Bearing Witness
A year ago, we were preparing the song “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired” for the unbearable funeral of Karen Musumadi. She was twenty-nine. The family, community and systems that should have protected her hung their heads like weeping willows. At the service, only a former high school English teacher reached past the easy praise of beauty and party charm to speak of Karen’s full personhood.
Far from the place she was born, she had made a Home wherever her feet touched ground.
A few weeks after Karen’s funeral, I sat in a law office boardroom while my abuser (fresh and tanned from another vacation) sat back. I pleaded for the right to keep my only Home. I begged not to be stripped of resources I had earned, resources I needed to treat fibroids that now had me bleeding for months at a time. I was hungry, waiting for my Food Bank hamper (an incredible blessing and privilege). In that boardroom, a man in an expensive suit - someone who has never been Black, never experienced the drains of blood from a uterus he doesn’t have - told me he once worked at a mill to pay for school… as if survival were only a question of more effort. Meanwhile, my abuser continues to turn medical knowledge into ammunition against my survival.
My ribs showed in the evidence they waved aside, these agents of the law choosing to reminisce about their favourite Honda Civic instead of addressing the sixteen-to-one wealth gap shielding my abuser. My stomach growled as I waited for a break to change a super-ultra tampon already leaking, protesting my choice to purchase tampons over food.
A year later, I envision Karen Musumadi in an expansive realm of Freedom, the heaviness of her chest left behind with the soil. A year later, I carry her in a chorus of ancestors saying the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.:
“If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by any means, you must keep moving.”
Practically Speaking, Support.
Thank you for your practical and meaningful support toward my Freedom thus far.
With one week before my court date, please consider extending your support by:
🙏🏾 Donating to my GoFundMe
🙏🏾 Sending your contacts for safe legal advocates, lawyers, or experts via Email
🙏🏾 Sharing this newsletter to increase its reach toward safe legal advocates
🙏🏾 Supporting by streaming, and sharing 17times
In Gratitude and Freedom,
Kaeyae Alo
✨ Dedicated to Karen Musumadi
*THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE
#PracticallySpeakingFreedom