Harlem Hopscotch

Harlem Hopscotch  - Go Maya Angelou!! Yoo Hoo

After a conversation with Fadescha

On Love 

In the age of truth you will be accepted

Now is not your turn

In the age of truth your ways of loving will be the right way again

Then you will not be bound

And nor will your lovers

The chains of owning, the cycles of using and throwing –

Objects

People

Emotions
These equations of the market
These toxic systems

Would finally be broken

And only the free shall sing

These structures and their keepers

Afraid of the secrets of love

Will be buried forever under the rubble of their own hate and fear

When time has had enough

The timekeepers will come calling

At their door, on their streets, in their cafes, in their banks and schools

And the timekeepers will

Do their dance,

Make their art

Sing loudly and clearly

In places where silence and compliance had rotted everything away.

And that art that they will make

The truth that they will speak

The voices of the voiceless they will carry

The love they will bring to the unloved

It will renew that which has decayed

That will be our resistance

That will be our art

That will be our revolution

That day you will be saluted for how you loved and lived today.

A poem came to me today
We are all being marked
Into digits and lyrics
Into distant physics
We are being marked
By speed and greed
By fear and apologies

We're being told that
The system works
That it must be followed
By suspending disbelief

But the system is like
A disease that comes so slowly
Creating a flush, looking pretty
And then it takes over
It takes over the body and the mind
Creating amnesias and disorders of all kinds

Until one day the spirit rolls over to die
Leaving in its wake a puppet
That doesn't know
who pulled the strings,
who called the shots,
who told the story.

A puppet that is too tired and overworked
To ask why? 

You should know

If you dread the thought of walking to the bus stop every morning to take the school bus
Your education has failed you
If you wonder sometimes whether anyone in your class is really your friend
Your education has failed you
If your classmates make fun of your hair-style, the color of your skin or the dullness of your school bag
Your education has failed you
If you are too scared to ask your teacher a question
Because you can't bear to look at the disappointment and impatience on her face
Your education has failed you
If you dream of some day showing all 'those' people who live in your nightmares
That you are not a failure, you're a hero, you done good,
Then your education has failed you
If the rain no longer makes you laugh
Or you've lost the key to the box  in which were all the people you could be at the same time
If you no longer are curious about unknown roads
If the world no longer seems to be multicolored
Or  a kite flying high above you doesn't fill you instantly with a deep longing for freedom
If the sight of  the poor, the hungry, the naked no longer hurt your soul
but seem like a natural backdrop to your aspiration for a 4 BHK house in the suburb with a flat screen TV and mall in the backyard
Your education has failed you
If you believe what TV tells you
Your education has failed you
If you have become a mute spectator
If you feel there's a lot of bad things happening but you have no power to make it right again
Your education has failed you.

Don't you want to start asking
Why. Has. Our. Education. Failed. Us. Even. Though. It. Fucking. Cost. A. Lot? 

On Good Days I'm Angry About Everything

This need to be permanent. Leave a mark forever. These goals of mattering. They’re all just fed into us. The pressure to matter in ways that don’t matter at all. Being on the side – that matters. How much are we all entrenched in the system? Is there any oppression, violence or marketing that any of us can consciously choose to not participate in, as oppressed or the oppressor.

Why do anything?

Who controls anything?

Who controls me?

Why be productive

Who produces?

Whose product am I?

There are markets

And ventures

There are market ventures

In this jungle of hate

Of rocks and tear gas

Of being choked to death for loving

Of being raised on a platform for killing

Of crooked cow lovers and half crazed women haters

Of those lying on the ground and the deal makers.

Whose product are you?

Our awareness of the other when we live in small/big bubbles of our own. Our fake comfort with the brands we wear and the malls we go to. The fears of the body and mind. It has been thrashed into us to not question, not wonder, not cross the road, not even look to the other side. Taught to believe that what matters is never the other. We are taught to not think beyond the banalities of sensorial experience - only our own sensorial experience. So who gives a fuck right whether the mall got built on land that was stolen from the poor? Because in summer to walk around in an air-conditioned building for fun is the only important experience for me. Wrong. 

