Severance

There is much conflict in my soul.  Perhaps if I write this and really open up about what I feel and the final severance that I know must come I can survive; perhaps I will feel a little better.  

I have completely distanced myself from this country and this people emotionally except for a few members of my family.  I feel nothing anymore.  Zero. No sympathy, hate, disgust, nothing.  America is an untouchable, something whose fate, good or bad, is not a matter I care about an iota.  

I see myself not as a black American or even an African American, but only as an African now.  I am an African of the Diaspora. Years of outrage and insanity passed off as normal have taken the last bit of sympathy out of me.  As far as I'm concerned even though I was born here and am the holder of an American passport, I am not an American.  I don't and never really had a totally American spirit.  I have always been someone peculiarly foreign, almost what could be defined as an exile.  

I've made a joke to my mother that perhaps I was kidnapped as an infant and was given to her.  My parents were an African king and queen, and they have been looking for me ever since.  They're still out there somewhere roaming and looking.  Perhaps her baby was switched with me.  Perhaps her baby died.  I know this probably sounded cruel to my mother even though the statement was made in jest, but there is something peculiar about me that goes beyond this place.  

I was bullied a lot as a child, and I never have really gotten over it.  I go deep within myself at times.  Sometimes this sailing away into the void was depression, shyness, rage, sarcasm, or aloofness. Over the years it has taken many forms.  


I have started to weed out people in my life little by little whom I feel have no nobility of spirit or character.  I don't want dishonest people around me.   I don't want people around who lack dignity.  I don't want people around me who are selfish and can't sense anyone's pain.  I don't want materialistic people around me who are wedded more to their gadgets than they are to humanity.  I don't want the fake humanitarians and slaves to trends around me who are silent about the wars, but are loudly vocal about animal rights or the unborn.  This kind will rescue a dog from any of the various war zones this country has proliferated, but they could care less about the widow, orphan, elderly person lost, alone and whose everyday is a trial by fire.  I don't want people around me who toy at love and in every breath devalue that glorious word more and more.  I don't want people around me who disrespect me or any black woman.  I don't want people around me who hate the African, the greatest victim of so much prosecution, betrayal, and theft.  I don't want an racist around me of any color, but I want those who will tell it like it about the racism, imperialism, and satanism that is really pushing this world over a cliff.   If you are petty or secretly crude or cruel move off from me.  If love is a game for you and breaking hearts, you need to go where your kind is welcomed.  I don't clean up people's excrement for them.  A lot of people feel their only role in life is to cover their own and other people's excrement.  That is for the servant kind, and I am not that kind of servant.  My honor comes first.  


My profession, teaching, has been spat on and defecated in this country by parents, children, and politicians,  and teachers and other people in the education field have been reduced to the level of masochists just to stay in some thing which will help pay their mortgage and keep them from ending up under a bridge. How does that make me feel?  I am beyond sadness and anger at this point. 

I wish so much that more black people in this country could have used our martyrs Dr. King and Malcolm X as models for dignity, strength, and truth.  I wish we had done all we could to learn about all the African greats that have given their lives and blood for Africa and wanted to see the Pan-African tree grow and burst into bloom. 


America hasn't earned my respect.  You can't just say you're the greatest and expect people with a higher mind to not look at your actions.  I'm sorry, but I can't be blind.  Perhaps that is my great fault living in such a society and world.   I can't allow myself to feel fully comfortable in such a twisted place of racism, naked materialism, a place that is a launching pad for war against humanity and the human spirit.


I never wanted to live and see black people to fall into so much degradation. I didn't care so much what happened to the rest of the society, but for us to fall has been more than I can bear.  I was looking at an article today about young black girls making pregnancy pacts.  This is what segments of us are producing as we look away to small and meaningless things.  We have lost everything, and I don't know if we will ever be capable of recovering ourselves. 

If America was teachable...  If America had not harden its' heart like Pharaoh, but there was always a hardness there.  Look at the history of this place.  

For me it is over.  I have thrown up my hands. The severance.

A Black Shia Muslim Convert Speaks

I was looking at this latest interview yesterday from independent journalist 108Morris108.  As always I enjoy his interviews because he seeks out intelligent people connected to the source of a situation, ideology, or conflict.   

Sheikh Ahmed Haneef, who is interviewed in this video, is unique not because he is a black convert to orthodox Islam but because he is a Shia who studied in Qum, Iran. He was once a Sunni Muslim.  I really enjoyed this interview because he covered very well in a short period a number of topics from the affects of slavery on blacks to the ideology of Shiism to consumerism and its affects on youth. 

I also recommend more of 108Morris108's interviews with various people from Libya, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan and others including some Americans who think outside the box. The link to his YouTube channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/108morris108. You don't have to agree with all the ideas on his channel, because I don't with everything either.  Some videos are not of interest to me, but most are. I just think it's good to expand the mind at least a little.

