Your
eyes, they curve around me.
I watch you try so hard to find your way past me.
Your sight is like rushing waters,
Moving beside me, behind me, pushing over me,
Indirectly consuming me.
They say the path of least resistance makes rivers and men crooked.
I
am here. I have resisted. I am resisting.
I did not make you crooked.
What is it about you structural giants?
What
is it about your pockmarked protection?
What is it about your false perceptions?
What beliefs have you bound to my body?
What pathologies have you painted the pigment of my skin?
What bad medicine did your forefathers use to make me invisible?
You
don't want to see me.
What's worse is that you have the choice whether or not you see me.
I become a casualty of your blindness,
Subjected to your one-sided absent-mindedness because you've been given a
privilege called selective vision.
You weed out the colours that don't match your peripheral preference, and,
I am not part of your rainbow, your twisted-light promises for better
tomorrows.
My
face can be plastered on posters telling you what I was last seen wearing,
With fitted descriptions, a location to give you bearings, and,
You can choose to look past me, and go on, uncaring.
My
raven's hair and heritage does not sound alarm bells.
It does not stir you to look for me.
Because you have never really seen me.
You've seen me all right. You've seen me on street corners,
Lips red like sirens, dreams broken like sidewalk syringes,
Neurotic like Catholic church windows,
Submissive and silent.
You
see me in welfare lines, hands open wide, waiting for what's coming to me,
Drinking death-causing concoctions behind dumpsters.
You see me as a standing statistic, a living, breathing, heaving stereotype.
You see me in the bar, another joke for you and your friends.
Just another squaw, but if you want to get laid, I'm your Pocahontas.
You see me as dispensable.
This is how you see me.
Undeserving
of stars,
Deserving of starlight rides and pleasurable times.
Funny how you fail to see me when I'm face up,
Lips puffed, body bloated and battered, bruised beyond recognition.
Still not gaining your attention.
Come on, baby, and dance me
outside.
I think she was just looking for a good time.
I heard she lived a risky lifestyle.
It was inevitable, some say.
This is how you see me.
Never
somebody's daughter, never somebody's mother, never an aunt, a sister, a
friend.
Never am I seen as strong, as proud, as resilient.
Never as I am.
Finally,
given the stars,
Laid to gaze at them on back roads and in ditches,
On ghostly stretches of forgotten pebbled pathways.
Your vastness swallows me.
Do I fall in your line of sight? Do you see me now?
Because I get this feeling that your eyes, they curve around me.
by Helen Knott
Recited by Connie Greyeyes at a meeting
dedicated to the families of victims held by the Special Committee
on Violence Against Indigenous Women, 9 December 2013
|