2021
mama earth finds herself in black woman’s body was accepted in the second edition of MALA LECHE, a quarterly radical art zine by Bad Milk Press. This zine features the art and writing of womxn, non-binary, and genderqueer artists and thinkers.
mama earth finds herself in a black woman’s body
Mama Earth finds herself in a Black woman’s body freaky friday body swap style. Silk scarf wrapped around her head, she wipes away sleep feeling the scramble, the churn, the never steady state tour de force that is a Black woman’s spirit. As she moves in her new body she feels “I woke up like this” Beyoncé fabulous and Cardi B “wet-ass pussy” frisky.
She touches her brown skin.
Basking in early morning light, she invites the sun’s rays to crest her curves, to cast shadows on the valleys of her new blackness. She is awake and aware. Awakened by her regality. Aware that her sovereignty is tainted with struggle and strife. She quakes in the imbalance. She is only a Queen when she is not an inconvenience for others.
Mama Earth finds herself enraged. Diary of a Mad Black Woman “I’m not bitter, I’m mad as hell” enraged. Fannie Lou Hammer “I am sick and tired of being sick and tire” enraged because though she is no longer nature’s keeper, she still shoulders generations of defilement. A history of disrespect. She has been told she has no worth for the last time.
Her veins swirl with magma, she is iron at her core. She can whisper life and can speak destruction. Her voice has the power to begin and end. And an ending is what she wants to this Black woman rage. To spew magma from fissures, spiral maelstroms into the sea. Summon windstorms and lightning to raze her landscape, start anew.
Yet.
yet…
Among all her power and all her terror she feels the pinprick of instinct. A truth her Black body knows well. To disguise her intrinsic rage with elocution is survival. Her calamity would only cause the destruction of herself.