I have never received full credit from the SPLA [Sudanese People's Liberation Army], because the men are very sexist and feel that I'm acting out of place, bringing too much attention to myself - but for the funeral of our leader John Garang, they had me write the poem "Chol Apieth" to eulogize him, and that was their way of acknowledging my contributions.

There are more than 100 million African women who go topless at some point in the day, each and every day, to honor both God and our ancestors. So being in a country like America where nothing is hated more than the image of the black woman, even by black people'because her womb produces the black man and makes us black'I find it of grave importance to implement African images, and especially to produce media images that acknowledge the sexual power and fertility of black women.

I appear topless as a way of holding on to my Nilotic culture, and I also do it to taunt those Africans who are ashamed of our original cultural beliefs.

I do feel it's crucial that women's opinions be taken equally with men's. But still'I have not been accepted by the American white feminist writers and activists, and frankly I don't care to be, so I am a womanist. I am feisty and I am given to womanish behavior.

I have this problem where it's like'I can never stop thinking. For instance, I find myself obsessing over the treatment of black women and girls by black men'the fact that black men have a special prejudice against black women and generally don't protect them or attempt to understand them, and I cry an awful lot about that.

As for feminism, I am a womanist more than I'm a feminist.

I'm an African woman, I suppose these thoughts torture me more than they do black American people, because it's like watching my own children trapped in a car that's sinking to the bottom of a lake and being impotent to save them'the black Americans have their own holocaust going on. You see the black man erasing black children from the landscape, you see black women desperately trying to get the black man's attention by wearing blonde hair and fake blue eyes, 500 years after he sold her and their children across the ocean.