Two Short Stories of Two Strong Men

I love stories.  Good stories have a lot of power if we open our minds and hearts to them.  People who think past the shallows love good stories with meaning and lessons that replicate real life.  In the last few days I have been exposed to two stories of two strong men.  One of the strong men I knew personally.  The other I did not.  One was a devout Christian.  The other was a devout Muslim and was briefly the leader of an African country when I was a very little girl.  These two strong men were my grandfather J.C. and the other was Ahmed Ben Bella.  My grandfather died in 1987, we believe at the age of 72.  He was never really sure of his birth date. My grandfather was a farmer and carpenter.  Ahmed Ben Bella died last week at age 93.  He helped in the liberation of his country, Algeria, from over a century of French colonial rule, and he was the first president of Algeria from 1963 to 1965 when he was overthrown.  He spent over 2 decades in prison, went into exile in Europe, and later came back to his homeland and functioned as an elder statesman.  He was respected not only in Arab but also in African countries as a freedom fighter and liberator.  

These two men both experienced discrimination.  My grandfather was biracial.  He was illiterate, but he knew how to survive.  Racial discrimination was a fully open and accepted way of life when he was growing up and into his adult years.  Ahmed Ben Bella saw discrimination at school from one of his teachers who was biased against the students because they were Muslim and Arab. One African I follow on Twitter said the other day that Ahmed Ben Bella had "more than nine lives."  He was the ultimate survivor.   

I've read some of the things that Ahmed Ben Bella said and like my granddad he was unafraid to speak the truth and stand up for what is right.  I remember my grandfather as a very quiet man who spoke slowly with a old fashioned black southern brogue.  He went to church regularly, and he and my grandmother both believed in helping others and providing hospitality to both blacks and whites.  Before I was born and my mother was a girl, my grandfather had a rebellious streak.  He did not tolerate being taken advantage of from his white employers.  Perhaps he got away with what he did because he looked more or less white.  My mother told me a story this weekend about an incident.  He had done work for some white people.  When it was time to eat, he was told they would give him a meal, but he would have to eat it outside.  Granddaddy responded audaciously that he had a kitchen, chairs, a table, and a wife who could cook him some food; he got in his car and left.  

Mom said they often worried that my granddad would get into serious trouble one day for speaking his mind, but he never did. It was the American South under Jim Crow, and he could have been attacked or killed for being blunt to white people.  By the time I knew my granddad he had mellowed.  But I understand more and more now the source of my own outspokenness, but mine has arrived later in life. My outspokenness comes from not only dad and sometimes even mom, but also my grandfather.  We are as proud as some Eastern peoples from ancient cultures, and we don't take humiliation and disrespect lightly.

A few days after Ahmed Ben Bella's death, I found an interview he'd done about twelve years ago for an Egyptian newspaper.   I was fascinated by the story of how he met his wife.  He was single when he had briefly been president.  He didn't marry until he was middle aged and was in prison.  Ahmed Ben Bella's mother was very concerned that he was still single.  He said in the interview that he had resigned himself to remaining unmarried because his life was devoted to the liberation struggle.  Later he was married, I read in another newspaper, by proxy.  A young female journalist who had visited him in jail decided she would marry him. They wed after seeing each other only three times.  It must have been love at first sight.  Yes, I'm still a romantic a heart, but I reside in a tough world, and I'm also a black woman in America, and at my age I have no illusions left... 

I thought it was so heartwarming the devotion of Ahmed Ben Bella's wife, joining her husband in prison.  There are very few people in this culture now who will stick by each other through thick and thin.  The few who still get married have eliminated the old phrases out of the marriage vows, and not much is left now. 

I read in another online paper in an obituary that Ahmed Ben Bella's wife was taken from the prison to have a baby in a hospital, but she miscarried.  When she was brought back to join her husband she had a day old abandoned infant girl with her.  Later the couple adopted a handicapped child.  I was really affected by the compassion of these two people taking two kids whom no one else probably wanted.  Ahmed Ben Bella said his daughter spent her first seven years in prison with him and his wife.  His wife was permitted to leave the prison to visit her family from time to time, but she was devoted to sharing his hardship and isolation with him. 

These two stories that I learned about in the last week are wonderful in their own ways. I wanted to tell them because I hope that whomever reads this will think.  I try to help people to think.  A good writer doesn't put down every little detail. There should be gaps, mysteries which make one wonder.  I ask questions to jar people's hearts sometimes.  I know many hate to think, but thinking and more than just thinking on a base level is important.  Deep thinking is very important.  Deep thinking leads to not only knowledge but also character, and it is never too late to increase knowledge and develop a good character.  

Even though my grandfather looked white, he identified fully with other blacks no matter what their hue was.  He always considered himself a black man.  He identified with the oppressed.  

I love these words of Ahmed Ben Bella which really state where his identity lay,  "I am Muslim first, Arab second and then Algerian. I am also proud to be an African."  

