So, this is a loose container for my last birth...
An experience so layered I will never be fully able to reckon with its complete significance for me as a human being,
as a collection of voices and personas occupying the flesh of a physically grown adult, hoping to resolve enough childhood baggage to mature fully into adult one day,
as a binary gendered being,
as an Black, dark(er) African child of the Diaspora whose people made the choice to settle too far from "home",
as a fatty girl with two pregancy's worth of panniculus (thanks Navelgazer),
as a lonely yet willfully alone being,
as a mostly unparented adult daughter,
as an immigrant raised (starving no food in the cupboards) famine and (junk food) feast,
as a greying almost forty (seven plus months and counting) inbetweener (too old to be a youth, too young to be a crone),
as a queer woman living and parenting outside queer communities partnered with a hetero and questioning man,
as a matriarch ,
as a counselling (psychotherapy, not psychiatry) consumer,
as a cussing woman,
as a radical, anti-authoritarian, body-positive parenting human being so tired of oppressive social conventions, the power of corporations including the medicorp....
I was going to write some more. But, let me just say: I've rearranged the posts so that earliest labour comes first and so on.
The Birth Story of Olamina Formidable-Power Akintunde Azania
sibling to
Tigana Phenomenal-Gift Sankofa Azania
My birthplan...
I picked the name for a girl...
The universe sent a boy...
Tha phreakin' ultrasound office scrap...
My birth story...
The morning of the birth around 7:30 before the midwives came...
The midwives arrive...
All the gang's here...
Bring it so it's brought...
Not quite a cotillion, but definitely the beginnings of a debut...
Emergence...
Immediate afterbirth...
The actual afterbirth...
Cutting the umbilical cord...
There are a few other photos I want to add like Shmolee meeting Nana Ophelia and him breastfeeding for the first time. Papi also pointed out that we haven't put up any recent photos. But this will do for now.
posted 7:28 pm at One Tenacious Baby Mama
It seems that one of the grenades I lob from time to time as a way to wake people up out of their various stupors where they regurgitate and rehash and refry day old news items has hit its mark. Meaning a conversation that goes past cnn or fox "news" items is happening.
I like conversation. Thank you to Liza at culturekitchen for deciding to promote the post I did about Western Civilization as a history of emotional dysfunction...it seems a conversation is ensuing.
I went by and watched from the safety of a nearby bush as some people tried to grapple with...to deny the implications of what I was saying about some people's British ancestors.
But dude...
The people had to have been goddamn crazy asses. They got in some boats, got lost because their navigational tools were inadequate to begin with, ended up washing up on a continent far from their yard, pretended they knew what was going on, repositioned (in their heads) the natures of whole peoples and cultures on a continent they knew (and still know) nothing about, they convinced themselves that they saw not people, but animals (just keep swimming, swimming, swimming), took the fucking people, sold them like they were cows or pieces of cheap land and then beat the shit out of these people and their children, bred sons with mothers, raped men and wimmin and children, fucked the progeny of their own rapes, brutally tortured and maimed at will and celebrated making money off the whole fuk'd in the head venture every mofo day for a few hundred years.
Then they told the people they'd had a change of heart and that they actually didn't see them as animals anymore (their human pets just weren't cost effective) and that some of them felt really bad about behaving like brutish, homicidal, schupidee jackasses for a few hundred years.
Then they decided that now the people would be thankful and go away with whatever insanity they had encountered and internalized under wraps.
The homicidal freaks themselves went their way and started having families with their own brutal homicidal tendencies intact with extreme smiling courtesy and social control as a constructed, constricting veneer white washing over the whole memory.
hee, hee, hee!
If that don't sound like the actions of a bunch of crazy ass dillusional, dysfunctional people, I don't know what is.
Who's crazier at this point? I really can't tell. The stories and insanity bred in the bone are just as intertwined as my/our dna. No splitting it up or separating it. But I can dig and learn more.
I'm not even going to debate the fact that the ancestors of modern day colonizers were obviously suffering from some severe collective trauma, fear, rage, oppression, violence of their own. Something awful happened to them.
Any psych student can explain how people who have been harmed, tortured, abused who don't have an outlet to help them feel, understand and release the harm behave. The Colonizer is a textbook case...as are so many of their descendants including the ones running the British, kkkanadian and US governments presently. It all fits, really.
Now, all I did when I wrote my original post was start to trace this trauma turned inward then turned outward as the colonizing imperialist violent madness of the people who harmed me and mine down through time using their own historical writings, the ones they so proudly parade as evidence of the roots of their superiority (and colonizing ways) before children in schools, as my guide.
So, before anyone gets their panties in a knot, why doesn't someone just go refer to some big, dusty old book about the history of the west? I don't have to...see, all the stories and images are stuck in my mofo head....I was such a good student, you see.
They were CRAAAAAaaaaaaaZY!
And they have descendants who have collectively inherited a horrific hidden legacy. That's not rocket science. Though, from the look of some of the people critiquing my facts, it's all debatable and up for disagreement...a hypothesis. You just go and tell yourselves whatever you need to so that you can sleep good at night.
I'm not one to use the words "madness" or "insanity" lightly. I don't believe in schizophrenia or anything else in the DSM, for that matter. Psychiatrists need to be committed, administered their own drugs and put through their own "treatment" regimens.
And yes, maybe I'm having problems reaching for politically sound, courteous, objective language right now, but i need to say it again:
Those crazy ass crazies dragged my peeps over the deep edge and as far as I can see, we're still struggling to climb back up and over onto solid ground!
ahem...cough, ahem...as I was saying...
So, really, I'm sorry if my logic doesn't come across as academically sound enough for some. All I have to say is: Go back and read your own history books. The aquaducts in Britain didn't get there by themselves and ask a historian where the name Londinium ("London" is a short form of a longer word) came from and ask those who know about St. Brigid before she became St. Brigid how christianity came and ask an etymologist about the root components of english and see if Latin isn't linked to French which is linked to English.
But, I'm pointing out the obvious and getting a headache.
I can't debate the veracity of my/our sources with anyone right now. Go do some past life regression therapy...travel back in time, only when you get close to seeing the truth up close, don't let your rational mind search for a denial based escape route by skipping over into another reality/body/reality not your own.
You were not an "Indian" chief.
You were not a Yoruba priestess.
Why does no white person ever come back from regression therapy saying:
"I was a slave ship owner."
or
"I was a raper of enslaved African children."
or
"I forced enslaved African men to suck me off before they could eat their morning meals."
or
"I saw the sharks coming and held the gun forcing the African men, women and children over the side of the ship."
Where are the people who regress and see the horror up close? I guess the lesson here is that when we Black people regress we'll find we did it to ourselves? hee, hee, hee!
Anyways...
To all the white people turned various shades of brown red yellow and black through past life regression therapy I can only say: "Go back! You must have been lost. Did you take a map? Try again and this time, try hard to locate your own genetic ancestors. Sit with them as they rape and murder and examine human teeth at auctions.
sigh...
So, really in a sane world not built on denial it would be good to go over to culturekitchen and get all up in the conversation. But...
I'm enjoying watching from a distance. From all the way over here, I can maintain a semblance of objectivity (and no one will get hurt or smeared when the ages old rage in me rises and cries for justice in the form of spilled blood.)
Thanks again to Liza. I'm not sure she realized she took a risk backing what I wrote so openly. It's not really safe these days to reference any of my posts too directly. You see, I'm not a"nice" woc.
posted 12:33 pm at One Tenacious Baby Mama