Raw
Raw energy, raw power, this art piece is so raw... Raw... What a peculiar word. So powerful, poetic, yet… Why raw? Undercooked, unrefined, wild? Unchained, free, forceful, but, in a “good way”? Have you noticed what else is not said when something, especially, art, is described as raw? Raw is almost never white. Raw is almost always female. Raw is often, very often, marginalized. Raw is exotic, raw is animalistic. Why raw? Because it’s exciting, outside the norm. It’s what many are thinking about, what many are hungry for, but it is impolite and immodest to ask for it. Or point to it. Because it’s foreign, it’s scary. Exhilarating, forbidden. You want to look, you want to stare, to devour with your eyes. But you avert them, because it’s not good manners to stare. You are too well-bred to show your curiosity. But why you strive for the noble savage so much, oh, the white master? Why you want so vicariously to live through the eyes of the uneducated? Ahh, the delicious languages so different from your own, the guttural sounds are tantalizing, awakening something long forgotten deep inside your...mind. The foreign structures, mistakenly imaginative use of words are annoying, but you allow them, as you allow a child yet to grow up, to play with your belongings, your words, your superior... your international language. You want to platform the raw, unrefined, savage women, excuse me, authors, because you understand the importance of giving them space, and fostering diversity, and, because they are beautiful. Their words, that is. But their art is not only raw, it's radical. So sooner than later it will cut through the facade of the foreign glamour and exhaust its exotisicm, and you will see it for what it is – the truth. Not your truth. Not the truth decided by your conquest. Not the truth you've carefully inscribed in your polished books you printed on your clean white pages. The truth of the civilized savage, too wild and wise to be tamed by your religion, too young and too earnest to be defiled even by your corrupt god, too fresh out of the mouth of mother nature to reek of your foul breath of death and decay. The truth that the trees whisper, and the streams have not forgotten. The truth of the vast blue skies above the immense yellow steppes. The truth in the horse's clatter, and the laughter of the fox. You cannot appropriate the truth. You cannot murk it with your deceit. For everyone you silence, ten will arise. Rise up, my ignoble, my mud-bedraggled, raw, and radical, my scared and horrifying, my people, the children of the Earth, and stomp away at the clean sterile story, tear apart the chains you have been so mindfully accustomed to, tear at the throats of those who dare not acknowledge you and your power, of man, raw.