Member-only story
I’m Gonna Stay Right Here In This Becoming
I had another voice before this. I believe it to be true. Somewhere in some womb, forever unknown to me, I heard a mother-tongue calling. But that was in another life I barely remember. A life briefly lived where I stayed. I mean, I was kept and I was not a stranger to myself. But I live this life now in a language I have coopted as mine through assimilation. Rough out of my chest but easy out of my lips, I speak in fragments; I know myself enough to utter aloud tales of reclamation and am unmoored from my people enough to be forever adrift from continuous connection. What an uneasy way to live — floating on seas that never lead towards home, describing my people with a tongue that was not originally mine.
I study the history of a peoples I believe to be a part of through melanated ancestors but know to be other through colonized language. I am a stranger in my own history. Sifting through names and faces of people that look close enough to be kin but distant enough that I am sure I will never know. I examine traumas I have no business claiming and celebrate joy with a breadth of uncertainty. A part of the whole, it seems, but never wholly known.
I was… before this. My story did not start with erasure of establishment in community. I had another name before this one. One I no longer respond to for it belongs to a baby that did not travel down the path her name laid out for her. And I don’t want to make this about the erasure that is whiteness, for that monster has claimed more of me than I should have let it. This is about my reclamation. This is about Blackness.
This is my I’m-gonna-stay-right-here
baptized in abundance of options within existence
reborn.
My past is a womb I became inside of.
The first of my lineage to recreate identity.
Bless this imagination.
Bless this determination.
Bless this Blackness.
Bless me.
I’m gonna stay right here.
Everything that comes from me will know its name in its conception. Will know my love in labour. Will know me before it knows itself so it will not be lost before it searches but instead will be found before…
