This post is part of an ongoing #BlackFuturesMonth18 series in February with the Black Lives Matter Network, exclusively shared on Blavity, that aims to explore what the Black feminist future can and should look like for all of us.

Week three of #BlackFuturesMonth18 is here! This week, we are bringing you an incredible global perspective from South African artists Napo Masheane and Zanele Muholi. The piece they have created to imagine a Black Feminist Future is honest and breathtaking. Simply put: We. Are. Coming. For. Everything.

Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and visual activist. She has documented Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people’s lives in South Africa. This #BFM18, she is partnering with Napo Masheane, a South African writer, director, producer, poet and an acclaimed performer on both international and national stages.

Immerse yourself in the video above, then revisit the poem by way of text, below.

COMING FOR EVERYTHING

by Napo Masheane

We have… stumbled in the dark
Across centuries of hate asleep on the floor
Packed tight together beneath a table
To make room for his-story not to scar us

We have…stayed awaken through the darkest times
Bounded by slavery-chains of racism
The colonial drunken-ness of sexism
The wicked spit-laughter of apartheid
We have… hanged our dreams
In windows
That denied US the right to breathe freed-air
But one day…
Our bodies will be seeds, planted inside dreams
To grow not as tears that punch the air
But as memories of flight out of a calabash
As humble as a simple clay
As fierce as the bonfire leaping out of its heart
Echoing
Affirming
Reaching
Reflecting
To free voices in chains
To bleed humanity against fears
To raise fists-full of dust
And to come for everything…
Our lands
Our names
Our tongues
Our songs
So… when you see our voices as bullets born
Cracking through walls of revulsion
Know we have come… to take everything
Coming for everything
For blood-hood as pure as drops of rain
For weaved up magic of wounds of any black child
Our children and their children’s children
Will know… our ghetto-township mountain-voices
Are held up by shoulders of Queens and Kings
Gold grows between our fingers
Our dance moves footprints to the sky

We are… a linage of blood-cliffs that keeps these land/s upbeat
We will not freeze, faint, or freight anymore
We will live, love, fly invisibly
To the pulse of our own power
And come for everything
Our heart skins will sleep but not rest
Our water-work will never shut-up
Kneel-down
Bend-curve
Break-loose
For any system or people who hate BLACK-NESS
Who refuse OUR voices to rise even in death
Our word-claws will split the sky
And make undying trees out of our spirits
Because we have… been crushed by endless sunsets
And her-story like flesh
Has wrapped its self a thousand-million times like a noose
We have had enough
Our fore-fathers have hanged straight off-legacies
That have devoured us only as black-fruits
So we have… come for everything
Are coming for everything
We will not freeze, faint, or freight anymore
We will live, love, fly invisibly
To the pulse of our own power
And come for everything
When you see our voices as bullets born
Cracking through walls of revulsion
Know we have come… to take everything
Coming for everything
For blood-hood as pure as drops of rain
For weaved up magic of wounds of any black child
Because in this life time
My life- Your life- Our lives
BLACK
CHILD
MATTERS
We are… coming for everything

Napo Masheane

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