from an identity polyptych by Tameca L Coleman

“I do not know when reconciliation comes”

I do not know when reconciliation comes

“I thought there was a thing called forgiveness, and if you don’t want to forgive and if you don’t pray for that person, it never be right.”

An activist writes: “Reconciliation is dead,”
the captioned photograph of a beautiful Native woman
shouting, a red hand painted over her mouth.

I am reminded of a man who is dead now 
and who admitted to me 
the rape on his record 

before asking me 
to stand between him and community, 
some of whom knew, some who didn’t, to soften, I imagine the knowledge of his past

and I asked a friend who had been gang-
raped if they thought a rapist could be rehabilitated.

and I remembered the traumas in the bodies of those I worked for,
and wondered what kind of person I would be if I said yes.

My mother’s neck still shakes, and the only power she has these days is in safeguarding her broken body.

I had a friend who had smooshy feelings for someone, and for his warmth another man ripped his insides, and left him, asking if he liked that.

He had no one, so though he didn’t like that, he accepted the only security he thought could be found, and then the rest of them, too, had their turns. This is the price he paid for a home, he told me, and he thought that maybe he deserved it, the taking and tearing of his insides. He went back again and again. 

A lover once said, “Your body is not always yours. Let me have it.” 

A lover once said, “You are being preserved for me, and I will find you. Do you like to be raped?”

A lover once told me that I better not dare claim anything other than love, my placement in his bed secured by the rifle within arm’s reach.

A lover once told me about the “sanctuary” found where two men made all the children they saved trade sexual favors. She is nostalgic about this house, and speaks the magic of floor beds and shared scarcities. This world was somehow better than what she had before, and she sometimes wonders where those men have gone, and she sometimes craves small dusty spaces and booze and shared bread that’s already turning.

Someone somewhere will no longer catcall a woman and yell into her back that he’s talking to her because of the scream that scraped scars up my throat and out of my mouth.

Someone somewhere has eight long scars down his back for trying to force me to take a “picture” to remember him by.

Someone somewhere carries my mother’s stab wound.

I do not know when reconciliation comes. 

When you said, “You know, there’s two sides to every story. I guess your Mom did what she did and I just went off.”

I thought about how I hate violence,
and I thought about how we’re facing violence all the time, 
the perpetrators of the wounds we carry getting off
scott-free with the language of their gods in tow, 
beating us over our heads once again
with demands for forgiveness
songs we do not owe.

---

You can’t just read your way out of racism. And yet reading with that aim is a powerful and viable first step. And how strange when you pair that against a Black man and his partner creating a space for communing and intervention, full of informative and empowering books meant for the communities they come from, for the communities whose safe spaces are disappearing, for the communities who are being colonized and owned all over again.

The young man who comes to speak to us has grit in his teeth when he says “white liberals.” They are the ones who have money and they are happy to spend it here. Spending their money here makes them feel that they are doing something. They do not realize that even here, they are co-opting intent. They do not realize that even here, in their earnest desire to understand, they harm.

am i an ally?

you can’t read yourself
out of racism

but stacks of books line the desks
and tables,
the bedside dressers,

they line
the insides of my bags.

i take notes and carry
the weight of them.
i underline
and highlight. read       with yearning.
the more i read, the more i know
i know

nothing
i bend over the tables, my shoulders
curving over my heart, eyes
strain and water,
my chest heaves.
each book
is a silent soldier
armed to the edge of the pages’
slicing corners              see
see
see
how
my spine compresses.

see how
my fingers
bleed.