My Reminisce.

Allow me to dream for an extra minute. Allow me to process all this for an extra minute. Allow me to rest for an extra minute. Allow me to forget the present, erase thoughts of the future and only exist in the past for an extra minute. Allow me to be calm for an extra minute.

I have my eyes open and just seeing you scares me. The ‘mzungu’ who keeps taking the likes of me away from our families and taking us to new lands to enslave us. It’s been three seasons and thousands of miles from my motherland. I was taken from my family and ancestoral land and I can’t help but wonder what will happen to my soul once I die and get buried in this foreign land whose ancestors do not know me. Will I be all alone in a darkness so profound that my soul will know loneliness for an eternity? In this three seasons, you have tried to teach me your faith which is comforting to my thoughts right now because at least in your version there’s a place my soul can go and join good people where we will live eternity in nothing but bliss.

I can’t help but wonder though, in this beautiful place, will I still be working in the cotton fields during the day and in a white man’s house at night? In this place, will the white man still have a better house than me? Will he still live in a more comfortable eternity than me? Will the likes of me still be expected to live in separate spaces from the white man? Will my ancestors be in this place? I’m conflicted and I cannot ask questions because I am supposed to look beautiful and be as stupid as possible. My people respected me as their princess and as their leader because of my wisdom. I was fair in my decisions and I was kind to everyone. Including you when you first set foot in my land. I should have turned you away but how could I? I had heard stories though of what happened to villages that had turned the ‘mzungu’ away so I thought it would be safer for my people if I welcomed you to live among us for a few moons. I thought you would embrace my culture and my people but how wrong I was.

Eventually I became comfortable around you and that’s how I ended up in that slave ship. I had to watch some of my people, who you managed to catch the night you kidnapped me, die of diseases and poor living conditions. You didn’t even give us a fighting chance because like the cowards you are, you attacked in the middle of a stormy night so that my army wouldn’t be alerted. You had the element of surprise on your end and so you slaughtered my worriors in their sleep. The few of my people that survived, I haven’t seen since I set foot off that ship and got sold to you because you thought a princess would be an amazing trophy from your expedition to Africa, to show off to other white masters like yourself. It kills me to see how my people are talked to, treated, thrown around and even used. I should have done right by my people.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, you took away my name and gave me one with no meaning and no honour. My name had meaning, honour and love behind it. My name linked me to my ancestoral land and those who’d died there but you took that from me. It took a whole two seasons for me to accept this fact. A whole two seasons of getting whipped every time I’d refuse to answer to the name “Mary” or every time I’d introduce myself as “Wanjirú wa Njeri”. “Unacceptable!” You’d say every time before ensuring I kissed the very floor I was standing on thank s to the slap you’d deliver to my cheek. Before I came here, I lived in a land where men respected women and protected them but here, your kind of men protect only the women with skin tones like yours. So I couldn’t help but pitty the girls being born in this land and have to learn that they’ve been born into a curse of rape, slavery and illiteracy. It doesn’t help to see how you’ve managed to break our black men. It pleases you to watch them beg and submit but where I came from, our men were worriors. They answered to no one and they loved being alive. Now all we do is long and call out for death, envying those whom we’ve laid to rest.

So I close my eyes and hope that you allow me to dream for an extra minute. Allow me to process all this for an extra minute. Allow me to rest for an extra minute. Allow me to forget the present, erase thoughts of the future and only exist in the past for an extra minute. Allow me to be calm for an extra minute.

Article by;

Vanessa Beyonce.