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[00:08.6]
This reminds me a lot of having to announce that my mom had cancer because it didn't feel real until I had to make a GoFundMe, like, campaigning for her life. Sitting here making a video about how I was detained at the US border— this is when it feels real. Hi, my name is ismatu and I was detained coming into the US.

[00:26.0]
A political dissident (which is something I am) is literally someone who dissents from political orthodoxy. When a society has a doctrine of beliefs that they hold quite dearly and someone decides to push against that doctrine of beliefs in ways that upset society, that person becomes a political dissenter.

[00:44.4]
And it's not a... it's not a safe place to be. In 2022. I made one TikTok once and it went viral, thus catapulting me into increased visibility quite unceremoniously and in ways that I can never take back. Once your face and voice is out there, it's out there. You know?

[00:59.6]
I decided after like three weeks of being online that the most responsible thing I could do with a platform that was given to me kind of out of thin air was to engage in political education. And political education defined here means: the study of what the current world is.

[01:15.1]
What is the current world order? Why is it that way? And how might we change things for our collective benefit? People often hear "political" or "politic" and think about what happens in a Senate house or what happens with lawmakers or like, electoral politics, who the president is.

[01:31.6]
And I am actually talking about the reality of our lived day to day, otherwise known as your material conditions, the material circumstances of what your lif is like every day as regular-degular people. Yes, of course, that does mean talking about the news geopolitically, because what happens above your head also affects, you know, the food on your table.

[01:51.6]
But also realistically, I'm talking about what it feels like to wake up every day a United States citizen in the climate that we're currently in. It means I do a lot of thinking about things that are supposed to feel invisible, like road infrastructure and electricity and what kind of bread people buy.

[02:08.5]
And if I offered my neighbors a home cooked meal, do I think they take me up on it? Why? Or why not? Now, there are many ways I deviate from the norms of American society, but the political deviance I'm going to focus on the most for the purpose of this public service announcement is my position as an abolitionist. Abolition has too long of a history for me to unfold in what's supposed to be like— a 20 minute moment.

[02:29.7]
But it can shortly be described as a political stance to abolish the conditions of slavery worldwide, which necessarily means the end of the carceral state. It means the end of racial capitalism, it means the end of imprisonment as a whole. And I would argue that that also means the end of the nation-state technology as a whole.

[02:47.8]
But I am like, way ahead of myself. I'm defining this for you because over the course of my tenure online, I have turned into a cultural figure and a symbol more than I have, like, just like some person who makes videos.

[03:03.9]
I went from someone who espouses thoughts on whatever I felt like talking about that day to someone with multiple international organizing projects. People have crossed state lines at a moment's— at, literally a day's notice to see me teach in person. And I'm recognized in every city that I go to now, regardless of whether I'm in the West.

[03:20.5]
There's at least a few people that come up to me and ask me if I am who I am— and those are just the people that feel the need to come up and introduce themselves. even when I'm home in Sierra Leone. So in, a few short years, I went from being an anonymous person with a relatively imaginable life to someone who is sleeping on the floor of the library that I'm building.

[03:42.3]
I feed villages off the strength of essays that I write for free. Like, not only am I politically deviant, I am also economically deviant. We realize how wild that is, right? Like, people like my work so much so that they choose to pay for it even though it's free.

[03:58.3]
And instead of just using that money to fulfill my own wants and whims as, like, you know, a consumerist U.S. American, I've chosen to feed people on an industrial scale. Everybody and their mama, by the way, had something to say when I said, no more paywalls, no more charging clients for therapy.

[04:16.4]
I'm going to do all of my work for free and be completely donation-funded. There were scores of people telling me that I was going to fall back into the stranglehold of poverty and homelessness. And in a society that values hegemony and obedience, in a society that does still run off the exploitation of the working class and the enslavement of the global majority to make sure that we all keep to the status quo of working until we die.

[04:41.5]
Work for money, go home, repeat. Work for money, go home, repeat. Anything outside of that economic system is punished heavily. You're either supposed to survive the capitalist machines or you're supposed to become so good at capitalism that you're in the position to exploit other people. So the idea of freely given, free exchange, producing food for people, that's economic deviance of the highest order.

