They still don’t see you!

You shouted at the top of your voice

The sound bounced back from the walls

And the world continued as if nothing was happening

You scratched and pulled yourself from the box soundproofing your voice

As your fingers bled and left marks and blood stains on the walls

You crawled out and fought and refused to be dismissed

You gave strength to many whose voices were unheard too

You spoke truth to power even when no one would listen

With his smug smile trying to discredit you

You faced him. You faced them. You fought

Until the day your soul left this beaten and battered body

You never stopped shouting, screaming at the top of your voice

They refused to hear you

They said you lied

They said you made it up

They said you were paid

They said you were a whore

They said you were an HIV positive lesbian slut

Still you fought,

Until your soul left this beaten and battered body

Now they say they believed you

Now they say they knew your strength

Now they say you never lied

That you told the truth

That you were a shining beacon of light for all of us

Now they claim to see you

But it is too late

It is too little too late

Your name they use for their own gains

Your real name they don’t even mention

You are Fezeka Ntsukela Kuzwayo and not a hashtag

They say they see you but they don’t

They say they understand but they don’t

Because even today they say you “alleged”

If they see you, they would apologise for not hearing you

For not standing by you when it mattered

For not calling a rapist, a rapist like you did

They wouldn’t wait ‘til your death to claim allegiance

They would apologise,

Because they too threw stones at you.

[In remembrance and honour of a regular young woman with amazing courage, who against all odds  fought against our patriarchal society, took her rapist on in court and refused to be silenced until the end. ~SKY~]

2016!

It's been so long since the last time i wrote anything. There has been so much happening in my world, in the world that I live in. I get home everyday, curious to see what is going on in the world and change the channel 10 minutes later when all the violence on black bodies all over the world becomes too much for my fragile heart.

Many people wonder, "what went wrong?" and all I can think of is how we all knew that these days would come. That if you take someone's land, take their lives, take their dignity, take their loved ones and think the false promise of democracy and rainbow nations will solve all the pain and hurt, that you have been lying to yourself. What we see happening in the world is Black people who have had enough of the abuse, the pain, the disregard for our lives. It is an overflow of pain and feelings of being sold out by the likes of Mandela for example, in South Africa. The feelings of being sold out by the ANC, the selling out of the dream of one day being "FREE".

My brothers and sisters are being shot at everyday at universities. These are young people who have been waking up everyday to go to school, to learn, to build a better future for their families until they realised that they are the only people who want this for themselves. Universities are just another business feeding off the sweat of our parents, that the government is still the same machine that killed us in 1976, that system never changed, just the face of who presses the panic button. The same men and women we think of when asked about who our heroes are, are the same ones pressing the button, the same ones killing us.

What it is to be alive in 2016 is the pain of waking up from a dream that you thought was possible as the former President, Thabo Mbeki once said, "South Africa, alive with possibilities". What possibilities are these I ask myself with tears filling my eyes? as I hear stunt grenades, see teargas, see blood flowing from young people running in all directions, hear cries, see the violence as the police grab and drag young black women and men across the tar road. I read my twitter and all I want to do is cry as I feel helplessness and wonder, "What can we do?" "What must happen?" and I come back with the same answer over and over..."Fight for our lives" "Fight for our children". I sit in traffic everyday and I look around at the cars driving next to me and wonder if anyone else feels this pain that has congested my chest with blood, anger and hatred.

Its 2016, just 40 years after the 1976 massacre, everything around me is just deja vu. Burning buildings, cries, pain, blood, violence.

This is what it's like being black, queer, a womxn in South Africa right now.

We will fight for decolonised education! We will fight against capitalism! We will fight against white supremacy! We will fight against patriarchy! We will fight and we will win because we were born free and we refuse to be anything else but free!

In any and all lifetimes, I’ll always find you

In life we meet all kinds of people from all walks of life; you connect with some and some you clash with and in most times you have no idea why you feel so close or so agitated by the people you meet. I believe our souls have met in the many previous lives that we have lived but cannot remember on the conscious level but in our super-conscious levels we recognise each other.

I have recently met a soul I feel like I’ve known my whole life and there was no point in our meeting that I felt like I was meeting a stranger. My soul immediately recognised her soul; in this life of ours it is hard to believe but I believe it as strongly as I believe that the body I exist in is just a vehicle for me to move around in this realm.

A fun, beautiful, charismatic, full of life woman who makes my heart smile a thousand smiles a day is celebrating her birthday in a few minutes and I want to let her know how much I appreciate her presence in my life. How much her presence has kept me sane in my toughest times. How much her zest for life has renewed and revived me. I’d like to take this very special opportunity to say how much I LOVE YOU and how happy I am that your soul found my soul again amidst a million other souls we have known previously.

I hope you find me in our next lifetime because I sure will be on the lookout for you in all my lifetimes.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MY BEAUTIFUL ANGEL, HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS HODGESON :-)!!!

The revival

Today my mind poured out a flood of words, that for the first time in over 2 years I felt like writing again after the long silence. You know how one can go through writers block sometimes for a few weeks or months but sometimes it can go on for years. 

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you that have read my blog, commented and those that have been emailing me to say that I should write again and that my words have helped them, whether it was a paper they were writing for university, an article or just in their own personal lives. (To the spammers…will you please find another blog to ruin!)

So much has happened in these almost 3 years that I’ve been silent; in my life but also in the country I live in, in the continent I’m part of and in the world that I occupy. From today onwards this will be my focus in all the pieces that I will be writing, some serious (as serious as I can ever be lol!) and some light hearted, some deep and as always almost all will revolve around LOVE. 

