Leave Me Alone
You already have your empire.
In Portugal,
in Brazil,
in every echo of Latin America
where your flags and tongues
still pretend to be innocent.
You have your borders,
your rhythms,
your rewritten pasts
that call themselves unity.
But leave me alone.
I am not yours.
You say you're the voice of the South,
but I’ve watched your silence
when the Fulani were hunted.
I’ve seen the way you turned
on Ethiopian Jews—
mocked, abandoned,
flattened into categories
you never belonged to.
You say you suffered.
And maybe you did.
But now you build over others' graves,
call it pan-African pride,
when it’s just
another empire
in a different skin.
You even call the Cypriots Black—
as if their salt, their stone,
their Aegean wind
was grown in your forest.
As if you could rename them
and no one would notice.
And now you tell me
I am dividing the world.
But I see it clearly—
you are the ones splitting it
with new flags,
new terms,
new borders of inclusion
that erase whoever doesn’t bow.
You are the ones
dividing this world,
while pretending you’re saving it.
I am Kurdish.
I have no empire.
I speak from the cracks.
I bleed in languages
you’ve never tried to pronounce.
Stop following me
into every room I enter,
claiming kinship
while you erase me with your breath.
You had your history.
Let me have mine.
You had your movements.
Let me mourn my own.
The Fulani are not your enemies.
The Beta Israel are not your burden.
The Cypriots are not your myth.
And I—
I am not your project.
You already have your empire.
You are already dividing this world.
Now, leave me alone.