Growing Up African in Australia by Maxine Beneba Clarke

Author:Maxine Beneba Clarke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

6

You are afraid to unmask the meaning of this body. You cannot recall a time where you and the mask weren’t one. You teach yourself that you cannot have spring without reckoning winter’s pain.

Back in the classroom, you are given a new name.

You are ‘Abdi’ because all the black people are the Abdis. You understand why they call you this: ‘Abdi’ means ‘slave’ in Arabic.

All the black people are slaves, in their minds.

Blackness was never meant to survive.

Trauma is a time traveller.

You fail again.

You are not musical, or sporting.

You do not possess this strange cocktail of coolness that they, the arbiters of blackness, wish you had.

You are an unruly fat body, diseased with diabetes.

You learn through these lessons that they are more black than you. Whatever ‘black’ is supposed to be.

You are edited out of your own story.

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