Life to me is like a course that you are enrolled into involuntarily but maybe in our super subconscious we willed it to be…and in this course you learn that what you believe in one minute can change the next because of experiences that we go through day in and day out. You start understanding why words like “Never”, “Forever”, “Lifetime” are really just another way of saying for now until I learn something different from what I know now…and as you learn these new things, you learn new patience, new understanding.

These are my lessons…

Finding love

I remember growing up, everything was so easy in my mind and I thought it would happen exactly as i desired. I'd finish school, graduate from tertiary, get a job, earn lots of money, buy a car, buy a house and find the woman of my dreams, have our two children and live happily ever after! It was all so clear and possible and then oneday, with every year adding onto my age...reality was harder than I expected and finding love seemed to move further and further away from me...the harder I stretched, the further it went.

With life still continuing, I discovered that this is what most of us spend our lives looking for and some of us give up along the way and solid love seemed to have ended with my parents generations...the love roll out office closed down and left for good but the true romantic in me still believes there's hope, if we try harder, if we stay honest with each other and what we want and what we can give. I'm just a love hopeful and I refuse to believe that there's no true love out there. And with my experience of love over the years, i've seen quite a lot of things that kill love or the potential for growth in a relationship and the biggest one is selfishness in a relationship, the need to want to be heard but not hear the other person, no honest communication and no staying power!

So you're probably asking yourself, "so if you know so much about love or what makes it work or not work, then where is your love?" You have no idea how many times i've asked myself that question (without destroying the potential of my current relationship); like many others, i've found myself falling into the traps of love, losing sight of a good thing and slacking off into selfishness mode and i've also got issues with staying power!

What should we all do to make our relationships last? Hell don't ask me!!! :-) but I promise when I do find the trick, i'll definitely share it with you...for now, i'm going to try and not do what i know hasn't worked in the past and just love my woman. I'm going to play my part and hope that my partner is willing to work with me on this.

For the most part, i think we should just keep trying and never lose hope.

A dreamer of dreams

You have come to me from a distant land,
Dreamer of dreams, to fill my hearts desire,
Sweet music flowing from your nimble hand
That plays within... to light my passion's fire.

A symphony of word and thought you bring.
Excitement builds upon crescendo's sound,
Brought forth in tones to make my light heart sing
For all the beauty that, with you, I've found.

A life is changed in just an instant's time,
All darkness fled before that brilliant sun
That shines from spoken words of softest rhyme
And speaks of treasures, only just begun.

This mystic meeting gives my heart a glow
That few have seen and only you will know.

Poem By Gloria Jean Berry

My base is strong

My base is strong
The wind has tried to blow me from side to side
Life has tried to rattle me
women have tried to break me but...
my base is strong

Society has tried to wrong me
Men have tried to cut me down
Pain has tried to kill me but...
my base is strong

My human soul has almost given up
My weak heart has almost failed to beat
My brittle body has almost shut down but...
my base is strong

My base is strong
It is unmoved
unshakeable
unwaivering
it is my God
and my God lives through my family

My base is my family
and my base is strong

"C" seems to be my favourite letter lately :-)

I've been seeing a beautiful woman for a short while now; she's wonderful, everything that I love in a woman; sweet, sexy, intelligent, opinionated, loving, straight forward, says how she feels all the time...of course we all have our issues that we carry with us but those are things you discover about a person as you get to know them everyday and take them as they come.

Now that I’ve told you about this amazing woman, let me get to the gist of my story...lately I’ve been having all kinds of feelings; at some point I was stressed out about her ex, their relationship and how things ended between them, her feelings for me, who we are as individuals etc. and I found myself feeling more and more miserable everyday, then we sorted it out with a chat after she literally dragged the issue out of me. But I've also been having this thing that has been building up since the onset...I'm scared! shit scared! of how much I love her and the level, depth and speed in which that love is growing. When you've been hurt before, you can't help but think of that pain and how it feels and how you swore never ever to fall for anyone else or at least never expose your whole heart like that again but with every second I manage to spend with her, I find myself falling deeper and deeper with no brakes.

There's also another thing that I keep doing which I'm not sure if other people do it too or it's just me and my dysfunctional things...I can't help but day dream about what we could be together and imagining what life would be like with her...then I keep interrupting that dream with possible things that could go wrong and I eventually convince myself to hold back...to not need her too much...to not feel that gap when she's not around me...to not feel that girlie need for attention...to not let go and just feel and whenever I do this...I feel myself disconnecting from her...and that's not what I want but it seems to be a self preservation mechanism that I've developed over the years to shield my heart from pain. Some could say it's a form of running away and at times we run even before anything has happened. In my heart I know very well what I want...I want to shower her with so much love, I want her to know I need her...I want her...I want her to feel exactly what's in my heart...that she's all that's in it...she's the reason I wake up with a smile on my face everyday...that when I close my eyes at night, I imagine her beautiful face and my heart fills up with warmth all the way through to the tip of my toes...that I spend time thinking if she's eaten, if she's okay, if she needs anything, if she's warm, if she slept well, if she feels the heat in her heart that I feel in mine. She'll be away for two weeks and already I know I'm going to die from not having her around but I constantly keep myself in check not to seem too crazy ;-)

I sit here wondering how I can stop history from repeating itself...how I can just open myself up completely and let love control me instead of me trying to control where it goes and how it gets there. I want to love her without any boundaries, without any fear, without doubt and without my past experiences meddling in my current love for her.

What I know is that love is a wonderful thing...that there's no boundary to how much love you can give...that it's warm and fuzzy...that it grows if you give it space...that it envelopes you completely if you let it...shows you a beautiful side in you that you didn't know existed and that that is the best thing about love.