A shirt which I wear proudly reads Assata is welcome here. I learned her, Malcolm, Ali, Hooks, Morrison, and Fanon in my teenage years while looking for my identity.

Love revolutionary, is Assata; she remains a heroine.

People keep asking How are you?

To almost all, I lie I’m good, how are you?

To a few, I’m more honest and I say I cried today. I am not okay. But I will be.

To a handful, I am most honest I am okay. I am not afraid of death. I might be the only one in my family. Talk to me about love. Most of my family is alive. Play with me. All of my family are displaced. Thank you for playing. My mother’s side of the family cannot find food. Our homes have all been destroyed. I will never return. My heart is my only home now. Did I mention I cried today? And last night I cried myself to sleep? My heart is big enough for another. Thank you for making me laugh. Your smile-lines are a blessing undressed.

This real truth is too private, too mad. It is chaotic and wild and I’ve only shared it with those who are standing guard at the fence surrounding my safe space, letting in no others.

I am naked, standing hip-deep in a creek of gasoline. There is a lit candle in my shaking hand. I still play, though. Play and fun have always been my life-lines. How are you?

I am not afraid of death. I have never been. It is rest and peace. I don’t seek it, but I wouldn’t change a thing if you were to tell me it was coming tomorrow. I would still play, and have hope that within the next 24 hours, Love would show up.

Every Revolutionary whom I have studied has taught me this. I talk and write of love. Of Love. Because that is where I am focussed. It is the rule. The Rule. For a world so ugly. It is The Rule to make it beautiful.

It is the flower sprung through concrete, reaching for sunshine. It is Darwish, one of my People’s most famous poets –

It is Hafez, too –

At the very root of injustice is degradation. It is to overpower and to oppress. It is to lack in love for one’s self, which though this makes it impossible to love another, it is just another way of saying insecurity, and self-loathing which are the quickest paths to the dehumanization of Other.

Until I die, and maybe beyond, I will always argue that white supremacy, the root of the illegal settler colony, is built on self-hatred because it must diminish from Other to lift itself. You will never convince me otherwise.

This degradation is antithetical to the human condition, it can only be taught. There is nothing natural in or of it.

Its opposites are the belief in abundance, hope, kindness, generosity of spirit, and ultimately – love. It is to still see magic in the rubble and the craters and the blood and the dismembered body parts. It is to believe that where there is no justice, there is certainly Justice.

It is to not miss the signs while we’re so busy looking at the clues.

Stay the course. Stay the course. Stay the course in these beliefs. Stay the course. And then make it your obsession, suffocatingly and maddeningly, make it this thing which haunts you, which might destroy you: staying this course.

Do not let the gen0cide brittle your heart.

Stay the course. Trust in Allah.

Stay the course, this fu(king sickness of a course built in response to those who might otherwise eat us to death.

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