Aloha from the US-occupied nation of Hawaii. I think language is important, not only as a writer but also as a person who strives to have a grip on reality. So, like I think it's important to call Africans on the continent or in the diaspora Africans, and First Nations peoples First Nations peoples, it is important to tell you where I actually live, so as to give you some notion what we are dealing with - well, what Hawaiians are dealing with in their own occupied land, and what I deal with as someone who witnesses this atrocity.
Hawaii is beautiful. I see the stars every night outside the window of my cabin. This beauty, however, since this is an occupied colony, is marketed to tourists and to mainlanders with access to capital. Tourists dollars and mainland capital is used to build and run resorts and buy cheap land on which housing is constructed. Fuck the Hawaiians, who have no access to capital and are losing access to their land.
Unlike Africans in the diaspora, Hawaiians are newly colonized and newly polluted with Anglo-Saxon obsessions and their gutter monotheistic religion. This means two things: to the careful eye, the spirit of Margaret Mead can still see the beauty of the Hawaiian body and its connection to the earth and its energies. Though still barely visible, this beauty has been whipped out of Africans for a good 500 years, then reinforced by bad Negro parents emulating white plantation politics.
But this also means the Anglo-Saxon obsession with shame culture is rotting the spirit of that connection Hawaiians had with the earth. So of course their incidence of illness should increase. Of course their social connections should be undermined.
It sucks the spirit to try to thrive in such a place, which is like a person, who is unable to embrace you because it is losing the capacity to embrace itself.
My limited experience with travel and life have already taught me those places with the least and newest "contact" with Europe, its Anglo-Saxon peasant trash, and its maniacal ways are actually populated with the most beautiful and well-developed people.
So as Hawaii corrodes under US occupation, like the little bird I am I look for a new perch to land on. A few well-meaning, clueless people have suggested going back to California, or Missouri, even Florida. This only depressed me. For one, I feel no desire to go anywhere on the mainland.
But also, the only places afforded me on that almost thoroughly corrupted landscape are bantustans where I am really meant to struggle and die.
According to Wikipedia, a bantustan is "a territory set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia), as part of the policy of apartheid." In a broader sense, the term has come to refer to any such enclave set aside by the state for its least desired populations.
So, for example, the term bantustan was used in reference to the ridiculous partition of Palestinians during the Clinton "peace" negotiations between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli white-settler government. The Palestinian territory, according to the maps which were scarcely printed in the US press, showed the ethnic Palestine as several non-contiguous spaces spread across Israel.
Bantustans are not intended to be self-sufficient entities but what we in North America might refer to an "Indian Reservations."
Japanese POW's might reference internment camps.
Black ghettos are bantustans. The fact they are Black African and poor ghettos is by design. Most Africans understand this; but not enough since we are still handing our children over to the plantation and wondering why we too are getting sicker. Almost no white person will accept the fact of the bantustan, since this white settlement is the greatest thing to befall the planet since Jesus personified himself in a Roman cleric.
But like Ted Kaczinski I no longer care about the views of white people and the world ... until it impedes upon mine: that is when the reclusive Unibomber emerged as superhero.
I have my eye on Africa, but I also know that if I want my spirit to breathe it will only do so in a place least touched by the hand of Jesus and the progeny of his disciples. Life will not come from acquiring more skills or pursuing more degrees: that is a fool's game and enough fools are playing it.
