blackgirl on mars: notes on a life in copenhagen (or how my alienation brings me closer to people).

thanks to Issa Eugenia for sharing this!

Suheir Hammad: Poems of war, peace, women, power | Video on TED.com

"The Mothers of Memory", Collage on Canvas, 2010 I come from a family of travelers. By the time I was six, I had already traveled at least twice, on my own, to Trinidad and back to Brooklyn. As driver licenses are an integral part of any suburbanite’s existence, so is the passport to my Caribbean family where migrating to the U.S. provided each and every one of us an opportunity otherwise denied in a country referred to as “home” but once left, would never be returned to, to live in, again. My grandmother, Hildred Balbirsingh was a pioneer in my family. She dresses like Queen Elisabeth II for Sunday Mass. She keeps an enamel potty under her bed (tensil she calls it) and smells like freshly grated ginger and dinner mints. She has an archipelago of liver spots on her hands which, as a child, I traced with my little brown fingers, imagining them to be islands of chocolate. By 1965 as Britain was closing her gates to her colonial charges the U.S.—influenced by the Civil Rig...