dedicated...

...to all the lovers in the world...

...whether you believe in it or not...

...it's all around. So spread a little...

L.O.V.E.

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Friday the 13th

Happy Friday the 13th!

Just in case you didn't know... I don't beleive in any sort of superstition.

Bye.

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teh PaperCut Designs

Here's the design I was talking about... here

I think it goes well with the fact that February is considered "Black History Month".


This is the first one I did:
With 5 of the most influential "Africans" of our time - in my opinion. Malcom X, Barack Obama, Dr Martin Luther King jr., Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko. All feeling good to be African! LOL!

The background and inspiration behind this creation, is a speech/peom by former State President (then Deputy President) Mr. Thabo Mbeki titled, I Am an African. Which he delivered on the occasion of the adoption by the constitutional assembly of "The Republic of South Africa Constitution Bill 1996." Delivered in Cape Town on 8 May 1996.

Followed by this one. Didn't actually plan on having two. I just wanted one. But I thought it made more sense to only have African-Americans this time around.

Excerpts from the poem:

Together with the best in the world, we too are prone to pettiness, petulance, selfishness and shortsightedness.

But it seems to have happened that we looked at ourselves and said the time had come that we make a super-human effort to be other than human, to respond to the all to create for ourselves a glorious future, to remind ourselves of the Latin saying: Gloria est consequenda - Glory must be sought after!

Today it feels good to be an African.

It feels good that I can stand here as a South African and as a foot soldier of a titanic African army...

//get it here//

To me this speech encomasses everything that makes us African. Everything. From what makes us African to our beautiful vista all over the continent.

It makes me feel proud to be an African.

So yes, today it does feel good to be an African.

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Black

I'm sure you've noticed by now that most of my posts are either for or about black people, being black, and general black behaviour.

This is not because I have some sort of dislike for black people, it's just that there are a very many things about black people that I myself as a black person cannot understand. And I think being an insider in these things makes me more open to general blackness amongst ourselves as a black nation.

I for one, am a very proud black person. I am not in any way ashamed of anything that I do or not do as a black person. What I say, how I say it, what I listen to, how I speak. Those are not the things that define my blackness. My blackness is not defined by any one thing. My accent is sometimes not black. My being able to speak so many different South African languages doesn't confine me to one particular accent. I don't sound Zulu when I speak English but I know I am. I don't have to sound anything to be anything.

Having said that, I have a problem with black people who chose to completely turn their backs on their blackness. Their having short curly hair. Having skin darker than other races. Asses bigger than most. Noses more profound.

All these things are what we as a black people tend to dwell upon - what we don't have; the negative side of being black. But what about all the positives with which we have a natural upper-hand over any other race?

How many people in South Africa can say they can speak over three languages at any given time without flinching? I mean, in one sentence, your average black person can use 3-4 languages easily. And it's second nature to us. Yet you find thousands of black people who chose to stick to one language - English. Why? Same applies to people who chose to stick to just one language even though there's a whole palate of languages to chose from.

As much as I admire those people for not wanting to lose their identity, it wouldn't hurt to try something else.

It seems as time goes on, more and more of the world is becoming one thing. Where you can't tell the difference between a South African and somebody from halfway around the world. All this thanks to the media -TV, magazines, and the internet. We're becoming more and more cross-cultural. Nothing wrong with that except when people lose who they are along with their natural hair.

I don't know what it is about hair that fascinates me... For some reason, hair to me symbolises a lot about a black person. Whether you're male or female, it doesn't matter.

Deciding to have dreads wasn't a decision I took lightly. I had had every other hairstyle you can possibly imagine. My dreads mean something to them, especially having had them for so long, they've kinda grown on me.

Anyway... if you chose not to have real hair on your head, I can learn understand that.

I'm not narrow-minded or anything. I can fully understand your need as a black woman to look like 78 million other black women all over the world and have plastic hair sown into your head and all that.

I totally understand.

It's the pressure. Pressure from everywhere. If you don't look like them, they think something's wrong with you. Shit, you end up feeling like something's wrong with you. So you conform. I understand that.

I'm not saying everyone should walk around with afros and wear stuff they made themselves.

The thing about hair is that, it is one of the most important parts of a person that has to be in order. If that's messed up, you're not really sure what to make of a person. So your spending 12 hours getting fake hair attached to your head is totally forgivable.

Though there are some black people (women especially) who go through all these measures not to 'fit in' but all in an effort to run away from their blackness, they don't wanna be associated with being black.