[05:03.2]
It's not technically illegal, but I don't know that legality matters in the world that we have right now. One thing that always precedes punishment is surveillance. Deviant people are heavily surveilled. In this day and age, that's very easy. Cybersecurity?

[05:18.8]
In a world where all of your devices are geolocative, active on Bluetooth, where people have their location on on their phones, on social media, to find one another, where most places across the modernized world are laden with CCTV cameras and facial recognition software. I could not hide even if I wanted to. Even if I didn't have such a distinctive face, even with the precautions that I do take regarding cybersecurity, I couldn't hide if I wanted to.

[05:41.8]
But then, like, I was never trying to hide. I'm not doing anything illegal. So one might ask, like, why, why are you being targeted now? Well, for one, I'm a Sierra Leonean. As well as being Black American; I was born and raised in the United States and have held dual citizenship since 2018, which was the first year I ever went back to Sierra Leone.

[06:00.4]
I was 19 years old. 19 turning 20. Both my biological parents are from Sierra Leone and that country was one of the few that was put Donald Trump's... persona non grata list? Essentially, if you have an excess of stamps from Sierra Leone in your American passport, it will make you more likely to be detained and further questioned for whatever reason.

[06:19.7]
For two, I have been openly writing essays in study of revolutionary theory and practice for the past few years. In 2023, I attended Mutulu Shakur's coming home talk. He's known for being Tupac's stepdad— you know, world-renowned rapper Tupac Shakur. But he had a life before!

[06:35.2]
Like, before and during that. In addition to being a father, he was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. He helped to found the Lincoln Detox Center, where Black folks in the Bronx learned how to detox people off of heroin from using acupuncture.

[06:52.7]
So they were detoxing people from heroin addictions with no withdrawals and without needing to go on government sponsored methadone. As an aspiring physician, I found this and find this to be one of the most incredible things I've ever heard. Like, I think his legacy, is a social and a medical phenomenon.

[07:11.7]
And at the talk, you know— this is his coming home talk after being in prison. He came home from being in prison. At that talk that I attended at UCLA, I met dequi kioni-sadiki and then later her husband, Sekou Odinga. And then they just became family to me.

[07:26.9]
It's actually their rings that I wear on my fingers. This, one was given to me— well, they were both given to me by her, lest she see this and feel a type of way. But this one was given to me by her. It was made by indigenous artists, and I wear it every day to remind myself of indigenous sovereignty that I actively work towards.

[07:45.1]
And then this one has the inscription, "BPP For Life." The Black Panthers were called terrorists in their day when they were active as a political party in the 1960s and the 1970s.

[08:00.9]
And now they're heralded as heroes of the people, the common people. They fed people so well with their free breakfast program that they rivaled the United States federal government and forced them to produce their own program, which fed me! The free and reduced breakfast program that the United States has on— that's, that was one of my, like, major meals as a child.

[08:22.4]
It's one of the few meals that I could like, 100% count on. The Black Panther Party, they had schools and ambulances and sickle cell research and food pantries. Their survival programs were so effective that people began to question why they had to rely on the nation-state, which is a good way to make yourself an enemy of the nation-state.

[08:38.6]
You don't actually have to take up arms against a federal body to be considered an enemy of the state. All you have to do is take care of people better than they can take care of people. All you have to do is change people's minds on what is considered to be inevitable about this world.

[08:54.0]
I'm ahead of myself. We'll come back to that. So in addition to the crimes of: (1) being Sierra Leonean and (2) coming into the spotlight under the wing of organizing veterans— organizing giants beyond veterans like, I've also just been successful in feeding people. I just made history having brought back industrialized rice farming for the Limba tribe of Sierra Leone, the only tribe indigenous to the region of Sierra Leone.

[09:17.0]
Thomas Sankara was the prime minister of the Upper Volta and the first president of Burkina Faso when they established their revolutionary government. I study him a lot. He was big about food sovereignty because the Upper Volta, which became Burkina Faso, was 90% peasant populated.

[09:32.6]
As in: people were rural, without education, without literacy, without vaccines, and without consistent access to food. And that is what I'm looking at for the state of Sierra Leone. Food sovereignty is one of my highest priorities. He said, "Those that come with wheat, millet, corn or milk, they are not helping us.

