This is a poem I wrote on my first few days of travelling in Germany and Poland. The poem was inspired by series of events in which I found myself, as a black traveller, triggered by the essentialist views of myself and Africans in general, triggered by ignorance, triggered by the dehumanising stares, triggered by the deliberate erasure of black pain in the memorialisation  of the atrocities committed by Europeans. And oddly enough,  I was triggered by South Africa, a place I had left, but whose traumas followed me. With all this, I had to learn to breathe, to find respite within myself, when everything around me was alienating.

Escape to Yourself

Distance is a form of reprieve

Distance is self-care

People can be triggers

Spaces can be triggers

Reminders of pains forgotten

Pains suppressed

Pain ignored

To be triggered in a place without respite

Means you must learn to escape to yourself

To become a home for yourself

safe-nurturing-peaceful