About Ray

Doreen “Ray” Gaura:  “I am complicatedly simple, religiously unorthodox, regimentally wild, fanatically balanced, reverently blasphemous, blissfully rowdy, introvertedly extrovert and devotedly noncommittal. I am a seeker soul aiming to traverse restrictions and confinements.”

In my world, not only do I see the grey areas, I also see the entire colour spectrum complete with various shades, hues and tones. As a female, brown skinned Zimbabwean human rights activist, 3rd wave feminist, Afrocentrist, sangoma (in training) and writer I have created this blog as a platform to talk about issues I feel strongly about including the sensitive and controversial (but highly important nonetheless) like same sex marriage & Afrocentricism as well as the fun, sometimes inane or totally random like how Justin Bieber is the Anti-Christ (no, not really), all this while looking at things through a kaleidoscopic lens.

It is also an attempt at creating my own identity; of myself by myself; by taking the occasional and often times necessary, introspective look at the things that help form my identity e.g. race and ethnic politics, gender politics, sexuality and sexual orientation politics, environmental politics, spirituality vs religion politics, “political” politics and the various forms of intercourse and interactions in this our global village and pinning them against a more global and universal backdrop. This quest to find and subsequently express myself inspired the name for this blog. Thanks  largely to my feelings towards the identity prescribed the brown person, the word “coloured” in this blog is a double entendre which serves to reference my race in a tongue-in-cheek-reclamation-for-it’s-poetic-appeal sort of way as well as the grey (colourful) areas in between. The word “ray” was also just as strategically selected for the title of my blog. Ray is a pseudonym I picked myself and in its use as such it means a beam or stream of light or in the case of my writing, to mean enlightenment, or hopefully something pretty close to that.

I feel I must at this juncture tell you that although I am fairly (read: almost widely) read, I do not have a University degree to my name and I have traveled quite a bit across Southern Africa (& a little in Europe) so if you are one of those sorts who qualify and quantify opinions and comments to be those that are valid and worth your time and bother based on a piece of paper (degree or visa) then you would do well to move from this page and settle yourself comfortably on the Dean of Harvard Law School’s blog or better yet, that of Indiana Jones. As for the rest of you, let’s talk 🙂

p.s. my posts are often really long 🙂