[09:48.3]
Those who really want to help us can give us plows, tractors, fertilizers, insecticides, watering cans, drills and dams. That's how we would define food aid." I hope he's somewhere proud of me, because I took that very seriously. But we will come back to this. I'm not even supposed to be in the United States right now. I only came back because one of my loved ones is ill.

[10:05.5]
I had planned on leaving and being gone for several consecutive months at the least. But my friend is dying of brain— My friend is dying of brain cancer, and I didn't want to miss the opportunity to say goodbye to them.

[10:22.7]
The process of being detained was obvious. It actually began on the plane when there was suddenly a problem with the jet bridge. Now, I was not the only one surprised on this flight that there was suddenly a problem with the jet bridge. It was my row getting off. I was in the middle of the plane, and there was one person in front of me.

[10:37.7]
And all of a sudden they stopped the plane because there's a problem with the bridge that connects the plane to the airport walkway. And there are tens of people grumbling behind me like, you let half the plane get off on that jet bridge, and all of a sudden there's a problem? I found it weird, too. Anyways, one of the airport staff in front of me is calling for someone to come examine the bridge because she can't find the problem.

[10:57.6]
And the other airport staff member has a clipboard and is taking notes. He's looking up at me and he's taking notes, and I'm just, like... deciding to pretend not to notice that this might not sound off to you. This might all sound like a prolonged coincidence, what I'm about to tell you. But I've been doing a lot of traveling in the past two years, planning and producing programming for collective sovereignty.

[11:20.5]
Even while I was traveling domestically, I've seen people escorted off of planes by officers wearing chains. And I'm not talking about, like, handcuffs. I mean, like big chains, the kind that you find at Home Depot to tie off a fence or to padlock something, like, across their wrists.

[11:38.3]
And the whole plane just sat quietly while people were taking off commercial flights in literal chains. Like, I just cannot afford to not notice. Once they fixed the jet bridge, I got off the plane at O'Hare Airport and declined the biometric scan that they act like is compulsory.

[11:54.2]
I went to the physical TSA officer for the fingerprinting and the biometric check and the questioning about my travel. I've never been questioned like that in any country that I've sought to come into. This is my home— this is my country of origin! I was born and raised in the United States. After she went through all of her questions that I found to be, like, a mild amount of invasive, but I was like, whatever.

[12:15.7]
Chicago's being occupied by ICE right now. She handed me a slip with a few letters and what I assumed to be her initials. I've never seen a slip like that before. And I asked her what to do with it. She said I should hand it to the officer at the exit gate after I received my bags. And that's when I knew, like, I'm going to be detained. Then I was waiting for my bags, and a representative of the airline that I was flying, Icelandic Air, came up to me and asked me if I was missing a bag...

[12:38.7]
before all the bags had been delivered; there were still about 10 people there that were waiting for their bag. I said yes, even though this struck me as odd. And the representative of the airline said that my bag was lost and that I was going to have to give them their— my address in Chicago so they could send it to me.

[12:55.5]
So, two things. (1) I don't know if you, any of you watching, have ever had the experience of an airline losing your bag, but you have to go through hell and high water to prove that that bag did not make it to its final destination, because then they are responsible for paying to ship it to you.

[13:10.7]
And no airline likes that responsibility. (2) The second thing is that if there are still people waiting for their bags, why would they know that I am missing a bag in particular? Like that doesn't.... You do your best not to notice things like this because you don't want to be called paranoid, you know?

[13:29.9]
So here's a relevant aside on the history of cointelpro. It's a word that we tend to throw around on, like, quote, unquote, "revolutionary" social media a lot. But, like, very few people have actually studied it. COINTELPRO was a totalitarian use of surveillance not only meant to build cases against political dissidents, but also to drive them insane in the process.

[13:47.5]
Means of intimidation meant literally following people covertly/overtly calling their homes, tapping their phone lines, stalking their family members. And it still happens today. It just doesn't need to be as obvious. The state of the Panopticon and cybersecurity, which— most people don't even use a vpn!

[14:05.8]
You're not a hard person to find. If someone wanted to see what you were working on, all they would have to do was hack into your computer. Do you have any encryption software? Do you backup your datas onto a hard disk drive? Has everything that you've ever done in the last three years lived on... Google Docs? You're not hard to find.

