bridges

I am not aware of the construction.  Bridges have been building themselves.  I am merely standing aside and allowing them to stretch out across currents and grasp people and knowledge whom I thought were unattainable.

A wall crumbled the other night while my friends, Aya and Poetry, and I were spending a quiet evening in one of our flats talking, sharing, drinking rooibos with honey.  Aya is from Cote d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast), but attends school in upstate New York.  She is soft, bubbles when she smiles and laughs, and is solid and centered in herself and her convictions.  She is a biologist and is critical of much, but open to much more and has offered to help me with my French while we attempt to learn Swahili together as well.  Poetry is from Miami and goes to school in Atlanta, and as her name suggests, is an accomplished slam poet who has toured internationally.  Both are black.

We began to talk about this strange place and how we've learned to contextualise ourselves within it.  I complain about how I cannot fit in, settle my raging mind, and realise they both, for the first time since leaving the States, do fit in.  For the first time in Poetry's life, she does not feel like an outsider.  Even in the deep South, and especially while traveling, she is judged as someone of lesser value, of a lower class, a troublemaker and unlikely to positively contribute to our society.  When she traveled to Florence, Italy, she told us of the times (plural, as in more than once) she had been shooed out of stores because shop-owners are accustomed to seeing black people only in the context of the vucompru, the African illegal immigrants (typically from Western Africa, like Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana) in Italy who sell posters and sunglasses on the sidewalks.  These are the stigmas so many must bear on their back because of their skin color and skin color alone.  I believe it is impossible to overestimate the long-lasting cultural, psychological, and spiritual ruin of a race of people who share a history of domination, never mind the political and geographical displacement and disfiguration.  There is so much shame associated with being colonized rather than the colonizer, the person who is not deemed a person at all but an object to be analysed and subdued.  Something seen as innately barbaric; to be told that you will never be capable of fully realising greatness (as measured by Western white perception) because of your skin color, your supposed psychological inferiority, your wild nature.  During the apartheid era in South Africa, those who were not white were referred to as "Non-White."  This classification is by definition a negation of existence.  You are not fully human.  You are less.  You are not normal.  You are not good.  You are not worthy.

I said this to Poetry.  And she started to cry.

She cried, "Finally someone understands!  You understand!  If only my grandmother could have heard those words!  I will never forget those words as long as I live.  I will never forget those words.  I will never forget those words.  I will never forget those words.  I will never forget those words."

I crossed a bridge as I crossed the room to sit beside Poetry and hug her.  A gap was filled.