Dear Ethnicity

 By Ghada Seifeddine

                  

You handcuffed us, led us into the dark alleys of wars and spit into our ears words of segregation and melancholy. You told us that we were destined to live such a life where the cold metal bars break us into pieces of ourselves as we pressed against them, holding our hands out in an attempt to snatch what we could of freedom, including the air encompassing us. We knew damn well that what we hardly inhaled and exhaled behind those poles was too different than that which you owned, and used to breathe and laugh scornfully at our ragged clothes and thin skin. Our brothers curse you each time they are stopped at a foreigner’s airport for false suspicion of being men cloaked with danger. Our daughters are framed inside oppression, unable to move. Our daughters cry blood as they try to move on, but evidently fall, on your red carpet mounted with rose thorn. The unjust give you fabricated fame, crying in the name of the ancestors that fought to make you what you are. In the name of God, you are nothing more than a series of letters tied together in the tongues of those who thought they were doing nations a favor. In the name of God, you, dear ethnicity, do not exist. You do not exist as Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jew, Armenian or whatever names you have given yourself according to colors of horrible inequality, of black, white or yellow. They are names you have given to the foolish. You, cheap ethnicity, do not exist in the name of humanity, in the name of man. Should you determine whether people are to be accepted or not? Should you determine what people our daughters and sons ought to marry?  Or whether our God is the same as theirs, or what you call: the other?

Dear ethnicity: Give us the key of choice, and leave what remains of humanity alone.