[14:21.6]
Unless you're like me: a freak who works by hand. :) The bag that didn't make it, not only did it not belong to me, it was also full of papers. Like a lot of papers. Books, folders, handwritten notes. I work by hand. I'm an essayist, and I write all of my essays by hand before I type them.

[14:37.5]
I'm skipping forward in this story chronologically a bit, because at this time, right, I'm standing in the airport, and I'm not supposed to know that my bag has been "delayed" for nefarious purposes [allegedly]. But when I get it back a few days later, it had very obviously been gone through.

[14:52.7]
My notes had been pulled out of their folders. Letters that I had been writing in their first draft were pulled out of their folders and placed on top of the rest of my things as loose paper. My books had been gone through. Some of my books were marked up. What was missing was the slip that TSA is supposed to put in your bag to say you have been searched by TSA.

[15:11.3]
I have been traveling internationally since I was 14 years old. I have had experiences where TSA searched my bag without me present. They leave a slip there. They're required to by law. But, like, there was no slip. That means that I am alleging I am the subject of a legal search and seizure. But then, like, who do I report that to? The feds?

[15:27.8]
...anyways. At this point in the story, I'm still in O'Hare Airport. I only have the one bag. I give the man the address of the person whose bag that actually is, which feels deeply insecure to me because I have no idea what they're going to do with that information. But I leave. I give the agent checking out a slip when everybody else has a green card, and he says that I need to go down that hallway and to sit and wait.

[15:49.2]
So I do. And I keep asking what's going on? And they say, your bag is going to be searched. And I'm like, okay, so this is detainment. Like, that's what that looks like. Generally when you are detained, coming in to a nation state apparatus, they're not going to look at you and say that you're being detained because they don't want you to escalate. They want you to cooperate and they want you to answer all of their questions.

[16:06.1]
But I understand that I am being detained. The agent that searches through my bag and her partner ask me about my writing career no less than three times in the 15 to 20 minutes it takes her to search through every single thing in my bag and work bag.

[16:21.6]
The procedure of questions goes: Are you a writer? What do you write? Fiction, Poetry? For how long? In that exact order, no less than three times. And it doesn't matter how many times. I tell her, "I am a generalist, I write what sells." She was like, you're a freelancer? I'm like, yes.

[16:36.7]
She keeps prompting me to say that I write fiction and poetry and I don't know what to— by the time that federal agents are asking you questions like this that are specific to you and your circumstance, they know the answer to those questions. They want to see if you'll lie. Also, like I started this video with: my writing is available for free.

[16:54.4]
You can read it at any time. You could argue that my writing career started when TriQuarterly published my chapbook. I have a distinctive name. I'm not hard to find. It would be foolish at this point in time in questioning and being detained for me to pretend like this was like some sort of random selection, like this was not about me personally and like I am not being targeted.

[17:12.3]
I am. So when I leave this experience, and I go to the homie's House in Chicago, I'm I'm trying to explain to people around me that have no real stake in revolutionaries, thought, intent and action, that anyone near me is going to be subject to increased surveillance, that this is not just a me thing.

[17:38.3]
But because my family in the United States is for one, deeply conservative and two, believes in the carceral systems of the United States, it's been really difficult to catch them up on the reality of my situation, which again is rapidly becoming our shared situation. If they see my work online, it's in passing short form video, which is very different than actually sitting down to read my work.

[18:01.0]
On short form video, I come across as pithy and intelligent and pretty, as I say, like, bite-sized, easily shareable bits of information and analysis. No one would ever think of this as particularly threatening politically. So when I was detained with the TSA officer asking over and over Again, are you a writer?

[18:17.4]
What do you write? Fiction? Poetry? For how long have you been writing? Right? No less than three times in the overall interview, I was not confused as to why. There's not a lot of room to be confused at that point. Following the initial detainment and search at O'Hare Airport, I was detained once more for three weeks. I knew some sort of incarceration was coming, especially because I had planned to stay in Chicago and ICE is quite literally snatching people up off the streets.

[18:39.8]
I made a video about this in the summertime around when I had been reposted by Senator Cory Booker about the changing face of fascism in the United States.

[19:32.1]
I also made short form videos about this— how, policy push-through in the United States have all been centered around fighting and rooting out "domestic terrorists."

