Meet Rufaro Cathy Musvosvi…
I am a 23-year-old Zimbabwean-born woman living abroad. So far, I’ve lived in Zimbabwe, the USA and South Africa.
In 2016, I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. I like comics, science and interior decorating. I grew up in a very religious family, a family that I love and treasure deeply.
My life experiences as a young African black woman navigating life in the diaspora have helped to shape my poetry and the way I view the world. Those are the facts. However, our realities are not shaped by facts alone, but in combination with our perceptions of them.
Someone once said that life is more about the things we can’t see or explain than the things we can. Things like emotions. Positive and negative.
I’ve found that the best way to deal with the emotional turmoil that is life is head-on.
I have a place where I don’t have to shoulder the burden of being the strong and unshaken black woman all the time. I get to just be a person with normal reactions and emotions. I’ve learned that it isn’t mentally healthy to always have to bear the responsibility of showing oppressors the light at the expense of my sanity. When you are wronged, it isn’t your responsibility to make the offender feel better. It isn’t your responsibility to make what happened to you more palatable for their sake.
Your responsibility is to yourself; to make yourself safe and to return to your wholeness. This is how I do that: addressing what I feel without pulling any punches to spare the feelings of the people, society or system that caused me harm. Sometimes that means calling myself out, being angry with the past version of myself that allowed me to be in that position and learning from her mistakes to get better. To be better. To find healing. I pray this does for you what it did for me. So welcome to the parts of my head that I wander off to at night. The parts that come and find me during the day.
Welcome, to the Ocean Floor.