Summation

I have been having trouble adequately expressing my emotions in this avenue the past couple of days, every time I began to type, or even thought of typing I'd become overwhelmed with so much I wanted to be expressed and conveyed. Because so much HAS happened. Emotionally at least, I've walked across this city and have been given a whole new perspective, a whole new way of processing the sights and activities around me, a whole new way to 'judge' my surroundings.

My opinions of people I once held in high regard has drastically changed as well, within a couple of mere hours of observation and emotional apathy on my part. I've only been here about 10 days and yet it feels like years. I cannot begin to evince my disappointment, disappointment that stilled these hands from typing. It was if I was waiting for something, some huge catalyst to get my fingers working again, forgetting that my gift lies in the spontaneity of it all, in the frank renditions of exactly what is in my head.

I met a leader who was content to blindly follow. A leader so intelligent, a leader with so much potential, muddying himself with lesser aspirations and understanding of the world, with lesser and demeaning actions and thoughts, my heart broke.

And I once again became apathetic.

My new doctrine is as follows;

If it doesn't make me smile, it does not make me sad, it in fact does nothing to my being, to my core. Joy or nothing at all.

I've been reading more voraciously, I've once again picked up my love for literature that was lost somehow in the pop culture that took over my life, I am accompanied on this journey by a beautiful black woman, who's life mirrors mine to such an extent it positively frightens at times. My dearest cousin, Jacqueline Acolatse. It is quite a sight, I have been told, to see the pair of us coming down a road, one with no hair, one with a head full of untouched virgin 'African' knots and curls, both dark in complexion, both over flowing with knowledge of self and intelligence. We are apparently rare in this society, in this culture.

As much as that idea amuses, it saddens me just as much.

Maybe I'm too full of Malcolm X right now, but then again there can be no such thing. His words repeat themselves over and over again in my head when I walk through the city and see what I now have learned to call my 'brothers and sisters' travel blindly around me and all I can think of is the word;

Victim.

But victim of who and what is the appropriate question?

This morning my cousin and I ran some errands in the CVS next to the Five Points station, the clerk noticed us both holding his autobiography and commented on how she had to read it in high school, we both showed mutual interest and Jacque asked her how she liked it. She wavered for a minute, I took care to notice her lightened skin and straight hair tinged red with god only knows what form of cheap dye she bought to satisfy her insecurity, cocked her head to the side and said.

"I liked it in the beginning but then it tapered of to the end and I didn't really enjoy it"

I don't really recall Jacque's reaction, but I walked away in silence, with only one word forcing itself out of my mouth.

"Victim"

But of who or what I ask again.

Because at this time, we have all the power, all the resources, all the knowledge can be freely acquired, we have all the tools Malcolm X used to enlighten himself and his starving brain at the tip of our fingers and yet we squander it and pay more heed to a site famed for it's naked female videographers and a glorified groupie who prides herself on the amount of sperm she has swallowed from any basic 2 bit rapper she can use to climb the ladder to 'fame'. Fame that she will not use to better her people. Fame that will destroy her soul.

That moment of silence hit me once again, I don't know where to begin, how to sufficiently express what is written in my heart, what I feel constricting my breath, what I feel creating that fear within my core.

Fear for my children, fear for my future, and fear for the truth.

That after all these years, after all these opportunities to discover it, it still continuously gets pushed underneath the rug.

And it renders me speechless.