[19:58.4]
As I've said before in one of my most popular essays, "There is No Revolution without Madness," Terrorist is up to whoever is holding the pen. I remember too, that the Black Panthers were once called terrorists. You know, the Panther 21, in fact, were accused of conspiring for domestic terrorism when all they did was organize for the collective sovereignty of their community.

[20:15.7]
And they were jailed on trumped up charges. Right? Like wanting to blow up the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Wanting to blow up the subway. There was no evidence of that. But then... there didn't really need to be because all the United States needed was reason to take them out of the game. And they sat in prison awaiting trial for two and a half years.

[20:34.3]
And during that two and a half years, you know, their face and voice. Sorry; my face, my voice. That was a muscle memory. During the two and a half years that members of the Panther 21 were incarcerated, their faces were plastered everywhere as, domestic terrorists.

[20:51.9]
Like they, they, they were in prison. They couldn't even fight the cultural battle that was being waged against them because all they needed to do was convince the American populace— they, meaning the federal government. This is not like some unknown, unseen enemy. And this is not ancient history, right?

[21:08.4]
This is literally living memories. Some of the Panther 21 are still alive, walking around. All the federal government needed to do was to convince the American populace that the Black Panther Party was full of domestic terrorists who are out to create senseless violence in this land of peaceful, brave, corn-loving Americans.

[21:30.1]
It's a dangerous time to be a political dissenter. When I was apprehended, I was apprehended in the state of Michigan. My family was worried about me, so my sister picked me up and moved me across state lines from Illinois to Michigan. And in truth, this likely saved me from being apprehended by ICE. So in some respects, I respect and appreciate what my family did to try and keep me safe.

[21:54.9]
There are more rights guaranteed to me in mental health incarceration than there are in the domestic terrorist unit of ICE. So, like, maybe it was better this way. But overall, detention is still detention. And being in the position where you have to prove your sanity to a group of people that are predisposed to believe that you are clinically insane is a very precarious situation to be in.

[22:19.3]
I wasn't allowed to leave. I was not allowed to have my cell phone or my personal electronic devices. I was not allowed a right to privacy. I was not even allowed to shower without someone coming in the room to check on me.

[22:35.1]
Checks happen every 12 minutes day and night. That alone— that alone— checks every 12 minutes night and day is enough to break somebody's well being. All the carceral systems in the United States touch one another; and carceral, for the purposes of this essay, simply means someone else, away from me.

[22:51.8]
As in, when someone in polite society is behaving in a way that makes the people around them frightened, uncomfortable, or impedes their ability to get work done under the capitalist machine that never sleeps, they become a threat and/or a liability.

[23:07.0]
I talked about this in another one of my most popular essays. "Therapists Are Also the Police. Sex Work, Social Work, and the Politics of Deservingness." It's about why I chose not to be a licensed clinical social worker after going through, you know, what was a hellish experience in graduate school.

[23:26.1]
I graduated from the University of Chicago with a master's in Clinical Social Work and a concentration in Global Health Administration and Policy. Ask about me. I was the Brown Fellow. After all of that, after my experiences in graduate school, coinciding with my experiences becoming a sex worker to survive the economic toll of graduate school, I decided that I did not want to become an agent of the state— and every state board healer, whether you are a nurse practitioner or a doctor or a therapist or a social worker.

[23:57.3]
Like, if you are in the helping professions and you are licensed, you are licensed to a state board, which means that you are a state agent. The central thesis of that essay that again, I highly recommend you check out all of these essays that I'm— all of these essays that I am talking about, they all have audio correspondence.

[24:13.7]
You can read it, you can listen to it. The thing about being licensed to the state is that you are loyal to the state at the end of the day, which means that if you have a patient in front of you that is, for whatever reason, being hunted by the state... you're not really in the best position to help them. You can't actually guarantee confidentiality because you do have to report if you have the intent to harm yourself or others.

[24:34.0]
And while I did not have any of those intents, trying to prove you're sane to a group of people hearing that you are a political dissident of foreign and domestic interest like, you just sound... crazy.

[24:49.1]
The night that I was apprehended, the only illegal thing that I did was steal period cups from Target because I was bleeding on myself and my mother refused to come to Target with me. And FDIC banks, if they suspect you of illegal or fraudulent activity, of which I have none.

