The Unlikely American

I'm feeling a little down this foggy October morning.

perhaps I should say nothing
kick a smile like a simple beat
no complexity in my percussion
warmed by commercial heat

Yeah, it seems that I am in the process of blowing up.

A spot on 848 on NPR, taping the Greatest Living Writers Project this weekend in NYC and I've been in the paper at least once a month since June.

So why do I feel so crappy?

Part of it has to do with the fragility of my future.

Part of it has to do with the ache of shaping my muscles into iron.

Part of it is my own sad heart and hearing the past echo off its delicate chambers.

Part of it is in the listening to the echo and singing/speaking/teaching/writing to drown it out.

But I can still hear it.

I feel very detached these days, knowing more and more that my values are not the values of the land of my birth.

Knowing that to most, my body is an abomination. My body is the "before" in a world full of afters.

My body hurts.

If you know me well, then you know what I'm doing to my body these days. How I am taking steps to become a true warrior and how much it fucking hurts.

What hurts more is the distance I feel.

I was born in Chicago, raised in America. I am an American.

And I hate it.

I hate this land of people who refuse to acknowledge the pain of communities who were used like blow-up dolls to achieve the shameful orgasm that is America.

So many want to be here, live here because this is the land of opportunity and freedom.

So many think that this is an evil land, full of bloated, ignorant people who think themselves better than the rest of the whole world.

This place isn't free enough for me and I've had to wrest opportunity from the cold, white fingers that run this place. I'm more bloated than most and ignorant, to be sure, but I don't think I'm better than the rest of the world. I don't think the USA is the ideal to which all nations should aspire.

I think this place is crazy. I think that most Americans are totally clueless about our bloody history.

I read their complaints about Black people and how we're always so offended by everything.

You know what offends me?

The fact that everyone conveniently forgets that the economic foundation of this "great nation" was built on the backs of people destroyed by its very construction.

Native Americans have been scattered and crushed like fall leaves, dampened with alcohol and casinos.

Black folks are angry and apathetic, bitter and fucking exhausted.

Women are obsessed with dysfunctional celebrities or artful table arrangements. We're totally distracted by lip gloss and talk shows. Those of us who aren't are busy emulating the worst of men, becoming tough-as-nails, bitches on heels who think that acting like aggressive assholes is the way to redemption.

Most other oppressed groups are bleating weakly for rights that will never come or if they do come, will be in name only, but not in thought or in heart or in spirit.

And here I sit, the unlikely American, but more of an honest result of this nation's evolution than the people paraded across the headlines as "Great Americans".

I come from a Russian Jewish grandmother who grew up poor and abused in Ohio, a Trinidadian French Creole grandfather who fought in the "Battle of the Bulge" under General Patton and beat my aforementioned grandmother into a shivering mass of prescription medicine and bitter regrets.

My father grew up on the West Side, with lots of siblings and a huge mother who passed away when he was 16. He had to raise his brothers and sisters, so when my Mom told him she was pregnant, he ditched her and left her evicted and living in her car.

Drug addiction. Abuse. Domestic violence. Alcoholism. A family of bastard children filled with broken dreams and dashed hopes.

And here I sit: product of bootleggers and plantation owners, abusive war heroes and drug-addicted activists.

This pain rises in my throat and stabs my heart when I read another blog, comment or essay about how whiny we minorities are.

The blinding fury chokes my vision of the future when I look at the present and see injustice represented in a room of children who don't know how to simply be nice to each other.

And underneath the pain and the fury is the question that has driven me since I was old enough to read (age 2): is change possible?

Is it possible for me to walk down the street and not get dirty looks because I'm too fat or too light or too Black or too female, but not feminine enough?

Is it possible for my voice to matter in a world that constantly sends the message that I don't?

How long can I keep singing, speaking, teaching, believing that a better way is possible?

I don't know.

What I know is that my animal spirit is that of a bull. I am vicious when stirred unnecessarily and persistent in my pursuit of justice.

This is who I am, vicious and persistent.

What place is there in the world for a human such as me?

What place for a vicious, persistent woman of many colors with a body like a bulldozer and a heart like an orchid?

I don't think America is the place for me. I'm tired of being the antithesis to the place of my birth, simply because my birth is the result of men who couldn't leave well enough alone.

We skip past the truth of slavery and the slaughter of the people who were here first, chalking it up to the world being a different place back then.

I don't buy it. Every choice that is made is conscious, if consciousness is allowed to flourish without restraint.

Those monsters who we call the discoverers of a new land (though nations were here for centuries) made the conscious choice to throw women to the ground and rape them viciously. Those monsters made the choice to go to another land, rip people from the homes, names and languages, all so they didn't have to pay for labor.

Those monsters wrote the books/so-called histories of these injustices and forced the rest of us to learn it in school.

And as a result of their conscious choices, millions of young people now live unconscious. They live in MTV-land, thinking that a woman without lipstick or bra is crazy, thinking that Black people who don't listen to the Ying-Yang Twins aren't really Black.

The conscious choice to alter the possibility and potential of billions of people because of their lust for power and profit is a choice that I, not they or their offspring, live every day.

And I'm pretty upset about it, especially because there's no real place to discuss the effects of our bloody history.

The descendants of those monsters still control much of the world today and write off any other version of history as "conspiracy theory" or "lies".

So this blog is one place where I can discuss how I've been affected. I refuse to roll over and think that Christopher Columbus is my hero. I refuse to be grateful that my ancestors (and by extension, I) were forced here. Now that slavery's abolished and my civil rights are written on some yellowing piece of parchment, I'se free, right?

WRONG.

Most people in this nation are so blind and wrong that their refusal to wake up will be their undoing and possibly mine, if I don't make a break for it.

In case it ever gets twisted, Nikki Patin may be the list of identities that are twirled like funeral ribbons, but what she is and will always be and what fuels her anger at injustice is this:

HUMAN.