Differences- an experimental prose piece dedicated to unhealed wounds, hurts & long lasting anguish

I’ve always liked the differences in humanity. I was a curious little girl who was fascinated with people from different countries, states, religions, racial groups, sexual orientations, ideas, and even realities.

I’ve never believed that my group (African-Americans), religion (Protestant), sexual orientation (heterosexual) was better than other people’s. We were just different. I feel like people forget the greatness of differences. I know it is a quality that I enjoy and sometimes prize.

I think there is too much emphasis on comparing people, ideas, religions, sexual orientations, and other things in American society. I don’t think holding things up and looking for the same qualities in each entity brings about a vast quantity of useful knowledge or truth.

I live in Japan. People in my homeland asks me about living here all the time. Japan is very different from America. I can’t compare the two countries because it would be unfair to both. There are too many differences that have created the current reality of each nation. I wish we’d remember this, especially in terms of race, religion, and sexual orientation.

                                                  II

I think Africans-Americans have very different experiences than people born and/or partly raised in the Caribbean or Africa. My view is that people of African descent who aren’t born into or fully raised in the American context may have a more positive sense of themselves and their history.

I feel African-Americans can be raised with a positive sense of self but it is the result of deliberate actions within their family or community. I believe some African-Americans got a little too excited about integration and the successes of the civil rights movement and let their guard down. Many of us are paying the price now in our communities.

I believe the U.S. for people who are descendents of enslaved Africans in the Southern and Northern regions of the U.S. is a full-on mental mindf*ck! I don’t think people even understand what a mindf*ck it is until they’re removed from the environment.

I wish every African-American could experience living abroad for a brief period of time. It is a very interesting experience for me to have my nationality be a defining characteristic. I'm Black or African-American in the U.S.A. However, in Japan, I'm American.

Living abroad isn’t a never-ending paradise and sometimes it’s an exercise in daily frustration but it can give one a completely different sense of perspective in which to view their life and experiences.

I`ve tasted the sweetness of priviledge, the kind that comes from welding an American passport. The passport in countries of less economic means has been a magical get out of jail free card. I`ve been waved into countries and shielded from police harassment due to my membership in the exclusive American passport club. This priviledge is in kinship with white wealthy male priviledge which dominates my homeland.

Another area of differences that I want to ponder is ethnicity. There is so much rhetoric and writing about how every other group is better than African-Americans. I’m a little sick of it. I don’t think anyone is better than my people, simply different.

I think the immigrant experience is completely different than arriving on American shores in chains. I'm sick of African-Americans being compared to immigrants. The land of milk and honey to you has been like living in a new level of Dante's Inferno for some.The grass isn't greener on my side of the road, it is brown and sometimes there isn't any grass at all.

The irony of this situation is that I believe some immigrant groups, along with women, and the gay rights movement are all standing on the backs of African-Americans. I believe the passage of civil rights legislation in the sixties paved the way for the U.S. to open its borders to non-white professionals.

I'm talking about those people that I love yet who drive me crazy and don't necessary love me back- South Asians. And the Black people who look at me strange because I don't understand many of their customs or lingo- Africans and people from the Caribbean.

                                               III

Now on to religion. ORGANIZED RELIGION MAY BE THE DEATH OF ALL OF US. How did this happen? Why do people have to believe in my God? I really don't think my God is that worried about so and so not believing in her.

Please stop telling people who have little contact with Christianity, aren't of the persuasion, or simply not interested in the religion that they are going to hell because they aren't like me/us. I’m a Christian and I’m nothing like you. It's ok for people to be different from me/us.

Why would my God punish people who have never heard her name? Telling a young Chinese woman that she and her people are going to hell because they haven’t been exposed to Christianity as citizens of Communist China circa 1980's is madness. I don't understand it.

I must add that telling me that I was going to hell for doing any little thing was a bad move too. I was a naive, bookish, Black girl who wore ugly Puritan-styled dresses to church who never did anything but read the entire backlist of Vanity Fair magazines, bug the librarians about the arrival of British magazines, beg my mother for money to buy magazines, frightened my little brother with my Culture Club fascination, and wear a fake diamond styled pin encrusted with the password to end my preteen misery -LONDON.

I know I was a Black, working class girl who loved the Clash's Combat Rock album but I was never in danger of going punk. I just love the Brits. And I don't think I deserved to be condemned to hell.

I didn't even know that men had testicles until the eighth grade. I learned the shocking information from my female junior high school classmates who laughed at my ghetto girlish naiveté'. I was beyond innocence and verged into the world of peril and cluelessness. Nobody told me nothing except I was going to hell if I didn’t follow your God’s rulebook!

Meanwhile, my great sins of reading too many books and magazines, plotting ways to get into top high schools, consuming way too much sugar and TV, working my arse off in school, and praying to my God for a chance to escape the life that my class and race supposedly sentenced me to were adding up.

I really didn't deserve it.

"I'm with you in Rockland where you must feel very strange."

"I'm with you in Rockland where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an unarmed madhouse."

Excerpted from Allen Ginsberg's Howl

Comments

[robert earl keen]

Nice site. Thank you.
robert earl keen

[hxjrcbm rsqga]

ldemrz xisqk rbjfipo rgvizow iagdco qdawonxtm khep viwzra frqkuae

[edvkniac xoythnjs]

cvtaksuio tigna lfbtxyj ufmvwey kypfnmdl fdgvcqza bapvirldt http://www.vdtxhjypb.iejmcnlg.com

[pzusrdint ibydsecop]

ijdlkrwg trkbm iznrmfpq gmuazrsv mwqrvx zdwmnl frvqs

[RedSpider]

Very interesting entry! You have been living in Toyama? I have a friend there.
RedSpider

[Jaqua]

Won't it be a sight to see when the illusion of difference falls by the wayside, and I know what you mean about mindfuck having traveled extensively and lived outside of the US, as a black man I totally understand what you mean its like water to a desert.