[25:07.8]
But just because I am suspect, my debit card stopped working,

[25:15.0]
and I was just not in the mood to beg that night. So I stole brazenly. I was screaming, Hands up! Don't shoot! in public. Because quite frankly, Black kids in this country have been shot dead for a lot less. The police were called, and instead of being tried as a criminal engaging in petty theft, the officer who detained me, as well as a trusted family member, petitioned to have me examined for a mental health evaluation.

[25:42.2]
Because, as far as, like, the Tthe attending officer wrote down, I claimed to have been shot. Which, to be clear, I maintained that I did not claim a bullet found my body that evening. But that set a ball in motion that was very difficult to get out of.

[25:57.6]
I was involuntarily admitted to a psych ward. I deferred my right to trial before I even knew why I had been admitted or what my treatment plan was. That was at the recommendation of my court-appointed lawyer who told me I didn't really have a chance of winning a release in front of a judge. Other patients, (inmates... whatever) told me that, you know, the judge only cares about what the doctor has to say.

[26:17.5]
And the doctor is licensed to the state of, in this case, Michigan. So, you know, it is what it is. I had to prove my sanity on a rotating panel of doctors every day who were all predisposed to believe that I did not have a realistic grip on what was true and verifiable about the world around me.

[26:35.6]
I was not allowed to present evidence upon my behalf to said doctors. Considering I was overall not in the midst of a psychotic break, and all the deviances from normal life, I made, I did so to keep myself safe... this was just a really traumatizing experience.

[26:50.9]
Also, like, deviance from "normal life," ...at this point, I need us all to think hard about what we consider to be normal and whether that norm is something that we want to continue. When you are living a life that is just fully compliant with the US government and you believe that the US Government wants to keep each and every one of its citizens safe, then what I am describing to you would sound crazy.

[27:16.8]
I would sound like a paranoid freak. Right? That's why the strategies of COINTELPRO were so effective. It wasn't just that they preyed upon people's physical safety. It was that they preyed upon people's sanity. The basic assumption for most US Citizens is that the government only pursues people that are criminals.

[27:34.3]
So if you think you're being pursued, you are either a criminal or you're crazy or you're some unfortunate combination of the two. Again, these are some of the theses of my two most popular essays. Therapists Are Also the Police, and There Is no Revolution Without Madness.

[27:50.4]
So I don't fully feel a need to tease out these points here. My main argument is the carceral systems go together. Undesirables, malconformants, people who are unable to comply with society and produce capital go away to have justice done or healing enacted upon them.

[28:08.5]
Criminals go to prison. Crazy people go to the mental institution until they're not crazy anymore, if that day ever comes. I want to note here that when I talk to some of my movement elders about what happened, they promote, you know, keeping a low profile in times of increased surveillance cuz you don't want to give harassers an increased reason to target you.

[28:28.4]
I don't agree with this logic. For one: the exploitative rules that we have in the United States, both as a society in which we govern each other about what is appropriate conduct and on a state and federal level, they're not really about safety.

[28:44.6]
They're about conditioning. Compliance with surveillance and exploitation does not guarantee you safety. It guarantees that you will be easier to surveil and exploit. I spent three weeks in a mental hospital, and I was released from mental health detention.

[29:00.2]
The average stay for that facility is five to seven days. I was there for three weeks. My doctoral team had no strong intentions on releasing me. The week I was released on Monday of my final week, I had no definite release date. By Wednesday, I had a discharge plan. If you want to know what changed to my account, I was released because I took my pen to paper and I wrote to the rights board about the violations that were occurring in my "care," especially in the fact that male attendants continued to provide safety checks while I bathed and practiced basic female hygiene.

[29:36.6]
I cited a violation of my religious rights. How is it central to my healing that male attendants have to see my face while I'm showering? Especially me, who covers my hair for religious purposes. This video, in fact, is, the second time in over two years I've been on camera without wrapping my hair.

[29:53.5]
The first time was on an Instagram live I posted about 24 hours before I was detained, which I posted because I knew I was in danger of being incarcerated. And I also knew that I could not trust my family to keep me safe from that fate. The second time is now, because I'm still feeling the weight of having my privacy violated like that.

[30:12.5]
I didn't even feel like a girl anymore. Or rather, maybe I think I spend most days feeling like girlhood is kind of just like something that happens in the background of my life. And then all of a sudden, men have to see me naked.

