This spoken word piece contends with the concept of the Colonizer’s Language and how we use language to describe and identify ourselves. This piece unpacks some of the history of the term “nigger” and how it impacts us in the present.
Tag Archives: Nigger
NIGGER by Renaissance the Poet
Nigger.
Negroe.
Nigga.
Black.
African-American.
Criminal.
The colonizer language that we have imbibed
as if it was a life sustaining nectar
Afraid to, wean ourselves from the poison that is killing us
because we have been fooled and are fooling ourselves into believing that it’s beneficial,
nutritional, contra-positional, infinitesimal in the scope of things
The Pros outweigh the Cons…?
con-artists in sheep’s clothing, parading the homunculus pulling the strings in our brains, weighting our steps with second guesses, misperceptions, allegories, and ill-conceptions, but in vain…
Do we strive for something better, clueless to the range of how damaging the language we use to represent ourselves is to our dignity, self-identity, intrinsically speaking, spiritually seeking, deranged! conceptions of how we came to being and who we hope to be, to become, to arrive
Nigger, as if we arrived, materialized as slaves on plantations contrived for labor
and never existed prior to raising cotton for stock profits in American pockets,
droppin to the ground exhausted, because the master forgot to water the human stock bought on the auction block for cents on the dollar
And this, is what we holler as a greeting!
excuse me…
“NIGGA,”
Cuz, I’d rather be a N I G G A, so I can get drunk and smoke weed all day
It is a natural response to an oppressive situation to assimilate and reclaim the terms of a language used to discriminate and disseminate hatred,
like the word “Gay,” was once used to describe happiness or joy in a situation, but then it
became a derogatory term laced with inflammation and incitation to repressive anger
displacing concentration on the facts at hand
that a label to the soul burns worse than skin to a brand
But the word only had power insofar as those convicted, insisted, complicit in its imposition
buckling under the weight’s transmission, did it have capacity to defame, but
Reclaiming the term robbed it of its power and now it is adorned with praise
Nigger, unfortunately is not a term that can be rephrased in such a way as to liberate its user
To reclaim is to own, and to own a nigger is to be a nigger’s master, a colonizer, and the oppressor
so,
to call oneself a nigger is to be one’s own oppressor, but moreover an overseer whipping our own asses for a master who profits from our disasters
Because a nigger is lazy, licentious, sexually promiscuous, unsound in mind and body, pretentious, unscrupulous, vile, criminally minded, guided by the basest of natures, wild, genetically inferior, paternalism required:
to own the term nigger is to ingest this image, latch it to our sinews, hang it from our bones, as our ancestors hung lynched from branches, and pass it to our lineage because the ideology is a spiritual pestilence to the masses
The antithesis of white, the foil despite the toil of life the cradle of which it all ignites: Black
More Eurocentrically politically correct; African American
But still dislocates us from our historical heritage and infests with hatred for ourselves
As we imbibe the colonizer’s language as our own
But in truth it has no meaning or value to us
Words are just symbols and signs; semiology
vestigial coverings that have nothing to do with our actual identities and reality
The Word “Nigga”
These Rhymes
Carry with them
Explosive obnoxious notions
And inoculations to erosive emotions
So pay attention with your best ear
Because this world is vicious
With its conspicuous ill-nutritious
& Victim-us mentalities
Dishing us pity me card sicknesses to our realities
Me
I’m just way too wild to be a Sisyphus
Held down by this society
The plot is thus…
I am a BLACK MAN
With the will to be free
Like Galileo
My mind will expand the universe
But I am just a tree from a seed
You see
The beach is but a part of the sea
It’s just harder to see
That using a stereotype to my benefit will only feed the greed
And even though Sun Zu marked that as a definite factor to a wars victory
Making my enemy think I am weak, when I am not
But that’s not the case in this plot
It’s a vasectomy
& I’ve been stripped of my pride
Like, inject the beat
Intravenously
That bullshit would have me stripped of my dignity
Crawling on all fours
Begging with pleas
The MAN
Has been disrespecting me
And however,
Incorrectly put it may be
He has miss-took me for a lesser being
The knife of his oppression- held half in my back
Held, half in your back
And he would have had more,
But the people who identified as Black
Took a stance and pushed him back
The script was flipped
But somehow we’re still off track
And while these “Uncle Tom Rappers”
Continue to profit on the exploitation
Of our modest situation
Doing the MAN’S work for him
Spewing his poisonous dominion
Into the minds of our behavior negative
Perpetuating the hate within our children
So many of us LOVE the rap
The Cadence and the flavor of
The heart of the speech in our people
Clearly there here
Where are you, my people? (repeat until they answer)
Yeah
We’re here
Standing
In defiance to the oppression we hear
Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
They bring our culture back
Better yet they give us a scope of culture to aspire to
Our mentors
Who remind us of what it means to be black
And furthermore what it means to be a people
And why the word nigger
YES
& the word Nigga
Will forever and always
Be whack.