we are to the subject, makes it less real, less painful. But the farewell remains reality.

Closeness, friendship, sisterhood, love. These are all life forces, they help us breathe, they make us live. I guess that’s why separation is so heartbreaking, because love attaches you to someone, in unspoken ways, and saying goodbye to them can feel like you are tearing away at the bonds that were silently built.

Bonds that were built through a mutual love for poetry, a shared deen, a shared loneliness, and a shared politic that centered our own existences, our own identities as brown girls in the struggle who loved karaoke and Drake and YOLO and getting our nails did.

Jamila, wallahi I’ma miss your presence, and your energy. Being your friend has made me grow in ways I never would have without you. You think I ever woulda rapped in front of everybody at a random ass Open Mic at PSU? Nah homegirl, that was all you. You’re one of the dopest chicks I know, no lie. We have so much more to accomplish together when I get back from Baltimore. Insha’Allah this goodbye is only temporary. I’ma hold on to its ephemeral quality to mitigate the sadness.

Write the world in Somalia boo. I’ma miss you more than you know. <3

i can’t believe i get my own tumblr commemoration! sarah, why are you so perfect? i’m crying, b. 

i just tried to change my “interested in” section of facebook from men to wizards, but there wasn’t an option for it, and that sucks.　

shephilosophy:

I’ve come to realize that I’ve internalized so much self-hate and victim-blaming, to the point where I can’t even tell homeboy to fall back when he takes too much liberty with my emotional and physical space. I been conditioned to be nice, to care too much about the feelings of preying men who step to me with mad disrespect under the guise of spittin game.

And I can’t even begin to negotiate the contradictions, of being mentally violated on the daily and being expected to love and revel in the attention, of feeling worthless in the absence of attention and objectified in abundance of it. Because without the male gaze I have been told I am nothing, and I have been taught to seek it, even when its intensity has left me

vulnerable,

overexposed,

and hurt.

Because to live under patriarchy is to believe it is always your fault, that when he invades your space you let it be. And that if he doesn’t invade your space,

then you don’t matter.

You don’t matter.

sarah tells it like it is. cosigned so hard.

“Nonviolence declares that the [First Nations] could have fought off Columbus, George Washington, and all the other genocidal butchers with sit-ins; that Crazy Horse, by using violent resistance, became part of the cycle of violence, and was “as bad as” Custer. Nonviolence declares that Africans could have stopped the slave trade with hunger strikes and petitions, and that those who mutinied were as bad as their captors; that mutiny, a form of violence, led to more violence, and, thus, resistance led to more enslavement. Nonviolence refuses to recognize that it can only work for privileged people, who have a status protected by violence, as the perpetrators and beneficiaries of a violent hierarchy.”

—

Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State

(Source: skepticamongthefaithful, via siemprevivalavida)