Watch Us Rise: Chapters 16–22

“I appreciate your zeal, I do. But you have to understand that you can’t just make accusations about staff here and think I’m immediately going to fire someone. It doesn’t work like that, Chelsea. And that’s not actually what I want to talk with you about.”

“Consider this your official warning. Your club will be shut down if you continue to incite discord throughout the student body.”

“What do you mean ‘incite discord’? It’s not our fault people showed up to the dance dressed up in offensive costumes.”

“Well, now, perhaps you are not fully responsible for it, but your blog is stepping outside the lines of the parameters set for school blogs,” Principal Hayes says.

“You said derogatory things about a teacher. Students showed up to the dance in direct response to your post. We can’t have you two inciting these kinds of incidents. This school cannot be seen as a place—”

"To what extent do we self-construct, do we self-invent? How do we self-identify, and how mutable is that identity? Like, what if one could be anyone at any time? Well, my characters, like the ones in my shows, allow me to play with the spaces between those questions."

hearmeroar commented: I love that you're highlighting contemporary artists. Not all poets and writers are dead white men. Yes!

She is the author of the poetry collection When My Brother Was an Aztec. Diaz has worked with the last speakers of Mojave and directed a language revitalization program.

Her series using salt as a medium explores the tenuous yet intrinsic relationship between the body and the oceans, highlighting the fragility and unpredictability of existence.

Her series using salt as a medium explores the tenuous yet intrinsic relationship between the body and the oceans, highlighting the fragility and unpredictability of existence.

He moves past us to wash his hands, while giving my mom a kiss. It would be pretty idyllic if only the principal of our school wasn’t trying to silence the voices of women, and my dad didn’t just walk in the house spewing some old-fashioned, racist term.

“According to our People’s History class, there’re a bunch of terms and sayings that have super-racist origins. Like, the etymology of Indian summer was based on the idea that Indians were deceitful—as in—as crazy as summer in November. So even though you think it might be harmless, you just made a statement based on a historically stereotypical and racist statement,” Mia says, leaning back in her chair and smiling at me.

“But I mean, why does your God have to always be a man? If God is a spirit, then why can’t that spirit be embodied by a woman?..."

No frilly dresses
or shoes that pinch.

Shower, get dressed, finish my poem for afternoon workshop—Leidy Blake teaches a class called Radical Acts for Beginners at Word Up every week, and I’m her best, and sometimes only, student—pick up the shirts from T-Shirt Express on the Upper West Side, and then head to workshop.

I show her a couple of designs. Isaac has used a composite of the women and highlighted their faces on the front along with their names below.

My body is a tornado. Nor'easter.
The eye of every storm. Yes, my body
a cacophony. Song. Hydrant of butterflies
Collective. Not meant to be revised or edited.

My body
is a rallying, an assembling. It cannot be
shut down or silenced. Won't be. We
live holy & raucous in our skin, we
are not made of fruit—there's nothing sweet
about me.

That, yes, incorporating healthy eating and regular exercise would be important but that all my vitals were where they needed to be.

“You can go ahead and keep working on the next Feminist Manifesta,” Jacob says, starting to laugh again, and as soon as I turn around, he slaps me...on my butt...right there in the empty hallway, with no one around to witness.

“The difference is that it was approved by me, and it was clear what they were raising money for. There are protocols that you and Jasmine don’t seem to understand,” he says, obviously frustrated with me.

“Allegedly,” Principal Hayes says, and it’s that word that tells me the fight is bigger than this moment, bigger than me, or Principal Hayes or Jacob Rizer. It’s bigger because not enough men listen to women, or believe women, or honor what we have to say.

“Allegedly: used to convey that something is claimed to be the case or have taken place, although there is no proof,” I read from my phone, while taking a massive bite of a bacon cheeseburger, and coating the fries with our favorite ketchup and hot sauce mix.

I usually sit back to enjoy the open mic. I love seeing Chelsea up there mesmerizing everyone with her words, how she is so bold and confident.

I am good at pretending to be someone else, of getting in their skin and finding their voice, mannerisms.

See assimilation.
See smoke from the hot comb crocheting the air,
burning a sacred incense.

See assimilation.
See smoke from the hot comb crocheting the air,
burning a sacred incense.

See assimilation.
See smoke from the hot comb crocheting the air,
burning a sacred incense.

Comb yours out. Twist yours like black licorice,
like the lynching rope
used on your ancestors’ necks.

You will not fit in
most places. Do not
bend, squeeze, contort yourself.