On fighting 'til the fight is all you have left...
...see these scratch marks?
these are the remaining scars of resistance left by my People who, being crammed in a 'death chamber' to suffocate, gave everything they had to try to survive, to try to perhaps escape, to try to resist and reclaim themselves & their value to the human experience...even though they knew what the outcome of their ill-fated resistance would most likely be.
Even as they were surrounded by insurmountable odds, being engulfed by impossible circumstances in which they had no agency... still, they fought. They fought so hard - barehanded, no less - that hundreds of years later we're able to see the indelible marks of Freedom that they etched in stone....
This spirit of the final fight has birthed me...I have no doubt about this. And, as a true daughter of the Diaspora, I also carry the blood of the oppressor, even as we all carry their ideology deep in our societal consciousness and conscience.
For them... all of them... And, for me... I will not fail to fight for what I know humanity can be.
We are in a civilization-wide state of emergency and the mass of us is still under the anesthesia of our errant attempt at a civilization of domination and control and aquisition by the few at the expense of any and everything.
Even against every set of odds, even as I lose my breath, even when I lose hope - especially when I lose hope (the hope that someday, someone will save me/Us) - I will fight.
We have a system of relations, and power, and power relations that is undeniably killing us.
I'd rather kill it - barehanded if I must - instead.
I will fight because I can. Because I do have the power to say 'no' and do 'no' and mean 'no'... Because I have more agency than my People whose desperate scratches are deep in these dungeon walls. ...and because I feel that there may be at least a few others who may join me in the effort to at least do something, at least leave a mark on this world that says we tried everything we knew how...
*(Pictured: A wall in the "death chamber' used to suffocate the enslaved Africans who tried to rebel and/or resist their slavers, those who could not be "controlled." - Elmina Slave Castle, Elmina, Ghana, West Africa)
