The Slave Chains of History

Chains never fall completely. Scars embed themselves like burns under the skin, And even though the skin is a body, it cannot hide the shadow of the irons. History screams, but its lips are sealed with silence, A silence oozing steel, blood, tears, sweat. They wanted to reduce us to shadows, But the shadow is the weight of the world trembling beneath our feet. Our ancestors screamed in the bellies of the ships, A cry muffled by the smell of salty sea, Legs broken, souls in tatters, But their sacrifice, their rage, flows in our veins today. You think time erases? No. Time is a vast sea of concealed suffering, But the roots are here, beneath our feet, In the earth we thought was dead, It is alive, it rises, it still screams. We are the children of those whom no one ever wanted to see. We were reduced to instruments of iron, Numbers, objects for sale, But this body that carries history, this body is still standing. The slave was not freed by laws, No. He was freed by the wind running through his veins, By the impossibility of erasure, By the impossibility of erasing the roots. The roots of oppression, the roots of contempt, These roots still devour the earth, They still devour the mind, These roots you pretend to want to cut, But you don’t see them, they grow within you. Don’t talk to me about equality, As long as your words are poisoned with history, As long as your smiles are masks hiding bodies worn by exploitation. I was born into a memory that refuses to be silenced. Your world marked me, yes, But know that it also carved an abyss within you. It didn’t kill me. It didn’t kill us. It only made our pain eternal. They wanted to erase the marks, The tattoos left by the whips, But these marks are stars that no longer hide. The bodies were lands of exploitation, But the flayed flesh Still bears the traces of the history never written. You want to forget, but I will not forget. I cannot. And those who preceded me will not. They cannot. Because slavery is not a bygone era, It’s a terror that continues from the slave ships. As long as your skin does not bear the history in its wake, As long as you haven’t felt the blows, the chains, the humiliations In the shadows of your ancestors, You will never understand that this is not a matter of "the past." This is not history, it’s life. The sons and daughters of slavery Do not walk, they drag ghosts in their steps, They breathe ashes, they live in permanent exile. It is the memory of a clenched fist, of a broken gaze, It is the memory of tortures that have never stopped tearing the air. You want to teach us the comfort of amnesia, But our pain is the lesson itself. It screams louder than your laws, louder than your knowledge, Louder than your good conscience. And you dare tell me it no longer matters. But tell me, how can the stones of the past be silent When they scream under the weight of the centuries, When they still bleed in our hands? How do you censor the figures we tore from the earth, And that we’ve never been allowed to return? They have not disappeared, these figures, They look us in the eyes, In the mirror of time. I am not who you want me to be, I am not the mirror of the arrogance of your amnesia. I am the one who carries history like a weapon, A weapon in hand, ready to break anything that tries to erase the truth. I am the one who has seen, who has suffered, And who rises every day, Every day, despite you, despite them, To scream to the universe that slavery is not a dead story, It is a wound that never heals. And if you close your eyes, I will be there, in your dreams, In your thoughts, in your cracks. For what has been broken cannot be repaired, What has been crushed does not disappear. And if you think we forget, You have understood nothing.