Zarah Yakubu (They/She) is a Trawlwoolway/Palawa and Mwaghavul (Nigerian) writer from Trouwunna/Lutruwita/Tasmania currently living and working on Wurundjeri country in Narrm. They wrote this poem based on a series of microaggressions they experienced during their first time living in metropolitan area. They are currently undertaking a BA in Creative Writing at RMIT.
Cracks in the Proverb
Dimly lit residential, picket fences and brick
Those kinds of margins, good and hungered for
Eroded concrete, bearing tree root veins like a body scaffolded by colonialism
The disinherited animist standing on it all is an unseemly patchwork of stray
Shell, something-not-in-the-archive-that-they-kept-from-Robinson skin and
African cubism coloured in with coca cola fizz
Bore from one solid generation of fresh wealth, almost private school wealth but not quite, white
picket fence though and family dog type nuclear for sure.
Being Black at night in an upper-middle/upper-class Melbourne neighbourhood
Is good for as long as its just stars and wind and darkness
What occupies Narrm is septic with bustle and clean suited white supremacy.
A jogging white woman enters the scene in one beat and cuts away in another
This patchwork girl reduced to a deterring Black blotch where Blackness doesn’t belong
Blackness is taking, thieving and loud
As a car locking when she walks behind it
As normal as it is, her eyebrows draw like guns at dawn
Sirens sing, half-lullaby, half-shrill in the tone of her mother all along her veins
Thick lip pursed to nostrils, Black features conference
She wants to fight something but there’s nothing there
Her fermented temper is tipped out of its jar
On to her tongue
Nothing washes the taste out