capitalismo mata-nos. not on a banner. not in a book. just a trash bin, tagged on a side street in lisboa.
the message was already decaying, paint dripping down like it knew no one was coming to fix this.
i didn’t take it as warning. i took it as witness.
sometimes the clearest truths live where you’re not supposed to look.
naky held up a portrait like it was a mirror. virgínia quaresma— journalist, lesbian, afro-portuguese. forgotten by design. remembered anyway.
the tour wasn’t quiet. it moved. spoke back. refused the way history gets told without breath, without body.
the archive wasn’t in a museum. it was in his hands. in the cadence. in the way we stopped on cobblestones to make space for her name.
from up here, the city looks soft. terracotta roofs, blue sky, sun warming the stone.
but i know what these walls were built for. how far their reach once stretched. what was claimed from here. what was sent.
it’s beautiful. it’s brutal. it’s both.
sometimes the view is part of the violence.
maybe this is what pause looks like. sun on porcelain. bridge in the distance. book barely opened. the city behind the cup isn’t waiting. it just moves. but for a moment, i don’t.
they still whisper her name like it’s dangerous. but this isn’t a whisper. it’s a scream, wheatpasted to brick. marie-josèphe angélique—enslaved, accused, executed. not for a crime, but for refusing to live quietly in a world built to crush her.
je me souviens, they say. but they don’t mean her. they mean the colony. they mean the order she tried to set fire to.
this paper will peel, fade, dissolve into dust. but she was never paper. she was kindling. and we’re still burning.
#tiohtiàke #refusals #traces #blackness #surfaces #fragments
the murals watched. we didn’t march fast. our orange shirts carried what couldn’t be said.
pink sky, mesh shirt, keffiyeh on the straps. joy is not the absence of struggle. it’s what we carry through it.
we lay down because they can’t.
this was a die-in. healthcare workers, gathered in the middle of the city, bodies on the ground for gaza. we were there not just as clinicians, not just as queers, not just as people trained to care— but as witnesses to a system that pretends to be neutral while choosing a side. we already knew that silence wasn’t an accident. we’ve seen it before—in the wards, in the media, in the funding reports. but still, there’s something about laying your body down on cold ground that makes the grief feel sharper. and makes the refusal feel real.
my keffiyeh wasn’t a symbol. it was a practice. a reminder. a commitment to name genocide where others equivocate. to be present when presence costs something.
the pink triangle on my chest traced a line back to act up, to queer resistance in the face of state abandonment. but this wasn’t about metaphor. this was about gaza. about children buried under rubble. about medics killed in white coats. about naming what we know, and what our institutions refuse to say.
i didn’t speak. i didn’t need to. sometimes protest is not what you say but what you don’t move to stop.
#tiohtiàke #refusals #holdings #blackness #queerness #traces #surfaces
