Layers Of Me- By Sakeenah
This little black girl
Can only dream long enough.
Before Society creeps in and
Just Before the light begins to Overshadow her darkness.
Like Molten Lava, it melts away, vapourises
Anything she had that was standing in its way.
She journeyed away from her homeland
With it’s (her homeland’s) jewels sparkling in her brownish/black eyes.
Carrying the weight of the crown entrusted to her.
She assembled each item, ( language, accents, folklores and culture) and
Stacked them in a suitcase.
She hunched, turned around, imprinted her footprints
Into the earth
-A final Goodbye-
A new found stranger.
She thought she’d meet :
Snowwhite and they’d share an apple,
Cinderella and they’d clean her castle,
Mulan and they’d fight her battle,
Aurora and they’d play with a spindle,
Weave a basket with the hair of Rapunzel
Yet, she was more like Tiana
A courageous damsel.
Wholesome Encounters, a part of her journey — Or so she thought.
For she had not an inkling what lay ahead of her.
She would come back battered, her crown broken and resolve disassembled.
***
She’d been living this facade
For long enough.
That it’s no more a second skin
It blended and seeped in,
Became a part of she.
She can’t distinguish between who she is and who she had become.
People, they praise her for that,
Praise her for the fact that she’d tried her best to
ERASE
Erase parts of her permanently.
I stripped away the accent, the words, culture. Squished into the mold.
I was fully concealed,
No fear of being shamed.
I no longer stood out.
For SHE didn’t speak
What they expected
What they respected.
So then, they rejected.
She didn’t speak white.
She didn’t know she was to speak
A certain colour
And cloak her other colours
Of the RAINBOW!!
Nay, not the rainbow
As it’s neither brown,
Nor black,
Nor white.
Is this how we are supposedly unique?
An endless battle, ongoing cycle.
Victory in the hands of the chess master.
***
They peeled away, layers and layers of me,
Ripped into me
Desperately and Excitedly.
For I was that present that their goal was to
UNWRAP!
They peeled away and did it again
And yet they found nothing.
I was discarded soiled goods- quite literal in fact
You see people they come from all walks of life
Inane to be impossibly united,
By morphing to fit these standards.
But I couldn’t be that.
They wanted channel
And they got fashion nova
The robbed mutant.
My wrapper, it was rough brown wrinkled and ugly.
I’d forgotten the taste of my culture,
The sounds of my homecall
It was engraved, dwelled in the dunes of my lips.
Passed on from mother to daughter
From Generation to Generation
As she placed a weighty caress on her forehead.
I’m bare,
Vulnerable to attacks.
Torn Flesh, unhealed wounds.
Growing larger but at it’s largest.
Yet, I’ve decided,
I have to firstly win
The battle within myself
To end up victorious
And a conqueror of the viles
And of my western roots!
You see I’m no Rosa Parks,
But,
I have a voice and not just a story,
But stories to tell
And that’s all that matters!!
@saks38
Hey Everyone! My name is Sakeenah Ajayi. I’m 16 years old and passionate about Biotech. I hope to go to med school next year. In my spare time, I enjoy writing and here’s a piece I wrote earlier in the year. Hope you liked it.
