Regardless, Rezina Habtemariam writing for Anastacia Renee- 10/29/2016

View Regardless, Anastacia Renee       

an ode to A L I C E


if you ask alice about betrayal she’ll tell you nothing.

she will not tell you how the world betrays her body and the lineage of bodies that birthed her body.

you [want to] think she is broken. because Black is always broken. Black is bondage. Black is bleeding. always bleeding. to you.

she is more whole than you.

she knows the layers that exist in her inside. the ones she created and the ones that were created for her, colonizing the parts of her that she has tried to kill.

she
keeps
it
moving.

when survival has only been found in movement, she finds freedom in the stillness of her being standing in front of the mirror.

she doesn’t know yet, but she is looking at god.



alice wants to know if there is a refund policy for anger.


she feels unsafe. and not unsafe in the way [most of] you do.
but in the way where she is dodging bullets from killing her body and the bodies she has yet to birth because those bodies even unborn are targets and
is also more likely to die from breast cancer and
while she is living no one actually cares enough and
​knows that after death her name will be written after a hashtag and
only then will you have learned her name and


regardless of what she does, who she becomes, who she fights to be in this world
it can still happen to her, it does happen to her. every day.

but she is fine. always fine. has to be fine. working on being fine.

she
keeps
it
moving.


home is not where alice keeps herself.


she knows the moon.

unconcerned with your 40 acres and a mule, she is busy building a spaceship that will bring her closer to the orishas. 

---

​Rezina Habtemariam is a cultural worker, writer, and Black feminist thinker who critically interrogates the relationship between structural power and the ways in which it produces the daily conditions of our lives. Habtemariam is a freedom dreamer grounded in the urgency of (re)creating + (re)claiming space that centers and explores the infinite possibilities, complexities, and ordinariness that exists within the margins.