WE ARE WATER

You Don’t Understand That We Are Water

(An open letter to all who oppose us)

You don’t understand that we are water.
You think you can dam us, drain us, name us

but you cannot end us. 

We were here before your fences, 

before your maps, 

before the language that tried to contain us. 

We flow through history, 

uninvited but unstoppable, 

carrying the memory of those who refused to drown.

You build walls, 

we seep through cracks.
You raise borders, we rise in rain.

You silence one voice, but a thousand more ripple outward. 

Because we are not one drop — 

we are the storm that remembers its purpose.

You misunderstand what power is.
Power is not control. 

Power is continuity. 

It is the persistence of rivers, 

the humility of rain, the reunion of oceans. 

You mistake gentleness for weakness, 

but water teaches that soft things shape the hardest stones.

You call us broken —

we call ourselves reborn.

You see struggle — 

we see evolution.

Our suffering did not make us small; 

it made us vast. 

Our grief  became a current that connects continents. 

Our resilience is tidal — 

it retreats only to return stronger.

You cannot own what is living.
You cannot silence what sings in every droplet.

From Cape Coast to Kingston, 

from Harlem to Lagos, from Bahia to Brixton — 

our waters have names, our names have stories, our stories have power.

We are the hands that plant, 

the drums that summon rain, 

the children who rise laughing after the flood.

We carry the sky within us, 

the moon on our surface, and the earth in our depths.

You fear what you cannot hold.

But understand this:
We do not come to destroy. We come to cleanse.
We do not come to dominate. We come to restore.
We do not come to end life. We come to remind you what life is.

So when you see us rising, do not mistake it for anger alone — 

it is memory, it is healing, it is return.
 

Because you don’t understand that we are water.
And water always finds its way home.