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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Be free

I was going to write about how Georgia and Jonathan and I kind of stormed the Miriam Makeba concert last night with Attillah's help, but I see Georgia got there first.

I spent much of this Emancipation Day at the office reading page proofs--such is the tyranny of magazine deadlines. In between, I've been thinking about something Attillah wrote in her Guardian column last Saturday, about what it really means to be free:

I tell my elders I am not interested in struggling. I want to win now.

I reason with bredrins about this struggle thing. Everything for a time and a season. I don't want to be 50 and saying the same things, fighting the same causes. I want to do the job right and once.

My bredrin says choose your battles wisely. But what are the battles that we choose? There will always be those who think something is impossible....

The time for struggling to get along with each other is coming to an end. I declare myself emancipated from the politics of resentment. I declare myself emancipated from the politics of paranoia.

I declare myself emancipated from any confusion between freedom and freeness.

1 comment:

Mad Bull said...

She writes well. I like her style. Don't you really know how the Syrians/Lebanese feel? I don't know for sure about the Syrians/Lebanese in Jamaica, but I get the impression that they don't really care, that they have divorced themselves from what happens there.
Of course, I am basing my impressions on observation of the children of Syrian immigrants rather than on the immigrants themselves, as most of those who actually came to Jamaica from over there came in my father and my grandfather's time, not mine.