For this class I’m taking on Africa, we’re supposed to read news articles about the continent each day before class. I was just on CNN and BCC. & I tell you, how in the hell can I complain? Prior to writing this I was just sitting here thinking,.. contemplating, and reflecting over my laziness. I’m almost disgusted with myself. I used to be discontented with my skinniness. Then I see pictures of these children from the Congo. Their limbs look like the frailties of famishment and represent the consequences of a failed political system’s personified ego.
A mother clutches her child for the sake of an internal instinct. Desperately she is determined to preserve one life. Tears pour down the despairing soul’s cheek, as she laments to the heavens. The look on her face says it all, I didn’t need any caption. There is pain in her face, found most obviously in the cheeks, and made more obvious by the revealed teeth. It looks as if she were crying out to the heavens, like she were reprimanding an unfair God who had left her with this dark brown carcass of a morbid desolation. What anguish! What grief! Oh, the desolation they must feel, like the world has turned against them. How can it feel, for we never know the experience? We auspicious Americans will never know the reality of my motherland’s pangs. For we find ourselves blessed to awake and congregate in the sanctuary of our classrooms every morning! The plights of these peoples are imponderables to us. We can only attempt to empathize and then sympathize with these alien others.
“"We have lost four children in four months to fever," says Therese Tchausi (seated).”
A mother clutches her child for the sake of an internal instinct. Desperately she is determined to preserve one life. Tears pour down the despairing soul’s cheek, as she laments to the heavens. The look on her face says it all, I didn’t need any caption. There is pain in her face, found most obviously in the cheeks, and made more obvious by the revealed teeth. It looks as if she were crying out to the heavens, like she were reprimanding an unfair God who had left her with this dark brown carcass of a morbid desolation. What anguish! What grief! Oh, the desolation they must feel, like the world has turned against them. How can it feel, for we never know the experience? We auspicious Americans will never know the reality of my motherland’s pangs. For we find ourselves blessed to awake and congregate in the sanctuary of our classrooms every morning! The plights of these peoples are imponderables to us. We can only attempt to empathize and then sympathize with these alien others.
“"We have lost four children in four months to fever," says Therese Tchausi (seated).”
I find my heart stricken with a bleak compassion. Questions swirl around in my moral mentality. Those like: ‘Why is there evil in the world? Or how? Can there really be some God to allow such things to happen? Why would this good God allow it? Why do people do this to each other? Why don’t they help? Why am I not helping?’
Then I compulsively force myself to instill in my conscience a noticeable serving of guilt, along with much more grief, and only a little depression. There world is a cold place, and love seems at times to be only a demonic apparition of a rational animal’s confusion! Why do we allow it? But then again why should I even care?.... No! I reject the nihilism! For I do care, and its more like I can’t help it! My inherent sympathizing just is what it is. I read about black people dying and burying their children. And I understand that the sands of Kenya and Namibia are red because of the blood the lands have absorbed! I perceive an African graveyard that lacerates my spirit. My soul is made sick by its superfluous mortality.
Then I compulsively force myself to instill in my conscience a noticeable serving of guilt, along with much more grief, and only a little depression. There world is a cold place, and love seems at times to be only a demonic apparition of a rational animal’s confusion! Why do we allow it? But then again why should I even care?.... No! I reject the nihilism! For I do care, and its more like I can’t help it! My inherent sympathizing just is what it is. I read about black people dying and burying their children. And I understand that the sands of Kenya and Namibia are red because of the blood the lands have absorbed! I perceive an African graveyard that lacerates my spirit. My soul is made sick by its superfluous mortality.
1 comment:
i have to say this literally gave me chills as i read it. beautifully written...
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