Angry Black Woman. Primitive. Uncivilized. Second class humans. Disposable. Unworthy and even diseased.
Pawns on the chessboard of humanity.
Political play things passed from one filthy state hand to the next.
Isolated, criminalized, profiled.
Tagged by my skin color and bagged with the trash.
Yet still sorted just as good as they sort their trash here aye? One trash, I mean refugee, better than the other..ptff!
As sitting ducks we are surveilled, kidnapped and killed, an attempt to eliminate us
How convenient it must be, to have your kind of white washing amnesia
Blissfully unaware of the atrocities of colonialism and imperialism
Unbothered by the ever growing effects of capitalism, neocolonialism
Or any factors that fuel migration in the least
Now you have the audacity to fortify and militarize borders
When you violated our own, raped our lands and plundered our humanity at your pleasure
And then with a straight face you dare to welcome with the right hand, and strike with the left!
Classifying refugees, like goods at a flea market
The underdogs, the likes of me get thrown out, flushed down the drain
The irony is choking, the double standards fuckin’ nauseating
Your message clear as day, we are not refugee enough, not queer enough, and in essence not human enough!
In this role is where you want me to stay, but guess what?
Today’s your wake up call. We are here alright, and we did not come to play!
You criminalize my beautiful melanin,
Yet include me when it suits you
From labor you deem to be beneath you
To objectifying and tokenizing my person
You have perfected the art of racial capitalism, effortlessly
The art of covert systemic racism, you have brilliantly mastered and finessed!
Subtle in most and brutal in uncountable others
Racial profiling, state and police brutality, queerphobia, Islamophobia
From within and outside fortress Europe, in the Mediterranean sea and beyond,
The rot is rife, as our shed blood soaks the earth
As refugees we bear the brunt of war, capitalism, partriachy, detention, deportations just to name a few
We are tired, so again, today is your wake up call!
You must see me, you must see us all!
There are many stories about refugees, many versions of a single story
Stories of uncivilization, catastrophe, disease, illiteracy, war, poverty, negatives and differences.
Buying into these single stories, leaves no room for refugees to be treated as humans
It emphasizes that we are different rather than how similar we are; human.
To be a refugee is to bravely rise above the waves of fear and death
To carry hope in empty, aching bellies, along with your bags of exhaustion and despair
It is to strive to preserve one’s memories in a tortured mind, and hold stories in a heavy heart
It is to proudly bear undeniable diversity, while battling prejudice and racialization
It is to survive on hope and feed your soul on dreams
But it is also proof of the fight and resilience of humans
A reminder that the warrior in us can only be pushed so far!
In our masses we gather, and we refuse to cower!
We are humans, born warriors and winners, we are many things before we are refugees! This, is our power!
We shall be silent no more! For our revolution is here!
So I will say it one last time, this is your wake up call!
It is either all of us are free, or none at all!
Break Isolation Group
... is run by refugee women, for refugee women - both those in and out of the German Asylum system. Most of us are living in different accommodation centres (Lagers) in Berlin and Brandenburg. We are a self-organised working group inside of International Women* Space, formed in February 2019 to answer the urgent need for peer to peer organisation for refugee women.