“I’m sorry I danced”: For Sonya Massey & the nameless black woman I saw being helplessly shoved by the Police at the Geneva Carnival last Weekend.
Silence makes you complicit, an unconscious accomplice, an ally of a system that alienates truth seekers and whispers in their ears: “you’re alone”. Whatever we seek in life above truths, human compassion, and all other ideals we’re now socialised as adults to scoff at, is the bait that ties us to a system that would one day leave its present prey and turn on us. Your career? Your internship at the UN? Your social reputation? Your assumption that you’re alone in the fight against oppression? It was “Do not hoist the Palestine flag nor speak on Gaza on your socials” if you want to protect your bread and remain at that 5-figure paying International Human Rights Law gig in Geneva. Bloody convenient. You’re Nigerian. Your grandma can’t even spell “Pa-les-tine” anyway.
Then, you’re slowly dehumanised. You’re slowly insensitive to the things that actually matter. Next week, it’s a “sister on the news”. You don’t know her but she’s one of your own. She’s Sonya Massey. Like every other fellow hypocrite, you gauge public response to see: “are big companies jumping on this Sonya trend like they did with George Floyd?” Because, if they are not, then there’s absolutely no reason why your beloved hypocrisy, which serves as the hedge to protect your bread, should dissolve when a sister gets shot inhumanely by the police, unarmed, and in the comfort of her kitchen. “I’m changing the system from within” you say. “I’m biding my time to get on the inside like a black man at a KKK orgy and then I’ll initiate some institutional change”. Of course, I believe you, Barack Obama.
You live in a world where the single biggest vein that supplies oppression is your silence. Your most prominent unanswered classroom questions in your one year masters degree in Geneva, Switzerland is: “Why are permanent members of the Security Council complicit in the violation of human rights in nations of the world where bodies pile upon bodies and mothers have to embrace the severed head of their newborns?” “Why is it a genocide when it is done by a Kabila but not when it is done by a George or a James?” “Why are there exceptions to the crime of unlawful killings under the Geneva Convention only when it is done by an American Soldier but not when it is done by an Afghan?”
Your Professors write so many complicated papers on these simple questions that if those academic papers were printed in hard copy, there would be some real drastic rise in global warming due to the number of trees cut down. These papers, like Usher Raymond, dance around the topic. You wear the same outfit that now looks more like a blanket than a suit to the same UN conferences where funding is more important than substantial change. Where green-washing and “you’re the change the world needs” is what every speaker paraphrases but when someone attempts to actually speak truth to power, suddenly there’s a technical issue with the microphones. You step out of your international human rights law classes to a real migrant crisis just beside the University doors.
You rush to the police station to ensure that the black man manhandled by the police on the suspicion that he’s an illegal migrant is safe. His only crime was looking homeless. Homeless white people are never illegal migrants, they’re only in need of welfare. You email the school about the profiling that exists just outside the university doors but nothing is done. Nothing comes out of your visit to the police station so you give up. You’re a migrant anyway and you need to survive. Your close friend once asked you, she’ll say: “Ayomide, when is it ever right to speak up?”.
Perhaps the best time to speak up is when my blood breaks through the surface of my skin and does the talking. When it is too late. When the bullets turn from the victims I looked the other way from, and they face me. Perhaps, I’ll speak more fluently and more frequently from my cousin’s shirt, with my face printed on it, and beside the words: “Rest in Power”.
The world is changing. The bullets are getting bolder. The volcano is spreading but nobody’s running. I was at the Geneva Carnival last Saturday and a dark-skinned black woman was shoved and attacked by the police. But everyone was busy. Busy dancing in silence. Nobody wanted to stand out. Speaking up is standing out. I betrayed her because I stood still for minutes, animated, helpless, and angry at how the police continued to harass her after they had arrested someone I assume was her partner for being a nuisance at the carnival. She would have been listened to, and respected if she was light skinned or white. I betrayed her because I soon went back to dancing. I chose to dance the void away from my heart. I chose to dance like an unhappy slave with two choices: Step up, get thrown in a van, lose your student permit and scholarship or simply dance like everybody else and wait patiently for your turn to be a victim.
My turn had happened exactly one week before: An ex-militia and a female accomplice with too much makeup profiled me as a drug dealer and called the police on me while I was doing my student job in Montreux, Switzerland. They saw me actively on duty, doing my job and saying next to nothing. But people of my skin colour sell drugs in the movies so I can as well be a multi-tasking Pablo Escobar who sells dope and does a 9–5 simultaneously. The police came and won’t shake my hands, won’t treat me like I was human. I made recordings. The two neighbourhood crime busters gave orders; the police followed through and took them out on me. If I wasn’t a well spoken man or a trained lawyer, I’d have lost it all. Although, I technically lost my job. The time wasted in the whole situation meant that I had lesser output and also wasn’t recommended for more gigs.
It might be my turn again sometime this week. I might not live to write a funny sequel. Or perhaps, might not be present at the release of my first album that documents all the struggles I’ve faced as a human rights lawyer, a rapper, and an African immigrant who might be at the right place at the wrong time. Because every time is the wrong time. At work, a Geneva carnival, or the comfort of Sonya Massey’s home.
Whenever you listen to the album, whether or not I’m present with you, do not miss the point. That we live in a world where the silent majority have been separated because they’ve refused to speak up. I cannot tell that you have a virus similar to mine if you don’t declare it. This virus is human compassion and it should never come before colour, class, belief and politics. But you hide it and you don’t speak up because either like me, you want to protect your bread. Or like him, you don’t want to stand out and be uncool so you only wait until it’s George Floyd and your oppressors through algorithms, or your influencers through social media aesthetics, give you the green light to protest. Or perhaps, you want to change things from the inside. So, like Barack Obama or Kamala Harris, you potentially become the leader of the free world but you stand for nothing.
We’re all victims waiting for our turn. Love does not discriminate, and neither does hate. Eventually. Of what use is life if it’s an open air prison? The few have craftily alienated the most and we’re all silenced by the blackmail of losing our jobs, our cool and everything that is imaginary. I have nothing to lose except my early death and living like a slave before such pain.
But who would bell the cat?
PS:
I’ve set up a moral GoFundMe, and all I’m asking from you is that we respect women. All the women. Especially women of colour. I’m not asking from a place of perfection. I’m asking from a place of need. They deserve better from a world that overlooks them twice: on the basis of gender + race.
Rest in peace, Sonya Massey. I feel like a coward for dancing at the carnival after what I witnessed. Perhaps, if in that crowd of approximately 25,000 Geneva party-goers, I had stood up for that helpless lady, it would have somehow stopped the killer cop from shooting you in the face faraway in the US. I pray the ancestors ease your pain. If I died before my time, I’ll be devastated too. For my unfulfilled dreams. For my kids who’ll have to survive the hardship of life without a father. For my old grandma who I didn’t get the chance to teach the spelling of “Palestine” before my passing.
I hope we all stop looking the other way.