I too will always identify with the those who are strong in overcoming the perilous portions of life and the oppressed no matter where they are.   Since things will never be fully just in the country where I live,  I identify myself as an African. Africa was the first region (Turkey was second) where I first felt full acceptance and welcome, and I will always feel a gratefulness to Africans and an extreme fondness.

In Town, Turkish Writer Mustafa Akyol

A photo I took of Mustafa Akyol at the lecture

I was invited to go to a lecture by Turkish writer Mustafa Akyol at my old university week before last.  Basically I only knew of him by name through a couple of blogs I used to read.  I haven't read his book or even his writings on his website.  I mentioned on Twitter that he was coming here, that I hoped to go, but that I knew nothing of what his ideology is. Then one of my Turkish followers Tweeted in my direction, 'He's against evolution theory, supports ID. He supports democracy, sharia law and jihad, but is against Islamic extremism.'  I had to look up what ID was an abbreviation for and recalled once I found it that I'd seen it before, "intelligent design."  I didn't know the details of the meaning of the term, but I was aware that it referred to a theory of creationism.   I am familiar with creationism as taught by the Bible, which is the only theory of it that I've had any real in-depth exposure to.  I've never believed in evolution, so there was no conflict there.  As for sharia law and jihad, my reaction to those words were not tempered by the usual Western panic.  I have studied enough about Islam and sharia in a general sort of way to know they are not what the average American thinks they are.  So I decided to keep my plans of seeing what Mustafa Akyol was going to talk about.

Mustafa Akyol's lecture was an hour long, and he basically gave a brief history of the Middle East in the last century after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.  The conflict between secularists and Islamists were also talked about.  He said that most of the Arab governments that became independent from European colonialism after the collapse of the Ottomans were secular.  According to him, for years the secularists had oppressed the Islamists, so he claimed that one of the reasons for the Arab Spring was due to years of strong arm tactics that leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gaddafi had used. He really didn't say very much about Libya, and I can understand why, but still I wish he had.  What has gone down in Libya has become a blot on the entire so-called Arab Spring.  I follow some people in the Middle East and others with origins there along with some Africans, and the ones I follow were skeptical at the beginning of the Libyan conflict, and after it became so outrageously bloody they have expressed disgust. Perhaps two months into these revolutions I had also become skeptical and was suspicious of forces both inside and outside the region that were trying to propel these revolutions.  What happened in  Libya was no doubt a counter revolution.  I was appalled and sickened by what went down in Libya from the beginning when it became obvious that networks like Al Jazeera and CNN were siding with the rebels and trying to sway public opinion.  Already there were stories of how racist these rebels were raping and killing black Libyans and black migrants. There was early evidence of their brutality on YouTube.  Neither the huge demonstrations in support of the Jamahiriya (Green Libyan government) were ever shown on TV.  They could only be seen online.  

Mustafa Akyol said that he was hopeful for Tunisia out of the entire group, however.  He said absolutely nothing about Bahrain or Yemen, which I also found disappointing.  There was little said about Syria.  

I told my Turkish friends I agreed with ninety to ninety-five percentage of what he talked about, but now that I've had over a week to reflect, I would say I now feel that a lot of questions were not answered.  No doubt Mustafa Akyol is a good speaker to listen to, but I feel too many pieces to the puzzle were not interlocked.  He said that he agreed with some but not all of the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.  I don't know whether to be alarmed by that or not since I don't know enough about that particular movement.  I am alarmed that he seems to still feel favorable towards Obama and said he likes Obama's tactic of "leading from behind" which was first heard in regards to Libya. I think "leading from behind" is just a new phrase for Dick Cheney's "going to the dark side."  I never bought into the US was only providing England and France with "moral" support."  The US had a major hand in attacking and destroying parts of Libya and disrupting the country.  I believe Gaddafi was the chief target from the beginning and that the next step was to loot the coffers of that country.   I had lost what respect I had for Obama when he refused to have people from the previous administration prosecuted for war crimes.  After Libya, what little if any respect I had was dead and gone.

There was a question and answer session after the lecture, and I was tempted to ask Mustafa Akyol "Sir, are you a neo-Ottomanist?"  I have suspicions that he might be to a slight degree.  All these governments that have dipped their hands in the so-called Arab Spring are jockeying for power, no matter all the slogans and propaganda that they hide behind. The US and EU are on their last leg of 500 years of global domination, both societies and economies are in moral and financial disarray, and they will not go quietly.  Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar fear Iran and want to be powerhouses.  Iran has quietly become a regional power and the US and many Arab states don't like this.  Turkey has been told it is a model for the region in various quarters and is acting on such praise, but even Mustafa Akyol doesn't completely agree with that idea.  He confessed that all is not well with Turkey either.  

There were a number of questions in my head, but I felt a little shy about speaking out in such a large group where I didn't know most of the people.  There was a book signing afterwards of his book Islam Without Extremes,  but I didn't buy a copy.  Perhaps I will read it in the future.   I was glad I got an opportunity, however, to see this writer speak, but there is much more I need to learn.