We heart Suheir Hammad and this poem #fiercemuslimah Not Your Erotic, Not Your Exotic #outburst
Don’t wanna be you’re exotic like some dark, fragile colorful bird, imprisoned, caged in a land foreign to the stretch of her wings
Don’t wanna be your exotic
Women everywhere
Look
Just
Like
Me
Some taller, darker, nicer then me but like me just the same.
Women everywhere carry my nose on their faces, my name on their sprits
Don’t seduce yourself with my otherness!
My hair wasn’t put on top my head to incite you into some mysterious black voodoo, the beat of my lashes against each other aint some dark desert beat,
It’s just a blink,
Get over it!
Don’t build around me your fetish, fantasy, your lustful profanities to cage me in, clip my wings.
Don’t wanna be your exotic
your loving of my beauty ain’t more than
funky fornication plain pink perversion
in fact nasty necrophilia
cause my beauty is dead to you
I am dead to you.
Not your
harem girl geisha doll banana picker
pom pom girl pum pum shorts coffee maker
town whore belly dancer private dancer
la malinche venus hottentot laundry girl
your immaculate vessel emasculating princess
don’t wanna be
Not your erotic
Not you’re exotic
Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American poet, author and political activist who was born on October 1973 in Amman, Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents and immigrated with her family to Brooklyn, New York City when she was five years old. Her parents later moved to Staten Island.
