Free in a box

Indigenous

 In this world but not of,

Unknowingly known.

Seed placed in soil un-toiled,

Buried deep, though not sewn 

I am, therefore this is,

Freely trapped in a box.

Taken from nowhere, but here.

Progressing to a stop.

Foreign to my native world.

Hidden in plane sight.

Darkness’ what’s revealed to me

Blinded by the light.

Exposure is my plea in day.

Revelation my cry by night.

Part the curtain, raise the shade 

Awareness is my fight.

 

Contradiction, irony and improbable notions pave the path that I walk on. And like the crooked man with the crooked stick, walking the crooked lane to his crooked house; it’s only fitting that my creative expression is ironic as well.  I am an African American woman of mixed heritage who was birthed and reared in the United States of America. But for most of my life, I was ignorant to most of my native land’s mores, laws and social customs. 

I have raised five children, though I am in many ways a child myself. I advise adults, and have guided developing adolescents, yet I am just attempting things that most of them have been practicing since fourth grade. I am Peter Pan in a Neverland where the lost boys indeed did grow up. The only difference is my Neverland is real life, and what I knew to be reality was a nightmare. 

Though somewhat cryptic, Indigenous is the essence of my experiences, perspective, and struggles in establishing a life for myself and my children. It reflects my interpretation of my place in society, as well as my purpose in this lifetime. Like many adults in  America (and around the world), I am assumed to be a result of my upbringing. Yet, while cultivating a unique awareness, it is this very upbringing that inhibited common interactions with the society that I was a part of. Still, a product of my environment I am not.

Until I was twenty-four I was kept ignorant to the social standards of the most liberated country in the world. Concurrently, I was exposed to things that other children and young adults my age were not.  I knew what the internet was before most people even heard of it. I was allowed to investigate how bread rises and manipulate edible science before most kids my age knew how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. 

Both my paternal and maternal grandparents are Christian Baptists, yet the spiritual practices that I grew up with included Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, Yoruba, Kemit, Voodoo, Necromancy and Wicca. At twelve years old I taught myself to cook six different cuisines and had to create a menu detailed enough to maintain the strict vegetarian lifestyle and nutritional integrity of a family of eight. By the time I was fifteen I had been trained to build a house from the ground up, helped deliver eight of my siblings, and provided my own prenatal care. 

I have an unequaled understanding of the way things work, and a peculiar interest in why things are. Which I am sure I owe a great deal to the "privileges" my parents never failed to inform me that they provided. But, even with these "privileges", I didn’t know the purpose of the Constitution of the United States. 

In America 1 in 4 girl children are expected to be sexually abused by the time they are eighteen years of age. I was eight.  I was kept secluded and away from other children, teenagers and young adults that were not my own siblings, or acquaintances of my father who molested, raped, and later impregnated me. But, contrary to most who suffer atrocities such as these, miraculously, I do not drown my pain in alcohol, dissipate my sorrows with drugs, or numb my suffering with self inflicted pain. Antithetically, my father's victimization of me inspires an appreciation for things that most take for granted. For example: the right to copulate with a man of my own choosing, is not something I take lightly. 

I am overwhelmed with appreciation to the point that I am driven to communicate this experience and others like it, through writing. I do this in a way that the reader feels as if they are touching with my fingertips, looking with my eyes and pumping blood though their veins with my heart. 

The journey on my paradoxical trail started at a young age. At 10 years old, I wasn’t allowed to watch R rated films. Yet I was having sex with adults, and was required to watch porn. In an attempt to cope with what was happening to me, imaginary play with my siblings was my favorite pastime.  We created a world that  where I was an adult, doing positive, responsible adult things. I filled in the blanks of the life I was already living. I had the responsibility of and was forced to participate in acts that only grown woman should be made aware of. So I included in “fake life” the aspects that I felt were missing in real life. These represented the lost control over what happened to my body and mind that I longed for. 

In my playtime with my siblings, I would pretend that I was the president of the country that I was in, but not a part of. I was the bread winner, the entrepreneur, the parent and the liberal protecter of my flock. In my writing I revisit that mindset, creating worlds based on ‘what if’ scenarios, and generating rhymes founded on the only thing consistent in my life. My heart beat. 

Being free in a box, lends one plenty of time for analyzation and contemplation. I also focused masses of energy on anything that I did.  I thought about thoughts, that I thought of before thoughts that I think I thought, on a regular basis. Which continues to primarily manifest in my writing, but is also apparent in everything that I do.

I look back on the days my parents left me home taking care of three to five other children (the number changed over the years), and it seems as though my "fake life" were prophecies that have fulfilled themselves in my life today. The person that I cast my first vote on was the first black president of the country that I live in, and now am very much a part of. I am the head of my household, an entrepreneur, a parent, and a very liberal protector and voice to a growing flock. And like the crooked man and Peter Pan, my place in this world is significant and secure. Just like the unforgettable tales meant to be told to a child.