reading when i can

It is said that the most ordinary among us is a written book that exists in heaven, a book so huge that human eyes cannot read it. That’s where everything is record—what we’ve done, said, thought, felt, even what hasn’t happened yet. Who could imagine that a human body—some square centimetres that were once only a cell— could contain so much space for history?

The body is slow, clumsy; it rarely surprises you. It takes you to places your imagination has explored long in advance.

It was terribly noisy. Impossible to follow a conversation. So I only followed the timbre of his voice, the deep, mature, inner timbre congested with calcium, like drops of water falling from cave ceilings to the ground, from earth to earth the shortest journey for sound but the longest for us mortals.

So one day, you find yourself exhibited in two separate museums at once.

Or the musical chairs game called ‘love’, where there are less empty seats than people. If you don’t want to be the last one standing you must predict when the music will stop. (Who, though, has really succeeded?)

Language is erosive. It makes us recluses, a wind through the canyons carving our palaeontological eras for everyone to read.

my eyes glued to a constellation (they call these types ‘dreamers’)

Who was this reader? A man or woman? Maybe lying in bed, without anyone around, heavily underlining, several places in red, or commenting in blue while waiting at an airport for a delayed flight. But the loops that circle words are isobars— one needs to have reached rock-bottom to understand these marks. And now it’s my turn to add my own geography. There’s hardly any space left, not even for shadows. The black ring of a coffee cup and the careless ash of a cigarette are my only traces. My fear of clarity.

Even the shore itself is a lure for the dark waters, high tides under a full moon, apotheosis of the universe.

Names leap ahead like hunting hounds, with the belief they clear the road of the journey’s unexpected obstructions. And we call ‘destiny’ our common unknown, a genderless, unconjugated, unspecified name. Its authority hangs on one shoulder like the tunic of a Roman senator leaving only one arm bare and free.

When a child is born, we name it after an ancestor, and so the recycling continues. Not out of nostalgia, but from our fear of the unknown.

Solidarities of any kind are never easy. Yet, they are necessary for the survival of us all and the natural world. Every group that seeks to be in solidarity with another bears the burden of conflictual histories, within itself and across groups with whom they aspire to bond, to build relationships, and to create societal changes. Most often, the conflicts are not of their own making, and the groups are positioned as “opposites.” Nonetheless, the burdens and scars of intentional and forced divisions shape the values, intentions, and relational practices of the actors, not to mention the groups’ collective memories.

Creating a radical self-love world requires our willingness to have challenging conversations about privilege, power, history, culture, inequality, pain, and injustice.

Moving from a radical self-love that transforms you to a radical love that creates justice and equity in the world may feel like a tall order, but you are already on your way. As we cultivate new ways of being in our own bodies, we develop new ways of being on this planet with other bodies. A return to radical self-love requires our commitment to building shame-free, inclusive communities that uplift one another while honestly addressing body terrorism and all the ways it manifests as oppression based on age, race, gender, size, ability, sexual orientation, mental health status, and all other human attributes. Some will deride our efforts with charges of playing to “identity politics.” We should remind those people that they, too, have identities that are informed by their bodies. Their lack of awareness about those identities generally means their body falls into a multiplicity of default identities that uphold the social hierarchy of bodies. The luxury of not having to think about one’s body always comes at another body’s expense. We should, with compassion, remind them that oppression oppresses us all, even those who are default. Not even they will always have a body at the top of the ladder. No one wins in a world of body terrorism.

I am stardust sparkling the night’s sky. Not bound by any limitations. Free to be seen, free to be heard in all of my beauty.

Diaspora has the agency to remake culture and tradition, just like those in the homeland.