What Comes With You

Image by the Author.

You did not go there.
You came to this.

You arrived without being invited, without being sent, without being asked. You came carrying words that travel easily: help, charity, freedom, liberation, truth. Words that sound clean when spoken from a distance.

We do not know what you do in the name of help.
We do not know what is practiced at the top of the hill, on the grassland of our land.
We do not know what your intentions are in the air you cross, in the soil you step on, in the ground that already holds our dead.

We don’t go to work on charity in your reality.
We were not deployed to fix your world.
Yet you arrive as if repair is required here, as if something is broken simply because it does not resemble you.

You come in the name of freedom, but whose freedom?
You come in the name of liberation, but from what, and for whom?
You come in the name of truth, and then you ask us to identify it, to choose it, to justify it.

Which truth?
Yours, or the one we carry?
Your freedom, or my burden?

You come with limits already installed. Limits on what you can hear, what you can recognize, what you are willing to learn. You arrive and study us as a role: the beneficiary, the subject, the case study. You catalog our gestures, our accents, our silences. You analyze our language while refusing to let it speak back.

We study you too, your institutions, your grammar of power, your civilization, your methods of naming and controlling. But you call this imbalance education when it benefits you, and nostalgia when it sustains us.

You tell us we are backward.
You say we focus too much on history, too much on the past.
But history is not a weakness here, it is a privilege. It is continuity. It is memory as resistance.

If our “backwardness” supports you in so many ways, materially, culturally, symbolically why do you abandon your privilege to come here and question us? Why do you descend into what you call hell, only to dem

and gratitude for your presence?

We learned your language.
We learned your history, your traditions, your systems of value.
We learned them because survival required fluency.

You did not learn ours.
And worse, you did not consider that you should.

This is not an encounter between equals.
This is an extraction disguised as empathy, a hierarchy masked as assistance.
You arrive claiming universality, but your universality has borders.
It recognizes itself everywhere and recognizes us nowhere.

So before you ask us what truth is, ask yourself this:
Why must truth always travel in your direction?