Who Me?

This skin, this hair, these lips, these feet, this backside

Are all the evidence and proof

I need that Africa is integral to me

Africa; seat of humanity, civilisation, erudition

Denuded by greed, still suffering and bleeding

This mind, it's thoughts, these words, this culture

Are the legacy of my European birth

I’m an Afropean, take me to a museum,

Progeny of a masterful strain, spawned by unnatural selection

This man sings revolution, that man says do human revolution

Meaning that any person - even me -

Who decides to and changes positively

Improves their environment incrementally

That is how we are gonna make world peace.

But I say revolution is circling, rotating often stagnating

I want to sing and do evolution

Inherent improvement, exponential expansion of potential.

Cos what you fight you make stronger

A battle against evil, expands the evil

Extends the journey, makes it longer

Visibly African, feeling European

Issue of survivalist genes

Shaped in animality, created in barbarity

Strength, rage, tenacity, ingrained before puberty

Cultured and nurtured on a continent of prosperity

Created with ill gotten gains

Still sustained by slavery. Chocolate slaves definitely,

Sugar, tea, coffee, orange slaves by definition a surety

Though most subscribe to the mendacity

Of the supposed abolition of slavery.

I’m an Afropean put me in a museum

Make a pseudo scientific exhibition of me.

European intercourse of the centuries, makes of me a stranger in my home

A lowland culture that ignores it’s history

That celebrates and honours genocidal stupidity

Ignorants who pillaged so called primitive cultures

Made a golden era from rivers of blood

The age old story of massacre and misery for financial glory

Walk the streets of Aleppo, the story’s just the same

(*Define for me clearly, I acknowledge those who have tried.

The difference between zuilen and apartheid.*)

Tolerance claimed here in abundance but tolerance is a filthy mire

Acceptance is absent yet, acceptance is what I desire.

Many times magnetised by a similarity of skin tone

Far too often judged, rejected, too strange, too different, too unknown

Self oppression and racism make this skin difficult to own

Luckily blessed to have been only metaphorically stabbed to the bone.

Name me Afropean, neither one thing nor the other

Colour does not define my sisters

It does assign my brothers

Look elsewhere for explanations of my feminist opinions

I’m now exploring the schisms of my outer and my inner.