Who are you?
I am Angel.
No, really, who are you?
I am George.
Stop playing around!
I am Hanson, Ferguson, Manson, Johnson, Ellison, I
am…
Zombie. Lost in the ways of my people, my identity, my
heritage
I am the soulless black-white being that haunts the
screens of materialism in the face of my destruction
I am that shadow in the mirror for Self no longer
exists to merit reflection
I am who I am that does not know who I am but cares
not who I am for they say who I am is Shameful.
Damn I’d rather say Angel ‘cos Adwoa Konadu Boateng is a mouthful
I am that being whose history has been exterminated,
rewritten and coordinated to suit the inadequacies of my present self
CNN and BBC lay out the fragments of my present just
right; a primitive tale of wars and poverty
No way I’m gonna be African now, not when these
pieces are made to tell my whole story!
I am a Christian, A muslim, A Buddhist, …so long as
it frees me from the jungle rituals of a Tarzanic people
I am the beautiful black girl that burns out her
curls for blonde bangs
I am no longer the black washed away with this hot
white bleach
I am the slave to the trinkets of my age
I am an individual that stands alone, not the US of
my ancestral past
I am the successful experiment of a mind removed and
replaced with a self-defeating fake
I am…
Zombie with
no soul but a self-destructive spirit
I am you and you are me
But how can me be you and you be me when you seeks
only to overpower me and me seeks only to devour you?
How can Us live when exploitation is the sole element
of our new programmed system?
A system which allows us to enjoy a westernized eduacation designed to drift us farther away from who we are
A system which designs me to fail from the onset
because I conceive myself as the redemption of these poor people who happen to
share the same skin colour as mine
A system which ensures my indoctrination, “school”, from the malleable years of childhood to
solidify into an adulthood of programmed robots
A system which assures me that it is okay to be
enslaved in my mind for that is the only defeat to my inherent inferiority.
I am the product of a system that preaches to me in
church to love my neighbor as myself but not when that neighbor goes to the
mosque
I am the product of a system that reincarnates the
greedy kings of the past who sold their own to the oppression of slave chains,
only now it’s not slavery but colonialism, not colonialism but capitalism
Chale, forget the label, as long as someone is
getting exploited and people are getting paid, we are right on track!
I am the product of a consumeristic system that
teaches me to prize the surface, glorify the shallow, and fear the vault and enjoy
the hollow
I am the product of a system that pursues profit to
all the ends of the earth and the sky, and the water, then include the
non-profit maker in the firing squad of global warming
I prize you for the richness of your ability to
imitate carbon copies and preconditioned magazines of what beauty’s image should look like
rather than what you really look like as a human being
I am the product of a system that drives me to the
despairing insanity and loneliness of self-hatred and suicide cos my hips are
too big, and my tummy’s too flabby, my nose just ain’t right, like a ship lost
its way and found its way to my face
I am the product of a system which thrives on hate
under the guise of religious/ human duty, or simply, Shee-it, I don’t like the
shape of his head.
I am you, you are me, but me cannot be you nor you
me for me cannot give to you to give to me to give to them to give to us
That is barbaric, jungle-consumed, unnatural,
definitely unproductive, primitive thinking.
I stare hard at my black shadow in the mirror
My heavy uncontrollable mass of curls, and my ugly
flat nose
My tongue which is lost in speaking the language of
my ancestors
My soul which has been wrenched from understanding
Nature’s need for a unity
My mind which cannot decipher the truth who I was,
for my past is hidden, who I am, for my present is told in fragments, much less
where I am going
And I see, not Angel, not George, not Adwoa, nor
Kweku
But a person who hates herself so deeply Self is
eternally lost in the cracked shards of a broken mirror
