On a sweltering Tuesday, me and Dylan pack into my beat up minivan and bump our stereo damn near to its limits, pushing out Lupe Fiasco and Nas records on inadvertent caucasian ears. The volume knob spins halfway backwards like our necks do on a double take when we see a cop car cuz police here don’t hide no prejudice. We go back and forth rapping along to Illmatic; Nas told us that the world was ours even if the white boys at school told me to go back to my country for saying I hate the winters here. We breakdance after school and play basketball in our off time. These are coloured boy territories, and here live all our homies; varying shades of rich mocha under Ecko and Fubu adorned battle armor. Every afternoon is a reminder that you gotta let your hair hang down in your face cuz a bandana ain’t gonna do nothin’ good for your image son. Dusk-caked asphalt drinks in the vibrations of our homebound running footsteps as symphonies of coloured mothers fill evening air with the familiar sound of hell no you ain’t gonna sleep over at nobody else’s house tonight. You know you’re close to home when you’re greeted by the bold smell of curry and garlic, filling up the block with a confidence you haven’t yet found for yourself; too many memories of plugged noses, cocktails of laughter and disgust as I open my lunchbox. Listen, I know all too well that people here in this suburb see my skin before they see I’m human, shit I remember that every time I gotta shave my beard before I cross the border or pops warns me about wearing a kufi to school because yes son it’s cool that Muhammad Ali wears one but you’re not Muhammad Ali and we gotta be extra careful ’round these parts. I think about the men who snatched the hijab off of my friends head, how they built up temples to conformity on the land they broke her down on, how god once gathered enough stardust to fill her form and how she is now collapsing into herself like a dying sun. Her coloured boy clan would gather around a lit backwoods like a campfire, telling stories of places where melanin wasn’t as potent a currency as here; countries where you couldn’t use it to buy clutched purses in the elevator like in this one. The coloured boy territories don’t have no border, they lie just beneath the ground of our neighbourhoods like a trench so you gotta stand twice as tall just to see your peers eye-to-eye. Suburban white folks like to say that they don’t see colour as their gaze meets the brown pine-box home of a dead coloured boy while my momma still sees coloured ghosts and you ask her why she can’t smile for you. She puts her head on my shoulder. Her tears run down my arm like a narrow stream and I’m grateful I can tell her that I’m still here.
I’m still here.
