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REJECTED CHILD OF MARIANNE
Rejected child of the Republic of Enlightenment,
In the land of human rights, my Africanness is a handicap.
In their eyes, I will always be the scapegoat for their failures.
I fled the tyranny of a banana republic chained to Françafrique.
Marianne still demands that I assimilate despite centuries of slavery and colonization.
Her negrophobia has become a silent bomb.
I am not allowed to complain at every police brutality.
The colonial pact dehumanized me on my native soil.
I discovered the face of racial hatred while crossing the Mediterranean.
I saw the West plunder the riches of my continent, traumatized by its democracy.
My sentence is to have skin overloaded with melanin.
I was born a Catholic Christian, like the children of slaves whipped in the slave plantations of the Caribbean.
My criminal record is as virgin as the womb of Christ’s mother.
But my humanity is demonized on the altar of capitalism.
Western supremacists do not want me to leaf through the black pages of their history.
Their racist hostility will never prevent me from being a good man.
They brandished the Bible to reduce my ancestors to slavery.
Today they brandish immigration to persecute me.
I did not choose to have black skin.
If I had had the choice, I would have asked the universal force to add even more melanin to my epidermis.
I am proud to wear the color of the Pharaohs when I spit on their prophets and their curses.
I have never walked with my head down, not even in the arms of promiscuity.
The cruelty of these racist supremacists has made me lucid and grim.
If every dark-skinned person had my character, my people would no longer carry the burdens of slavery and colonization.
Negrophobes would face men of extreme awareness.
I will never be the doormat trampled under the feet of supremacists.
I hate racists with all my heart and all my strength.
Copyright ©
Auguste Romain Nyecki
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