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Ubuntu Women Shelter - A dedication to Ubuntu women who shelter

Updated: Nov 13

Our care moves,

Shifts

 We are not confined to a place 

We are not defined by a wage 

Our care carries that cup of warmth to your lips, 

Our care lays out a clean pillow, sheets and draws the curtains 

Our care is permissible disarray

Scattered fresh ginger root and pungent chillies and the sound of thick maize porridge stir 

Our care is a pot and a spoon stirring spice memories of home smuggled across borders  

Your hair picks up glints of the dawn as blue braid 

We sip brewed masala tea, break hot buttered chappati and talk,  you share dreams of your lived worlds we will never know

You come here with a song on your lips that we have no language to hear.

You wear the weight of history like a crown of intricate design in burnished gold 

You come through our barbed wires, 

our militarised walls, 

our CCTV tracking, 

our sniffer dogs


With your stories and laughter, you come through our borders algorithmized to contain, discipline and extract value from your black body


Your gaze into the distance does not forget but you forgive…you carry the sea within you that beautiful clear water, silent with the pain of children and family left behind …the sunlight picks up fish scales, adrift memories of a present continuous feeding frenzy as we gorge, destroy, suck everything dry to feed our first world lives.


Yours is not a courage that comes with a gun, or a knife or a militarized border, yours is a courage that comes from knowing, from sight…


We invented race and racism here and this says more about us than it ever does about you. 


Our racism is skin deep but becomes lethal when coddled with phrases like ‘People make Glasgow’ 


Do they? In this great city people have always been left behind but we pretend, we brand, we strut and play games with words like civilization and progress  … Without a collective historical reckoning Capital will continue to make Glasgow on the backs of bodies that clean and care … the river brought the slave ships and loot from the colonies and now BAE systems brings profits and jobs from death and war… 


You see our bleeding feet as we walk on broken shards of amnesia and the hot coals of forgotten histories that holds a boot on our throats to silence and choke not kill…  as women’s voices on the close forgotten by history rise sharply “look at us we have nothing …but we will look out for you…


The light fades and in the gloaming, the shine of cheap chrome fittings on locks and iron gates meant to keep us safe glows ...as the sun sets on the estate, the night birds shriek and we wait for another dawn.


Thank you

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