Writing can be compared to a lot of things. I've recently found it to be like black consciousness, as I feed the furry little demon slices of my brain, puffing up the b until it becomes a double-decked B. Then I suppose language is like white supremacy and colonialism. Or like the transatlantic slave trade, where black slaves from diverse geographical regions and linguistic backgrounds were grouped together on ships, stripped of language, community, and sometimes clothing; meaning, traditions, and cultural practices were constructed based on traces of their cultural past. This is Black consciousness. Traces from a pure objective state brutally disrupted by pale hands called language, like how my thoughts part from me like a lost child from its mother. We cry tears of an overwhelming amount of tangled
enjambement
and confused conjunctions. And
then, double consciousness. Words are like mirrors, I whip my head around as I turn, hoping to catch a glimpse of myself before I notice. I think of my thoughts, and as I mold them into shape, it is frightening to think that now my thoughts, or shall I say “writing”, have their own pair of furry little legs andshapes (becoming possible victims to body dysmorphia), and are capable of thinking of me too. I gently take myself by the hand
And stuff it in some dark sticky stinkhole.
Then perhaps, like consciousness exists as intentions and objects exist relative to us, language is not a hand-me-down version of my thoughts but the essential form it exists as. Destined to be expressed, in fact, a thought cannot be proven to exist otherwise, like how I inevitably require some flesh regardless of what or however frequently they shed. My skin relishes its existence
In the stickiness of the dark stinkhole.