I have to acknowledge that I am very very priviliged despite being affected by three of the most vicious forms of systemic oppression in this society.

I’m lightskin with 3c hair, I’m able-bodied, I'm intelligent and have had access to very good education, I was born and raised in Germany, I’m financially stable, I’m good-looking and I’m charismatic, I have a phenomenal therapist helping me process my childhood trauma, and I have enough free time to write silly little poems about it.

Although my queerblackwomanhood is omnipresent in what I write, the subtext of my view of the world, I almost never explicitly name the way it feels to stand at these intersections and wait for the light to turn green, and I wonder why that is.

I think that these are pains that I personally find nothing poetic about. For me, there’s no creative potential in them: my urge is to destroy. The state of the world, the powers that be, these arbitrary hierarchies make me angry and I don’t write when I’m angry, I write when I’m sad. Or in awe.

Shoutout to all the people who have taken these pains and created, who have unleashed all their righteous beasts and uncompromisable selves onto blank canvases and empty pages and made art, who’ve spun gold out of matted wool, who resist and defy when they speak and show and write and find expression for these expierences that leave me with a capped pen in my clenched fist, speechless.

The first time I read Angela Y. Davis’ Women, Race & Class, the book gifted to me by a stranger, my life changed. It felt like I was handed the translation of a language I’d always heard everywhere around me, in the shadows and the margins, underneath the cracks of a pearly white facade or sometimes in broad daylight with everyone averting their gaze. A language that I speak fluently, sure, but fluency hardly makes me an expert.

But Angela, she had a dictionary with all the words and a grammar with all the rules and a collection of texts that clearly showed what it was, who spoke it and why, and it made our language tangible, explainable when I had so often failed to explain it to others or even myself; and she forged with them a weapon that she gave me along with the grammar, a path towards liberation.

And then I met Audre Lorde and May Ayim and Alice Walker and other queerblackwomen, those around me who let me learn from them, with whom I could share, and accept, and rejoice.

With them by my side I’m learning that the more I accept my silence not as a weakness, but as resistance in one of its many forms, the easier it gets for me to rejoice in my breaking of it.