Epigenetics

"Epigenetics literally means "above" or "on top of" genetics. It refers to external modifications to DNA that turn genes "on" or "off." These modifications do not change the DNA sequence, but instead, they affect how cells "read" genes."

My pain has become my identity. There is this urge to write, to write about so many things that I am grasping with in my life. But the problem is I cannot seem to figure out which layer of my life to focus on in this piece. Which gene to read, which gene for the people to read. The creation of a black identity I exist in, that still is in a complex battle with the colourism ideology colonization created, yet still I stand firm with my symbolic freedom that I have chosen wisely to adapt to. Existing Black. Colourism: The Lighter Spectrum. Symbolic Freedom. Choose Wisely.

Titles that carry weight on me as I desire to motivate through expression, until I came across Epigenetics that allows me to compile my feeling and experiences of being black in a white world, being brown in a black world, establishing curls of no hair don't care that leaves me to feel free and still being able to look at everything and choose exactly what I want and who I want to be. I never needed to say I was black or remind myself of my race or to be aware of my behavior because of the colour of my skin. I had no need to identify as black, even though I knew I was. But the default was that everyone around me was basically just like me. I was never living in a world where I was the minority and had to find ways of expressing that. I was always comfortable in my own skin. I still am! Fresh from the Caribbean, mixed up with slaves and indentureship labourers and plantation owners running through my blood. I am Unapologetically Black. (No matter my gene pool, it reads Black!)

I am Unapologetically Black. He messaged me in shock that I could make this recogniztion. A connection of skin we all have once we step out of our 'tin can' of similarities we live most our lives in. I was too light to express my blackness. This is the ignorance society expects us to uphold! But I understood where he was coming from. My society treated me as if I was just a little more, more than everyone else that was soaked in fine sweet chocolate, dripping full melanin of beauty. I had always wished I was a bit darker.

But I was nothing more in this world I came to experience. I was equal, equal with my own race. As it should be, as I had always wanted it to be. They saw me as black, a sort of cappuccino coffee. Still coffee tho. But then you came, just to set the precedence of what I was going back to. We sat around the table, and I thought you genuinely liked me for me (as what I think of most people, especially men, the ones in my country of course). But it started to feel like it was getting out of hand, treating me better, calling me beautiful, compliments after compliments, and your acknowledgement that I could not, should not take charge. Black women take charge! I was black, but a toned down version that you could expect to be subtle but still assertive but just the right amount. The right amount of black. I stand offended. I sit, cross my legs and wear my pink offensively.

Light Black. But Dark Black Gene was on? Such ignorance again. As we still create criteria and this spectrum of black for our own people. Tearing our own people down. Putting our own people against each other. Ideologies of slavery still work in our minds unfortunately. Emancipate to symbolic freedom. But yet still you ask if I was going through a breakdown, a cry for help, young adult crisis or just following the hashtag of letting that afro come alive and embracing my roots, "Fi Di Culture".

I know my culture. I'm curious if you know this culture though. I do things for myself. I already know who I am. But do you know who you are? I walk around with straighten hair, flowing to my back, then cut it into a bang, then add blonde highlights, not because I want to depict a European ideal of woman. Jokes are at you when you come to the realization that I simply just liked the hairstyle. I am proud in my blackness, straight hair or fro. Just like how now that I have strengthen up and allowed scissors to take it all off, and restart a new. It does not mean I am one more addition to a black hair movement.

I have been telling you my hair was 'black' (for all those who thought I was born with some mixed race hair type, the story gets funnier for you). I am simply letting go of the old, the pain in my identity and starting a movement of symbolic freedom, freedom in the new. I don't need you to understand. I need you question your own identity. Why do you do what you do? For you? Or for them? I am filled with genes. You are filled with genes. Which one do you want read, right now, at this moment? It's your choice. Your life. Live it! Allow people to live in their own skin, make their own realities. Your judgement is only adhering to what these colonizers had set out for in the first place. Divide and conquer! If you want them to have your mind, that is simply your own conviction.

My mind is free, Free as to be, To be who I want to be. Be just about anything, Anything I want to be. Is your mind free? Which gene of yours is to be read?