For the children
I am Bra Mzi Mahola
I am Nana Walter Chakela
I am Yehuda Amichai
I am Refaat Alareer
I am Ian Fleming
I am Patricia Highsmith
I am Brad Pitt
I am Coco Chanel
I am Rilke
I am Nietzsche
I am Freud
I am Jung
I am Lou Andreas Salome
I am Malcolm X
I am George Botha
I am Steve Biko
I am Bessie Head
I am Ingrid Jonker
I am Sylvia Plath,
Anne Sexton
I am America,
I am Israel,
I am Palestine,
China, Russia, Australia,
Derek Walcott’s West India
I am Mufti Menk
I am Azania
I am everywhere
I am a child of God,
standing with a
a ripple of hope in my hands
I am freedom.
This eye opening poem speaks to the universality of all of humanity. A declarative assertion and confrontation interconnectedness, the lines “I am Palestine/I am Malcom X/I am America” had originality in its delivery and creative ideology. Makes one wonder what could have possibly inspired this haunting prose? Could it be all that is going on in the world? With raging wars, political hegemony and divisions, social injustices and annihilations of vast groups of people in war torn countries and all for what?! This poem reminds us that WE ARE ONE ANOTHER! “I am everywhere/I am a child of God,/standing with a ripple of hope in my hands/I am freedom.” Reading the poem itself is “freeing”, it branches out like a universal rope tethering us all to another and like dominoes, if one of us goes down, eventually we will ALL go down…Why can’t we all treat others like we’d like to be treated? In the words of Christopher Reeve, (a.k.a. Superman) who said that he wishes people could “…see the Earth the way that I see it…” from space, as a “small, fragile place” where “we’re all neighbors” and should therefore “take better care of each other”–Jacques Fleury, Author of “You Are Enough: The Journey to Accepting Your Authentic Self”