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