“A Guide to Violence” by Kandace Siobhan Walker

1. have a body.¹
2. abandon the gender you were assigned at birth.²
3. name social structures which shape & govern your reality.
4. name trauma. name the classes who inflict trauma on bodies like ours.
5. remove a history book from its shelf and light a match.
6. practice empathy.³
7. walk naked into the street, demanding reparations.
8. adopt english as a mother language, when you’ve no other choice.
9. disobey the state by giving birth.
10. talk in dialect, like you never left the motherland. learn to code-switch.⁴
11. name the women you love & who love you.⁵
12. design new vocabularies to voice your lived experiences.
13. navigate.
14. mourn the dead, thank them for what they left behind.
15. demand what you are wrongly denied.⁶
16. be vulnerable, sometimes. when it suits you. be kind.⁷
17. protect what you love.

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1} read: feminine, or other. a white body, for perceived vulnerability. a black or brown body for increased threat of violence, and structural vulnerability.
² name your body’s sex characteristics after an old hollywood movie star or your gynecologist or your favourite day of the week: “touch my wednesday.”
³ say things like, “the moon & stars are all lesbians,” and “what’s your rising?” in public.
⁴ or, don’t.
⁵ mother, sister, friend, cousin, lover. we brush each other’s hair and hold marathon skype calls in mercury retrograde.
⁶ healthcare, free tuition, capital. space, light, love. longevity of life and work. your child’s safety; will he come home from the park?
⁷ your gentility, kindness, need not be universal, nor extend much further than the physical confines of your own body, if at all.

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Kade Walker is a writer and artist based in South-East London, UK. She is studying an MA in Black British Writing at Goldsmith’s. Straddling multiple nationalities and heritages, she belongs nowhere, but she’s trying to make a home there.

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