Rufaro Musvosvi | Cytherean Literature for the Bantu Girl | Poets Resist

Poets Resist
Edited by Krista Cox
July 30, 2018

Rufaro Musvosvi

Cytherean Literature for the Bantu Girl

Epitaph 1: The Letting Down of Hair

Alternatively: I Let My Hair Down, As Did The World Her Earth Daughters

To be burned and then plunged into oil

This we call a heat treatment

Something went horribly wrong

We are all on flames

Up in fire

Were we left in the oven’s heat too long and became too dark?

Or were we too dark for anyone to care and got left in the oven’s heat too long?

Does baptism by fire make you strengthened?

Or only hardened?

A vase baked from clay shatters on the floor and reminds me

They are not the same thing

Epitaph 2: Verbal Gymnastics To Gently Let Them Know They Messed Up

I was born into "Not taken seriously"

But had to get a degree to be allowed to be mad

Because pain's only valid if it's eloquent

The world picked on me and not even my brothers said a word

My angry tears are just the Backseat Freestyle to “our” movement

And maybe I'm just being petty,

But we were all up in arms to get black superheroes

Where were ya'll when we got one princess-in-law who was a frog for half the movie and a maid for the other?

I've explained it all wrong

I'm trying to be real and also pass the Bechdel test,

But still have studied enough to pass the DuVernay test

Enter store

I walk with my hands away from my body and my hood down

so they see I've got nothing to hide

Upon exit

I put up my hood and jam my hands in my pockets

so the dark parking lot doesn't mistake me for a woman

With something left to take

Epitaph 3: One Bad Day

This world is perverse

They say light and mean illumination, to birth visibility

They also say light and mean pale

They say dark and mean deep shades of color

They also say dark and mean the void

It was in this way

The deep child learned that if she could be pale

She could be visible

And no longer be touched by the void

But it is easy, the misinterpretation of a prayer

From a dark child

To be enlightened

This, and a barrage of other considerations

When they stare

So I ask,

"Do you wanna know how I got this dark?"