They swear to never ever date a black man, to only live in the white suburbs, have white friends, speak only English, and totally neglect their blackness.

Why?

I don't understand that.

There's a worldwide craze of white men wanting to be with black women, and some even go as far as marrying them, and you wanna look like what they're running away from? Starving yourself because your butt's too big? Says who? Is it the same TV channel that shows you "beautiful" skinny white women 90% of the time?

There are women all over the world who would sell their houses to have a big round black ass. You have that naturally. You were born with it. It's the one thing you can be proud of having 'inherited' that (if anything) truly makes you black.

I love my blackness. I don't know about you. I love everything about it. Not only is black beautiful. Black is everything to me.


I love that I as a black person, can adapt to any situation you throw me into. I can hang with black people as much as I can hang with any other race. I can go anywhere I want and do anything I want. I love that about my blackness. Any other race would make headline news if they did the same.

I have some friends who would wanna attack me for this. But I really don't care. I am who I am and this is me. If you knew me well enough you'd understand.

What makes you ashamed of being black?

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The (r)evolution of me

I've noticed recently that I'm becoming more and more... I don't know... conscious of my blackness.

This is not a bad thing by any means, I mean, I've been black my whole life. Unlike Michael Jackson. And will continue to be for years to come.

What I'm saying here is that recently, I've noticed how a lot of things I do seem to revolve around blackness. Mainly our past as a black people. Anywhere in the world.

Over the past few weeks I've been working on a couple of designs, and the recurrent theme in these designs, seems to be Blackness. I don't know why. I don't know if I'm making any sense to you reading this, just that I'm trying to figure it out myself.

I designed a piece a few weeks ago. Titled Resist. That's the one with the red background by the way. And I didn't necessarily set out to design a piece like that. It just ended up that way.
I was listening to some music at the time, and a song kept crawling up on my playlist and I created the RESIST with a fist and set it aside while working on the rest of the design. Which was meant to be a grundgy wallpaper. I just ended up adding RESIST into the design, and then came the few words from the song. A house song by Roland Clark. I'm not sure who's on the vocals though...

After that I just added pics of people doing exactly what the song was saying. Resisting. It all came together. I can't explaing it.

I have no reason for feeling the need to tell anyone to "resist", or "run for their lives". Hell, I self don't have any reason to resist.

Second piece:

I designed this last night -04.Feb.2009. Inspired by this one...

I was bored at my place, and decided to work on a design. I didn't have anything in mind at the time, but while browsing around looking for a background pic, I came accross some pics in my library. It was a picture of President Obama, the and the African continent. And at the time, there was a bootleg house mix of my favourite former State President Thabo Mbeki's speech/poem, I Am an African. I decided to put the three together.

As the design went on, I realised the project was just getting bigger as I got more ideas of what to add, but didn't wanna clutter it like the Resist one. So I thought I should rather perfect what I already have and would finish it off today after I got the rest of the pics I wanted to add. (I'll be putting the pic up on here tomorrow.

Ok, enough about the design process, I'm sure you were starting to nod off there a little bit.

What this whole thing is really about is basically that I was never raised as anything but being a black person. I was raised in a family where nobody backed down from anything. From any race at any given time. Though none of my family member give much of a damn about politics...

I don't hate any race for any reason. I was raised to be aware of my blackness. Not aware of it as in, be ashamed or apologetic for it. Just be aware.

I don't come accross as the type of black person who would cause any problems for anyone, and to be honest I really am not like that. And it's for that very reason I don't expect you to treat me any different because of the black person that I am.

Though I claim not to read any books, there are a couple of books I have read; and maybe that's the reason I'm feeling the way I do at this point in my life. I prefer reading about people's lives. And not some guy who is told to climb up a montain for a ring. I don't even watch those type of movies.
I prefer biographies. Especially what is Black literature in the mainstream. Even though most black literiture isn't really what you would call 'mainstream'. I read Alex Hailey's Malcolm X biography twice, I can't tell you why. Simply because I don't know. Read Capitalist Nigger (for some reason I can never remember this guy's name) lost interest in it at some point, but finished it anyway. I'm thinking of readin 3 other books in more or less the same train of thought as the two I mentioned.

Being a child of the web generation. I do most of my reading online. I lose myself on Wikipedia a lot. I just click links from within whatever article I'm reading and I just never know where I'll end up.

End.

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