A student is told that her work may not be accepted because she has given it in late. Her work borders on the bizarre because she has thought it through. She has thought about sustainability, erotica, futures, formless-ness. SHE HAS THOUGHT. But in all of this what matters most is that she is late for a submission. And that is how a student learns that thinking isn’t as important as dead-lines. Dead-end. We’re creating dead-ends. Dead end people. Dead end discourses. Dead end wars. And can an artist break that bubble? Can an artist choose live beginnings over dead ends? Is it possible still? It is imperative. With the day job, the soulless work we often have to do. It is still imperative for an artist to locate herself on the other side. Maybe just for a little while every day. Over time the little may become a lot. Over time the process may become the product itself. And we as artists would have recorded and spoken of our times. We would have waged a battle against all the odds stacked up, and told the history of the other. An important history, a truer history. This is our job.

How do we organize ourselves to support each other in this job? How do we create spaces to collect, to converse, to take courage when all seems pointless, to give hope, to be critical and disagree in trust. Can these spaces be static? No they cannot. Because these are dangerous spaces. They will always be questioning and challenging the system in which they exist. And soon the system will not be able to bear the questions and fear for its existence, because the questions are obvious and everyone who has broken the chains of fear and silence will be asking them. Soon the space will be shunted, co-opted, broken down. The system has so many strategies and means to create its dead ends. But nothing is permanent. So permanence of collectives cannot be our aspiration. We have to move, be fluid, adapt and like guerillas in a jungle, we have to fight smartly and strategically. We have to subvert, at times even ourselves. 

Dance. Resist

Dance

Dance because there's nothing else like it for a good soul shaking. Dance like it's the only way out of nuclear disaster and you can save the world if you did. Dance wildly and ecstatically, drunkenly with abandonment. Dance because wild women owe it to themselves and the rest of the world. Dance because in these dark times when the world wages it's wars on women's bodies, by twisting them and shaping them, raping them and breaking them and selling them and selling to them, it can be the only resistance. Dance any way you like. Dance like a mad woman. Shake your belly and let all it's jiggling layers make mockery of the sizes they tell you, you should be. Breasts heaving, and toes tripping, sweat dripping and anger spuming. Dance. Look them in the eyes and Dance.

Girl (arrived) in a Cherry Pond

Freshly arrived in a cherry pond at the wholesome age of almost thirty -three. Finally standing on my own two feet, shoulders less hunched than they’ve been for a while. Yes I feel like I’m home. I feel like a woman and all that jazz. Is it totally not PC nowadays to feel your gendered-ness? Well fuck that I say, because life’s too short and the thirties even shorter. I’ve decided to put things down so I can remember them later; the things that matter, the things worth remembering about one self and more importantly the things that need reminding all the time. There’s way too much trash out there about how a woman ought to be. Of course I’ve known that. All of us know it. But I’ve known it in much the same way that I’ve known that Mars is a red planet , or that communists have beards , an inclination towards good scotch, bob dylan and talk about SOME VERY IMPORTANT things, or that Vijay Mallya is an asshole.

Now into my thirties the trash that women are fed has come closer home. It’s suddenly become touchy and feely. The offense it causes me has become directly proportionate to my body weight, ageing skin, and things in my closet that I can no longer fit into. Shit, was it all always this superficial? I’d like to believe I’m shallower than most women. I really hope there are a whole lot of you thirty something’s who don’t give two hoots about any of these things and love who you are, just the way you are, without nerve wrecking questions about your intelligence, body, health, men, love, soul-mates, freedom, power, motherhood, money, aspirations, life goals amongst other things. Unfortunately I know there’s many of us out there living with some fear or another, panicking about end goals, convincing potential landlords that we’re ‘morally’ upright/uptight women who will make for respectable tenants, posting politically correct ideas on rape on Facebook but wondering nonetheless whether the last creep to make a pass at you was somehow about you asking for it anyway.

The thirty something’s. When I was 20 I had once told a man that by the time I’m thirty I’d probably be ugly and have osteoporosis. He had said “I think you’ll be gorgeous when you’re thirty”. He broke my heart after two weeks. And yet ironically those words of his come back to me on bad days as balm. Which is when I know that my memory is so conveniently selective when it comes to the people I’ve met and the things I’ve experienced.

This blog is about a woman in her thirties living in a post globalized, hyper capitalized world. It is about me being chicken shit on some days and brave on others. Asking questions and looking for answers that I feel if I don’t ask or answer now they will haunt me for the rest of my life and the choices I’m yet to make. Like a pendulum I swing between being a Believer and a Cynic, a Plain Jane and a Diva, a Goddess and a Whore, Sanity and Validation, Leisure and Work, Freedom and Bondedness. This blog is about all these things that make my life incredibly rich.

This blog is about me making sense of my resistance.