BitterSweet

Praying for kindness, & a million chances to shout Eureka.

[kxbbi-deactivated20150913]

talking to myself after 2% milk

pragmatic. and we fight over labels we ourselves made. no, it’s not a country it’s a continent and i’m not a woman, not a man, i’m mixed, don’t let my skin fool you bruh. mankind will shoot himself in the foot while looking left, and turn to gun for retribution. what will it matter when we stand palm in shaky palm before the asteroids hit without favor for flags. reports say ghana is not so great now and i’m sorry. i guess we say things need to change so much we forget that things don’t change themselves, people do. i’m pretty sure people will. drink light soup and be slow to anger.

[nowyoukno]

[marxandrecreation]

I feel like this headline is an allegory for liberalism

[alegbra-deactivated20150724]

These Police Brutally Attacked a Group of Peaceful Activists. What Happens Next Will Warm Your Heart

[mocada-museum]

Two Sisters, by @robertpruitt

[franticcurls]

I always feel like I’m about to make-out with the microphone when I’m singing and I’m really into it & catch the spirit ..  I almost have to be like ‘whoaaa whoaa debbie watch your feelings it’s a mic’

[franticcurls]

This is a video of me singing for the last time at Pomona, the day before graduation. I had been wanting to sing Landslide (and perform with Wes) for about two years and I felt so lucky to have been able to finally do it, and on such an important and sentimental day. 

I know Landslide is a song about growth and life and changes, but I can’t help but think about the Accra floods when I listen to it now cus I got the video yesterday and also, y’know, nature and shit.  

[franticcurls]

ok so I’m just so sad about not being with my friends and it sounds really childish and irrelevant like ‘life happens, deal with it’ but I’m just .. so sad. the worst part about graduation weekend (noone told us) is packing out all your shit in a day with your family awkwardly in your room while sobbing and trying to tell someone how they changed your life. I can’t count the number of I miss you texts I’ve sent/everyone is just dealing with their own shit with family and jobs and leaving the country and immigration and finding housing and I just want to drunk-hug everyone and tell them how much I love them and how lucky I am to have them in my life

[mameafia-deactivated20160419]

I keep asking for Daughters of Glorious Jesus albums & my friends think I’m joking.

I need ALL their albums. I’ll go scouting through Makola just to find these albums. M'ani abre.

[franticcurls]

me tooooo

[franticcurls]

me: *is left alone with my thoughts for more than two seconds*

me: the suffering begins

[khofnak-deactivated20160409]

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness—and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling—their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

Arundhati Roy, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil (via jalaana)

[franticcurls]

Apartheid was white terrorism. What the British did during the Kenyan Mau Mau was white terrorism. Dylann Roof was a white terrorist, supported by state sanctioned institutions of white terrorism. We do not negotiate with terrorists. That’s what America teaches. Except white terrorism. Then we don’t negotiate; we privilege; we prioritize; we centralize. Then we spit up that privilege via white Jesus, heart disease, fibroids, violence, obesity and a soft, slow, sure killing. White supremacy does not worship our God. It prays at the altar of coffins filled with black bodies. It tithes in the blood of black folks. Its hymn is the sound of our tears and screams. Its amen is the stillness of our stolen breath.

Esther Armah, Black Bodies, White Terrorism: A Global Reimagining of Forgiveness

[franticcurls]

Black Bodies, White Terrorism: A Global Reimagining of Forgiveness

My mama is 79. Wednesday night is her bible study. Just like Ms. Ethel Lee Lance, mama has her circle of church going elders—black women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s for whom church is home. Maybe even safer than home. Their pain was safe in the hands of this particular Jesus. Unshed tears from the Middle Passage were here. Friendships decades deep were here. Sanctuary was here. Comfort, too. Prayers unheard by a black community too often deaf to the pain of black girls and women were heard here, by this Jesus. Or so they thought.

“Charleston, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya: we have a global black inheritance of white supremacist terrorism. It has left a legacy of untreated trauma. That inheritance has trained us to pour our pain into our own bodies. And then turn away when that pain manifests. Particularly when it comes to black girls and women. Our bodies are vehicles for rage, rejection, resentment, and denial to acknowledge the depth of our hurt. Instead, we are judgmental of each other in our pain. We are unkind, we replace empathy with analysis and invite an audience to engage the strength of our intellect. Our pain goes unheard and so instead it finds sanctuary in the intimate violence we subject ourselves and our bodies to. What, now, can we do with our pain? What forgiveness process might we create for ourselves, for all the ways we hurt and harm each other? Will we ever be able to trust each other with our pain?”

[franticcurls]

this song makes me feel like I can be a different person

[godth]

Why do you have a fear of intimacy ?

Attachment is the source of all suffering!

[franticcurls]

thank youuu <3 kawrage

i’ve been trying to distinguish b/n things that are imposed on the body and things coming out of the body that are still toxic to it. kind of confusing, i can’t tell how to write either/or separate them/or maybe fuse them? but imma keep trying

[franticcurls]

i’m pouring out the holes in my body water flooding me//rising above my being//not only figure of woman but a floating//a wading through meadow and weeds and slippers stuck in mud, singing, can ghosts walk with bare feet? crying  out  and sinking in the water of holes,

my body refuses to let me sleep//begging her each night she says no weeping her each night she says go//spirit go, wade through weed and mud, but leave these feet 

behind.

[kawrage-deactivated20160618]

help, head. help heart.

[ukpuru]

Olaudah Equiano, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African, (1789) autobigraphy, Free read/download (PDF/EPUB) on Google Books.

[ukpuru]

I went into this book thinking there’d be a lot held back, a lot apologised for, but I was so happy this was untrue. Mr. Vassa/Equiano really impressed me and his story would bring home slavery to especially Africans. Intelligent, subversive, witty, and most of all unapologetically Igbo/African, a quarter of the book or more is him telling us how his homeland was the place to be. He became a personal hero of mine after reading this (even though I feel he should have married a fellow former African slave).