Friday Love: Today, I Am So Glad I Am A Girl

Sometimes, Love, Inshallah editors stumble across something so powerful that we are left speechless. This spoken-word performance, “Not My Fault,” from poet/writer/activist Staceyann Chin , is something we had to share.

Chin is a mutli-racial immigrant from Jamaica, a woman raised without a father by a mother who left Chin as a child to come to America, a story eloquently outlined her 2009 The Other Side of Paradise – A Memoir.

She is also a LGBT activist and writes about the oppression that forced her to leave Jamaica. Her writing and performances often explore intersections of the immigrant experience, sexuality, and female empowerment.

Chin opens this poem by stating, “Today, I am so glad I am a girl, because yesterday, my mother told me to write my story.” Her delivery is so powerful that you stop breathing as she gasps for her own air. She explores the power of writing, the complex nature of mother-daughter love, the challenges we face as women learning to value our own stories.

The female immigrant experience, the power of writing, the freedom of telling. It is all here.

Listen to the end, when she triumphantly declares - Go out and change the world you live in! It is the only world you have.