Amazing! via Shanice Octavia McBean By Asam Ahmad: Bad Muslim. Do not project your fear onto my body I will not hold your hand and reassure you I have no intention of killing you I will not coddle your fear or accept guilt by association I have no interest in reassuring you not all of us are like that I will not apologize for your parochialism your provincialism or your ignorance for your inability to perceive violence unless a tv box or a hashtag numbs your mind with it I will not mourn with you because you don’t even know how to acknowledge my many deaths I will not affirm that your grief and your loss is more painful or more significant or more terrifying than the grievances you have never even heard of than the grievances you refuse to recognize as grievances I will tell you instead what it feels like to watch your Pundits and your Experts extoll the virtues of Killing All Muslims of deporting everyone on security lists with names like mine I will tell you how much terror your vaunted fear births how it pierces my skin coils around my cranium burrows under my parietal bones makes it difficult to breathe to think to wake up in the morning how it grows inside me this infinite terror because you think your fear is so special so singular so unique it justifies the rivers of blood in places you still don’t know how to find on a map I will not apologize until every single european apologizes for the massacres holocausts genocides famines committed in your names until you personally apologize for palestine kashmir algeria the congo for drawing lines in the sand that still fester like bloody wounds will refuse to apologize until every single american personally apologizes for discovering this continent by washing it in the blood of it’s original inhabitants for slavery the kkk plantations japanese internment camps the trail of tears for the burnings hangings lynchings of Black bodies for policemen who still don’t know innocence and Blackness can exist in the same body for rectal feedings and unaccountable disappearances abu ghraib and fallujah for torture that still doesn’t count as torture for terror that rises and rises and rises infinitely I will not apologize because nothing I can say will ever suffice for you because you have already proven your inability to hear my many apologies because even my 1,600,000,000 deaths won’t quench your fear I’m a bad Muslim and I will never again apologize for the bitter taste of your fear in my mouth
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 12:08:24 +0000