You sit there in judgement and
call me a fool. You tell me that my people are nothing, that we will amount to
nothing and that I should be ashamed of who I am. You tell me that I am weak,
that I have weak blood in my veins. You say my heritage and my gender conspired
against me.
I say who died and made you god?
Of course, if I had control of
history, I would prefer a version in which my ancestors are treated as equals,
as humans. I am not fond of the version in which we were captured and subdued
like dull-minded animals. I do not celebrate the fact that our official
language is one that we were required to adopt from a mother who was forced
onto us. I would have preferred to type in my father’s tongue with the fluency
of the ancients. However, the [ugly] truth is they came, the conquered and
destroyed. Worse still, they actually thought that they were helping us by
forcing us to abandon our history and adopt their future. I am not proud of the
mess they made of my people. However, I will not cower in shame and hide my
face from the sun. You are not the sun. The fact that your land speaks its own
tongue or that you were not captured and tortured by fellow beings does not
make you brighter than I am. You are not the light to my shadow. I will not be
ashamed.
You mock my daily efforts to pave
my own path. You say that I cannot survive in this cruel harsh world. Your own
daily routine could rival a sluggish snail. You tire merely at the pointing of
fingers and shouting of instructions. The very act of being awake exhausts you.
Yet, you mock my vigour and charisma. You claim I will soon be as spent and as
useless as you are. I am glad that our paths are different. I am glad that I
will not follow yours. I will build my own dream and live it out in my own way.
I am glad.
When I speak of the hopes and
dreams I have; of wishes I bear to change my people’s fate, you laugh and mock
my ambition. You say the system is rigged for me to fail. For the system to
survive, you say, it must stand on great broad, manly shoulders. My feeble
bones and soft flesh cannot withstand the responsibility of its weight. You do
not know my strength or my fire. You do not know of the men and women folk that
I descend from. You do not know of my determination or my gusto. You do not
know my journey or my story. You do not know. Therefore, I forgive your
ignorance.