[30:29.3]
When I didn't want that to happen for the sake of their job, for the sake of care I didn't ask for. I went and got my nails done because I just, like, wanted to feel in control of my body a little bit.

[30:46.4]
They took my prayer scarf from me because they claimed that I could hang myself with it. Just like, I don't even know how to describe how traumatizing this was. I won't be able to talk about it in detail for, like, at least a year. Being detained stole from me the last three active weeks of the life of one of my best friends.

[31:06.5]
I only came back to United States to say goodbye to Suz. They reminded me that we're coming up on 10 years of friendship in 2026. And instead of reminiscing with them during their last final weeks of sentient, like, responsive life, I was incarcerated in an adult psychiatric facility.

[31:23.4]
And I could not leave. By the time I was finally released, Suz no longer responds to outside stimuli. So there's just, like, there's no apology for that. There's nothing anybody can say to make that better.

[31:39.1]
You know? I'm never gonna get that time back. I'm thinking of, my Baba, Sekou Odinga of Mutulu Shakur, his comrade. They were imprisoned for 33 and 35 years, respectively.

[31:57.6]
They both experienced, like, deaths of their own children while they were incarcerated. I just got a drop of what they have an ocean of.

[32:12.3]
My days of passing in between my homelands are over. I have no certainty that I'll be let back into the United States again if I leave. And that is heartbreaking. And I can't say that I'm surprised; I knew this day was coming. I just. I really thought I had more time.

[32:32.0]
I feel like that's the hubris of youth, you know? You literally always think that you have more time than you do. I want to return to point three, which is, why am I being targeted now? One of the reasons that the doctors in the psych ward kept thinking I was literally insane, like, as in without a grip on reality, is because I was insistent that I am both a public figure and a political official.

[32:52.3]
And I am. Up until now, I've been. I've just really downplayed my titles, only mentioning them in passing because indigenous sovereignty is very easily misunderstood. Y'all hear king and think like the OG colonizers in England and [ick.] ...never that. Long before Europe was even a blip on the minds of humankind, the Limba remained.

[33:12.0]
They're the only tribe indigenous to the region of Sierra Leone. They are a mountain people, and they're also indigenous rice farmers, so adept at rice farming that they were targeted heavily in the slave trade, taken across the world, particularly concentrated in swampy areas like North and South Carolina.

[33:28.8]
Before the horrors that came with the Commonwealth, we called our chiefs kings. It was only after British colonization came and fucked everybody shit up that they said, you know, you only serve one king, and that's the Commonwealth [gag!] Actually, the person who made this shirt— they were some of the first people that I even just, like, admitted being detained to because it was so traumatizing; I couldn't even talk about it.

[33:55.7]
He pointed out that Sierra Leone, when I described it like a colony, he was like, oh, yeah, like a reservation. They just took a plot of land that didn't belong to them, that was already inhabited, and dumped a whole bunch of people of multiple ethnicities there because the British Empire had abolished slavery, but that did not mean that they wanted people to stick around.

[34:16.5]
That's what Sierra Leone is, just like, a hob glob of ethnicities that became Sierra Leoneans. And the British Empire told us, you only have one king and that's the Commonwealth. Well, the Limba tribe was practicing monarchy long before anybody came in with their ideas about what a king is.

[34:33.2]
And King Alhaji Bombolai was not only one of the greatest Paramount Chiefs in recent Sierra Leonean history, he's also my grandfather. My grandfather built roads, had animal husbandry. My grandfather had the only functioning hospital for the provinces at its time.

[34:53.4]
My grandfather built the high school that my dad graduated from, and my father was groomed to take his place, but he declined and moved to America. So in 2024, on New Year's Day, I arrive in Sierra Leone with everything I own in five suitcases to continue the work of my grandfather and rebuild the infrastructure of my tribe.

[35:15.3]
So much of my praxis, everything from declining to charge for therapeutic services to giving out money to online constituents wherever I can, comes from the praxis of chief. As I said in 2023, when I initially ran this fundraiser to feed my family, "A good king lives well and fat off the riches of his people.

[35:35.0]
A good chief brings wealth and splendor upon his people." My name is Nadalyn Gwendolyn Ismatu Bangura, and I'm a young sovereign. And you know what? Exile don't scare me. I don't have a desire to slave for this country that doesn't want to protect me. I'm not going to work until I die.

