A BLACK GIRL'S GUIDE TO SELF LOVE: A SLAM POEM

Shot With: iPhone X
Edited With: iMovie

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Song:
Best Part X Daniel Ceasar

Script to Poem:

Part 1: Getting started
2008
Black girl meets black father for the first time in a dimly lit dixie kitchen within the back corners of a hyde park complex
She plays with her food as he plays with thoughts of possible absences
She thinks to have been searching for his daughter for eight years he is quite composed
He asks what she’s into, she says painting but thinks to herself consistency
Black girl has never truly experienced consistency
Urban dictionary what is consistency?
The answer comes in 2014
Black girl visits hyde park after being uprooted to lifeless suburb
Dixie kitchen is no longer present and neither is her father
All that’s left is a gentrified area
Black girl’s body speaks gentrified area
Her ain’ts become are nots
And kiddie kuts braids become 4c boycotts
She becomes a tourist in her own city
Told she is not from chicago
Yet she could never possibly claim the suburbs
Only a black girl could exist everywhere but nowhere simultaneously
Part 2: Affirmations
Black girl’s past lover haunts her in her sleep
Sending chills down her spine at night leaving her wondering what she could’ve done to make him stay though he knew of his departure before he even knew of her name
Just like black girl’s black father whom she met for the first time in a dimly lit dixie kitchen within the back corners of a hyde park complex
Black girl determines that if she could possibly bend the rules of time
And live in her own created context
She’d understand that her existence is not validated by anyone else’s presence
Yet she occupies her time talking to teenage boys
That never meet standards or exceed expectations
Black girl’s skin has a weird habit of breaking out during these periods
Falling asleep in a day’s makeup with each facetime call
Trying to fabricate a more favorable facade
She’s never quite adjusted to the feeling of being alone
Black girl determines that if she could possibly bend the rules of time
And live in her own created context
She’d understand that desirability does not equate to value
Yet she does not otherwise know how to exist without the approval of others
Black boy fails in his romantic advances and
Black girl says sorry
White boy cuts in line though black girl was there first and
Black girl says sorry
White girl pushes past on crowded city sidewalk and
And black girl says sorry
Black girl determines that if she could possibly bend the rules of time
And live in her own created context
She’d understand that it is impossible to live unapologetically if she keeps apologizing.
Yet her mother’s new husband shoves black boy struggle down her throat
Clogs her arteries with school to prison pipeline dissertations
And blocks her airways with all that black men experience which black women could never
Decides her oppression is non-existent
Black girl feels non-existent
And determines that if she could possibly bend the rules of time
And live in her own created context
She’d understand that black males still have male privilege
That mass incarceration is not the only way to keep the black body in bondage
And yet she still questions her being
Takes up all her energy and exhausts herself
Because existing as a black girl is making a black girl’s guide to self love with no definite success
Realizing self love is not all that it is made up to be
It might be face masks and bath bombs for the white girls she has to share space with on a daily basis
But for black girl it is something much more abstract
Something less concrete
Something that takes more than three minutes to ascertain

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