Blanc/Noir
You wrote your history in capital letters and called it canon. Tried to shift our parts to the margins, tried to hide your cruelty with white markers. Added black pages and wrote them in our blood.
Dried blood turned black, blended into the chapters and seeped into the seams. Black in a pool of black does not become solid, but transparant. Invisible to the naked eye.
So we carved our history into our skin and found other ways of retelling the tales of those who came before us. They hummed away their pain, turned misery into prose, sang the ache out of their bones. We reshaped our history into lyric.
You tried silencing us under layers of earth, kept breaking us down as you did forests to share your propoganda on. But you had forgotten that plants grow when you sing to them. So we kept serenading to the Earth. You betrayed her, the one that gave you life, but we embraced her and stayed rooted, carrying her soul through our bodies. We carry her in our lungs, giving air back to her.
You tried setting fire to our legacy, but you awoke sleeping embers, igniting a rebellion that sounded bittersweet. Retellings through lullabies and songs that serve as soundtracks to our souls. Transcended ages, countries and religions, carried by the wind across oceans, even foreign tongues understanding these melodies. We are everywhere, you know.
You wrote your history in bolded words, tried writing sentences in italics, underlined your thoughts and expressions. We wrote our history onto our core. We are different, you know.
In a Name
Not long after we met, you became comfortable using my name, even shortening it to your taste. How sweet it sounded when you called for me. How it showed me all that a name entailed.
Often I would get distracted when I am introduced to someone new, paying attention to details that do not matter, losing focus and feeling cheated because it never feels as though they told me their name. It might be that I black out when they do.
How selfish of me, to call out to others as little as I do, or if it were to happen calling them ‘you’, or use any generic nickname that can be used regardless of person, and not by their name their parents gifted them. Reducing them to a “babe” or summing them all up with “guys”.
Embedded in me is my name, forever lasting, yet I am reminded of how I could have been called something different by my parents, were it not that my name resembles my mother’s, so when she stumbled upon it, it was instantly decided. She ended up choosing a name that is considered unique. Even my younger brother, after 27 years, still remarks on its singularity, as if from time to time it would suddenly fall out of the rhythm of his speech.
Like a drummer going off-beat, a name can also turn bitter, when mispronounced, misspelled or misinterpreted regardless of intent. How its weight and meaning then becomes relevant. How my brows furrow when I read the name written on the sleeve of my coffee cup. Doubting if it is mine, as that is not how I am named, but taking it anyway.
You called for me, after not knowing me for that long, using a nickname I never told you I was given. As if all my names, the short ones and the ones longer, were familiar to you before we even met. As if my past lovers told you all of the names I was ever given, how to say them, and turn them into song.
