Writing is the depiction of reality as seen, felt and experienced by yourself to someone else using only your words….
There’s a certain apprehension that dawns on me whenever the plane breaks through the cotton wadding of clouds and the stretches of German landscape suddenly appear outside visible from the window seat I’m always lucky to get on my discounted flight bookings. The hues seemingly flat and in shades of muted forest green and dark brown. Unless it’s the middle of summer, the stretch illicits so little appeal, the muted tones crying for a splash of colour intensity in God’s Photoshop.
I’m drawn to the realisation I’m back in a land I can’t really call home but that has been that for close to half a decade. The moment I see the land of the tribe of the white man known as the Germans, my insides do a flip. I steel myself for the touchdown. Not one to squirm on a flight – I actually enjoy turbulence and think of it as a version of a Desert safari (but on steroids, of course) or a really fast lift heading skyward. No, I’m not queasy from the rapid altitude change, I’m queasy because of the apprehension of my state; the knowledge I have seen since that transit through the Dar airport where the queues were filled by light skinned Europeans, now a tone darker from all the Zanzibar sun. The knowledge that I would go from being a majority to a minority -that is what I needed to steel myself for. A minority looked down upon since our sale into slavery penned a history that deducted from centuries of legends we already had. Memories are fickle,the primacy effect combined with bias equates to racism. I haven’t experience much racism in my town and this is not a story of racism. That is such a stereotypical statement, to immediately reduce my stay in a foreign country to whether I am accepted or not based on my skin colour.
This is a story of my feelings of inadequacy. My desperate need to not let those stereotypes turn out true. My unwanted appointment as an ambassador for my people by the mere fact I form the minority. I am afraid, afraid that my voice counts for something in this foreign world, afraid that my every action is scrutinized, analysed and extrapolated onto my entire nation. My fear that I am not ready to bear such a heavy burden.
But such is life.
Luke 21:15 For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict.
Fishmongery 