You wake up in the morning and move to take a shower,
Your insecurities worsen daily, by the minute, by the hour.
You undress and stand before the mirror taking yourself in,
Your skin isn't fair- Your eyes are not blue- And nothing about your body is thin.
And so you step into the tub and you sit there and you cry,
And if anybody asked you, you could never explain why.
Why you are overwhelmed with this astounding sense of mysery at the sight of your own reflection,
Why you dwell on every aspect of you, why of flaws you think you have a collection.
But baby you are so wrong.
You've been beaten by this dance, this game, this familiar song,
You have been put down by a society who does not value you,
We have always been told that we are not the standard, that beauty is not something that we can do.
We are told that we are powerless to these conventions unless we chose to conform.
Unless we chose to renounce to every tradition that from our Motherland is born,
Unless we chose to lighten, bleach, relax and hide everything that makes us, us.
We will never define the magnificent. We will never be good enough so we should just stop making a fuss.
But I refuse.
I refuse to be defined by the white man's way,
I refuse to be cast aside and degraded, to see my culture, my history abused,
And I continue to fight this battle, this war, against the Eurocentric gaze.
I will not be a mere page in a textbook.
I am more than you ever thought I could be and that is something you could see if only you would look.
If you would look further then the colour of my skin and the texture of my hair, you'd see, that you are in no way, better than me.
And I will not be the scapegoat to every wrongdoing in our society.