Interlude

Conflict is an act of intimacy

It brings people together.

Conflict are the loving bonds that didn’t get to meet.

Conflict can be generative.

Conflict can also be underpinned by the kyriarchy.

 

Verse One

When Black people espouse radical love for one another this becomes a threat to white supremacy, capitalism and cis-hetero patriarchy, hence forth known as the kyriarchy. The kyriarchy teaches us that domination is love and without it we are vulnerable, bell hooks writes, “… it is impossible to truly love someone and dominate them. Love and domination are antithetical.”[1] Love is not domination and there lies the problem, domination manipulates love with abuse.

The kyriarchy presents scarcity as our only option to exchange love, care and affection. These attributes become commoditises that are rationalised and means tested, “how deserving are you of my love?” This is romantic capitalism. This is no way to love. More pertinently, this not how I want to love.

Bridge

Trespassers were permitted  into the covenant of our friendship.

Chorus

I often examine our  conflict like a dig in an archaeological site.

Verse Two

I have been involved in numerous  conflict with cisgendered-heterosexual (?) Black men where we playhouse that replicates ”…a private gender war”’[2]  where victory is scored upon who exerts the most power and who defeated whom.  “Patriarchal thinking certainly does not encourage men to be self-loving. Instead it encourages them to believe that power is more important than love, particularly power to dominate and control others,”[3]Conflicts like these arise because we lack the frameworks to navigate our relationships beyond the confounds of domination. We have not yet dreamed the right language or conjured the best tools to understand how domination often favours one body over the other.

Bridge

You discarded me how my mother discards fish carcass when making soup.

Chorus

“Let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go,”[4]

Verse Three

Our hurt can act as a catalyst to understand who we once were and who we can reimagine ourselves to be.

The kyriarchy also teaches us to hold on to our hurt selves instead of acting generously with our emotionality. Our hurt can be our bigger defenders of the past when reconciliation feels so uncertain.

We need to remember that, “… white supremacist thinking is always challenged by loving unions between black males and female sheds light on why there has been so many obstacles placed in the path of such unions.”[5]

Bridge

Hurt feelings fictionalises the truth. Memories are unreliable scripts.

Chorus

Dwelling in our hurt is to swim in polluted waters.

Verse Four

Reconciliation is hard work.  It forces you to abandoned the familiarity of your hurt and to enter new and unchartered territories. We are forced to learn new scripts when the next line is yet to be written. Reconciliation is a speculative practice. The time needed to process our feelings often sit in contradiction to the logics of acceleration and linearity. Reconciliation challenges romantic capitalism.

Bridge

Reconciliation is inexpiable.

  

Chorus

Can we trust our hands to heal each other’s pain?

Verse Five

Conflict changes us. We are different versions of ourselves now and reconciliation has the power to transform us for the better.  I am learning how to breathe better by exhaling the toxicity of the kyriachy and inhaling life affirming and generative behaviours. I breathe new life into our relationship.

Reconciliation is an alchemic processes. It is like a pendulum, requiring the dynamism of two interdependent forces, creating a rhythmic and cyclical exchanges on equal grounds.

Outerlude

“We need to create the cultural space to talk about love relationships we have that are fulfilling and satisfying. In some cases, we must see the sacrifice of privacy as part of the anti-racist, anti-sexist resistance  struggle wherein critical vigilance requires sharing our positive and negative stories.”[6]

---

[1]  bell hooks,Salvation, 2001 ,p.167

[2] bell hooks, All about love, 2000 p.149

[3] Bell hooks, Salvation, 2001 ,p.145

[4] Erykah Badu “ Bag Lady,” 2000

[5] Bell hooks, Salvation, 2001 ,p.156

[6] bell hooks, Salvation, 2001 ,p.187