Be N-Igger

A white liberal editor said what I wrote wasn’t black enough. I spoke to him with confidence, with a hole in my shirt I had tucked in my pants. I told him I am a man just like him, and he acted like he didn’t hear what I said. He said, my writings wasn’t black enough. I gave him some more essays and he said, it didn’t represent the people who were struggling. And on the way home on the bus, I thought about my father, who was the only black man receiving his PHD amongst a predominantly white university. Was his struggle, not struggle enough? On the way home, I continued to write and look out the bus window and I saw the prostitutes do their dance as usual... the gang members watched and peered on the corner. And I wrote my poems from what I wanted to see. I wrote about the flowers that grew behind the barbed wired fences. I wrote about the women on the streets who once admired the flowers or who secretly admire them. Can we admire flowers too? Do we have a right to feel some softness in the world? Do we have the right to be a full human?