[35:51.4]
I'm not going to be bullied by the cost of living to do things that are "Reasonable." I'm not gonna die a slave. I got people to feed. I'm not going to be scared out of doing the work that I know that I'm supposed to be doing. Some of the callings on my life are just straight up bigger than me. And I know that my peoples in Sierra Leone, the Limba tribe most in particular need me desperately.

[36:10.2]
And/also/however: I owe my life to the Black American peoples of what is currently known as the United States of America, or what the Panthers called us when they were building out a nation for our sovereignty: New Afrikans.

[36:28.4]
I owe my life to the New Afrikans of Turtle Island. And I don't scare easy. I did my time being scared. I felt the grief that I needed to feel. But quite frankly: I have work to do before I leave this place.

[36:43.8]
I said this once two years ago when the rice harvest felt impossible. Three years ago, actually! Almost. That was January of 2023. We're about to come up on January 2026. Let me show you what I did, with just my little pinky. You see this? BAN-GOO-RAH.

[36:59.0]
In Mende, that means black spotted leopard... or, Black Panther. Let me show you what I did with just a little bit flying under the radar. Hi, my name is ismatu gwendolyn. and I have not done a good job with being honest with you all. Grab your tea; I'm having chamomile.

[37:14.5]
I don't tell you enough about who I am and why I am the way that I am. This is in part due to circumstance; I never meant to become an "influencer." We kind of just ended up here. And this is in part because I am scared of the Internet. I am scared to be seen as more or less than human. I'm scared to be vulnerable. I'm scared to let you know about my personhood and not just my thoughts.

[37:32.9]
But the reality is my personal is political. And I cannot tell you what I believe without telling you why I am that way. And I am also an amalgamation of my communities. I'm papier-mâché pieces of the people that love me and that build me. I'm at the tail end of fundraising. I'm in Amsterdam right now trying to buy a tractor.

[37:49.3]
And I got a message on Instagram that straight up said, you know, it would be easier to give these things to you if you told us more about who you are. Sometimes I forget that there are people on the other side of the camera that, like, care about me sincerely. So thank you. And I'm sorry for hiding from you. I wrote you all an open letter.

[38:05.3]
It's like, longer than this and more eloquent than this. Specifically to LJ and everyone else that feels hopeless, I'm gonna read an abridged version. Hello. My name is ismatu gwendolyn, and I believe a couple of things. Because I am African, I believe in a free and fed motherland.

[38:22.5]
Because I am Black American, I believe in self-proclaimed freedom. Because I am a sex worker, I believe all power and all of the sting belongs rightfully to the worker bee. Because I am the child of farmers, of chiefs, and of food scarcity.

[38:38.5]
I believe that food sovereignty is the keystone to collective success. And most importantly, because I am young, I believe a better world is en route. Not just better days are possible, but that they are actively coming. A reborn world is exploding like the rising sun.

[38:56.9]
Soft at first and small, but awash with color and clouds and glory. I believe I will have a world that I hand to my children and say, look what we made for you. Look what we kept for you. I believe that oppressed people will eat until we are full.

[39:12.5]
And we will.

[39:22.6]
LJ specifically asked me, how do you have the extra energy to do all of this? This is what made me realize I have been dishonest with telling you about who I am and why I do what I do. I don't have extra energy. I am burning alive, with grief.

[39:37.9]
I don't have a choice. I am like this because I am either going to be terrified of the world or terrified that I'm doing something about it. But either way, I'm scared. So what can stop me? And more than that, this fundraiser has filled me with a hope that I didn't even know was possible.

[39:57.5]
I'm saying this as someone that has previously tried to end their life. I am so lucky to be alive to see this day.

[40:18.7]
Before I'm out of this country, I got a lot more. I got a lot more left in me. Have a good day. Wait. One last thing.

[40:30.2]
Thank you, God, for protecting me. Thank you for my villages back home who prayed for my safety and my safe deliverance. Thank you for the people that can see me. Thank you for the people that wait patiently in hopeful expectation for the day that people, not a people, but the people, are sovereign enough to feed ourselves, to clothe ourselves, to work for ourselves, to make sure that the work of our hands makes our days easier.

[41:11.1]
I'm in it for ease. Thank you, God.