Could it possibly be? Yeah, I've finally found it in me to blog post from a public computer lab. Yikesies! I used to be (seventh-grade version of myself) extremely self-concious when typing in our seemingly private computer room for fear that my mother/sister/father-not so much would barge in and say, "Hey, dinner's rea--What does that say? You made out with whooo?!?!?" Yeck.
Now I guess I'm just slightly self-concious about people realizing that I blog. Nobody knows anyway, I suppose. I have, what? Three subscribers? And I thank each of them now. :) I don't even know why I care if people did know. Bloggers blog to be read, right? All the same I hear many of my peers make snide remarks about bloggers....bloggist sounds more fun to me.
But for now I'm going to stop trying to be humorously thoughtful and do what I intended to: Poems. I try to write new stuff all of the time and some of it gets finished, lots of it does not. Some of it seems very provoking and ?educated? to me after I go back and look at it. I don't believe that S.K.W. from Po-dunk, OH wrote it. What I have noticed is I tend to generate ideas for poems from the new stuff I learn about in my classes, or things I read in articles, and of course from the copious amounts of TV I consume. Historical figures that are usually not well-known or well-taught have been the theme, lately. I put a poem about Fred Hampton on here, and I hope to add more. I also have one posted that was inspired by the Black Dahlia murder victim, Elizabeth Short, of the 1940s. The next one that will be posted below is going to be in honory and memory of Sarjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, whom I learned about in my Ethnic Studies: Women of Color class (fascinating!). Writing through my interpretation of someone else's point of view is new and interesting to me. I stop concentrating on my same ol', same ol' issues in my own life and actually learn from others. Plus, it allows me to be someone I am not for a good ten minutes. Hope you enjoy!
R.I.P. Hottentot Venus
"I've been in limbo for nearly 200 years
And now they finally ship me back
Back to my homeland.
The last time I was here I was
barely a young woman.
Finally, I will be laid to rest
like an ancient cold baby who
has been shivering in the winter air
and is swept up and taken inside--
to a warm bed where she belongs.
I will be back to a place that
knows me
and not a place that only sees me.
I will be back in my family's land--
my perfect bones will rest in
the dirt near my sisters and brothers,
where I should've been centuries ago.
No longer will my
withered,
exaggerated,
lifeless,
exhausted,
body stand there in that city museum,
being pointed, gauked, laughed, and pondered at...
just as it was when I breathed air in my lungs.
For if it wasn't enough to rip me from my country,
to lie to my young, innocent heart,
to sell me to another pig-of-a-white-man,
to take me to a loud city
full of wicked people with
bulging eyes and insensitive brains,
to make me parade around
in the nude in front of hundreds who gasped,
and then to tear me apart,
inside and out,
to see what it could've been to cause my
"freakishness"
after I died...
Then maybe it is now enough.
More than a century of the same
chauvinistic, scientific racism of
Monday-Friday vacationing voyeurs,
wondering what was wrong with my
lifeless but restless body behind that glass...
the least they could do is send me back
Back to my homeland,
back to my people,
back to my family,
back to my final resting place.
For you were worried I'd become
An object of politics here, but I'm not.
I was only an object in the country
you call home.
My voyage is over,
and 200 years later,
I'm finally home."
-Skw '09
"Sarah" Saartjie Baartman, Khoi Khoi native
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