Raha Behnam

Hello Amerikkka,

I am exposing myself to you as one of the aliens landlocked within your arbitrary and violent borders. I don’t know a life without you, after all these years spent gripped in your embrace. I don’ t know much about the outside world. But you won’t let me be an insider either. I can do little else but document the myriad ways you hold me here like a prisoner, but hate me so fervently and so well, all at the same time.

I really have no clue who I am at this point. I am a floating genderless mass of confusion.

There is no other mother country. You are the closest thing I have to a mother. How painful to admit it. Our relationship is not a good one. But it is a relationship. So here I am, embracing my destiny as forever an unwanted child of yours. I will try to cope, I will negotiate, but mostly I will try to tell you how it feels, how it has felt, to exist in the first world with a body stuck in the third.

 

 

If the world is made white, then the body-at-home is one that can inhabit whiteness.

Sara Ahmed, A phenomenology of whiteness

                       

     

رها

           رها

               

              رها

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a third person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.”

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks