Ama Nkrumah
Act 1; Scene 1
Enter woman:
we do not know what she looked like—
how stretched her flesh was laid out in the husk of her being,
how charred her eyes may have been,
how clickety her laughter may have sounded
the elasticity of the jiggle in her behind when her feet landed on ground.
We do not know which tribe she came from, who her mother was
what language she may have spoken and which name she bore.
we only know that, if there was a palette of colors she would have fallen
anywhere between the darkest shade of black to the palest hue of brown.
we only know that she was woman.
woman at a political rally.
who claimed space on a soapbox, renamed herself in show of solidarity,
slashed her cheeks with blade, smeared blood over her body
and dared all the men present to follow suit to demonstrate that
their collective freedom was worthy of skin-deep sacrifice.
Ama Nkrumah.
a name that did not belong to her.
a voluntary erasure, but an erasure nonetheless,
for what’s a name to freedom?
what’s breaking of skin to claiming of self?
what’s spilling of blood to a wholesome bond?
what’s a chance of being shamed to a people saved?
you haven’t been loved well enough until you’ve been loved like a man.
Christ didn’t come in the body of a woman because even he knew he wouldn’t have lasted all 33 years with a mouth so holy and a tongue that sharp.
when love stretched wide it was only to make space for the redemption of men.
when love starved it was only because she dreamt of fed mouths.
when love bled handfuls of pain it damn sure was because there was no escaping it.
when love offered dangling breasts at the temple of protests it was only because she believed in a kinder tomorrow hard enough to be shamed for it.
when love choked on apologies it was only because peace was the greater offering.
you haven’t been loved well enough until you’ve been loved like a man
Scene rolling on a never-ending roll
SHOOT
(After an altercation with a tutor, Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Yi-Fei Chen created a brass tear gun that fires water collected as tears, as a visual metaphor for her personal struggle with speaking her mind.)
A design student created a brass gun that fires tears she’s collected in three stages
- The user first puts on a mask with a silicone cup that catches the tears.
*MASKS-ON-DISPLAY
:Fake smile 2.1
:Broken but makeup game strong
:Facsimile of generational pain
:Hiding in plain sight
:Mouth stuffed with merry-go-round pain
:Hand-me-down stress
:The atom of a scream
:The square root of a fresh wound
:Neo-spiritual songs
- The tears are frozen in a bottle.
*SHELVED-FEELINGS
:Pickled anxiety
:Silence heavily spiced with an atrophied tongue
:Ingrown rage
:Skins—burnt umber-cocoa brown-desert sand-charcoal black-leather jacket black-midnight black
:Body-type—not photoshopped enough
:A collection of I’m fines in response to a million how are yous
:Less suspicious-looking heartache
- Which is then loaded into the gun—allowing the frozen tears to be fired.
*TEARS
:Angry black woman
:Too loud for a woman
:Diary of a mad woman
:A hashtag movement
:A voice that sounds like someone left a fuck you in your throat
:The lifecycle of a scream
:Tears, plain old tears
What does it say of a country
if its women need tear guns before they can cry?
Still woman?
What if I woke up in a different body next Monday?
without a uterus, but still a woman
No longer a hemorrhaging warehouse for eggs
What if I woke up in a different body
next Thursday of the coming week?
A well-soaped nut sack
cushioning a reasonably sized penis,
an innate entitlement for the world’s offerings
and pre-installed knowledge
of having inhabited a feminine body?
What if I woke up as the phantom pregnancy
of a woman who’d miscarried?
Living a life of pretense unknown only to me
Bloating and bleeding and puking
my way through a revolution
Will I be woman still?
Will I be woman still, with my outliers forming new identities?
Calling into existence other forms of living
and toe-tagging it to the body of womanhood?
Will I be woman still, leaving a litany of unpardonable mistakes,
forcibly paraded as the masthead for unreal women
Will I be woman still?
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