shoopshoopchernobyl

My vagina is bald inside my underwear, inside my pants.  It feels everything and as I sat with you and your wife, trying not to look at either of you too much, and searching for perfect words to express my wrecked self and jaded worldview, I started my period.

The night before I was grooming my pubic hair and when I checked me out in the mirror, I saw that the right side was closer to center than the left.  So, I shaved a bit more on the left.  Then I had to shave a bit more on the right, working my way inward until I became smooth as a newborn.  It looks strange.

I woke up late the next morning, missed the bus, and was twenty minutes late to class.  There you were.  Waiting.  You were there with a woman who had long shining hair, a chunky necklace and Prada glasses- your wife.  She wouldn’t let anyone else talk about the material which was Black Feminist literature and criticism.  I was the only black person present.  It was a microcosm of society- male authority figure, white woman on a pedestal, a sister in the backround with a bleeding bald vagina.

Perhaps it began before the shaving- when a classmate fondled my hair?  I don’t feel safe and now I wear it all twisted up and hidden.  My whole life I’ve blended in with walls and shadows.  My hair brought me into the spotlight and I can’t handle the attention.  It’s just hair, for christ’s sake, and I’m just me.  But I’m fading again.

What  a relief, but sad as well.

Or maybe this started even before that, like with the move to Oregon?  The Bay Area?  Choosing not to go to college right after high school?  Not moving up a grade in elementary school when the opportunity presented itself?  Not staying at the hospital for the last week of Daddy’s life when I was asked?  Being born?

Anyway, I finally broke away.  You’d been gone for half an hour before I was able to get a word in edgewise to excuse myself because, like you and your wife, I’ve got other shit to do, like check out the damage in my underwear.  If it were you and me, I would have counted this as a special moment in my mental scrapbook of us I call “Milestones Bewteen Us About Which You’ve No Idea”: Started period in your presence.  There are others, like: I said the word pussy in your class, and my personal favorite thus far: you wrote that my paper was academic candy and I’ve got proof.

Instead, I have to add ‘I question your character’ to my twisted collection.  It’s not bad.  The wife is pleasant enough, attempting to connect herself with me, or check me, or whatever.  Honestly, it needed to happen sooner rather than later due to special powers I possess which make it possible for my thoughts to become reality.  This was inevitable.

And it should be noted that I ain’t that fucking great. 

I just loved that, for a time, you were no ordinary man for me. 

I am a wife, mother, daughter and student.  I am black, low-income, uneducated and not too young.  I want to subvert these identifiers.  I want to subvert the system that makes such markers so meaningful and inescapable, not only to the world around me, but to the world within me.  But how can I do so when all the tools at hand are the system’s tools?  How can I speak out when my words are not my words and my thoughts are inauthentic and filtered through the indoctrination of the system?

After discussing Julia Kristeva’s Desire in Language, I thought of Audre Lorde’s period of silence, ending after what must have been the frightful discovery of corruption threaded through her thoughts.  I reflected on the unshaved women of the 1970’s, who though hairy, still gave themselves freely to men.  I looked into sensible shoes.  I recalled Valerie Solanis’ S.C.U.M. Manifesto which laid out the plans for a matriarchal society but did not explain how to get women to accept the differences amongst themselves and unite in order to achieve her vision.  I haven’t worn mascara in days.  I became mindful of the words I choose, attempting to avoid personal pronouns in my speech and writing- which is burdensome- and examine my thoughts for authenticity.  And I am exhausted. 

I decided to fuck with syntax and use the word fuck in a paper in hopes that the reader will understand what I am trying to do and not mark me down for it.  Realizing, then, that this is precisely how the system operates, how I enable the system to continue operation by censoring myself and collapsing under its oppression, I begin again.  I made a promise to be true to my Self as a human being, as a person unique.  Five minutes later I realize that there is no Self to which I can be true, or that if there is Self in me, it has been crushed into some tiny speck hard to find. 

This idea of Self is not only necessary to achieve genuine autonomy, but is the basis for daily living, for belief, navigating the western world in which Self and individuality are highly regarded and are necessary to live with integrity.  How disturbing to realize I have no foundation, or rather, that the foundation I possess was not built by my hands, but constructed by a society that hates women, blacks, the old and the poor!  I am curious as to what I have that hasn’t been handed to me by those with ulterior motives.

I considered body language.  Perhaps body language is the one true expression of a Self- even a hidden Self such as mine, but recognized the oppressive imprint of acculturation on it.  Who will engage with an unsmiling black woman?  Judgment will come.  I do it to other women!  I see their sadness and feel this almost junkie need to make them feel better.  I cannot allow a woman real feeling.  I cannot allow this for myself either.  I will lie or blame pre-menstrual syndrome for behavior which does not comply with the good-girl standard.  Good girls are happy smiling girls.  They are compliant, quiet.  We, as a society, men and women alike, cannot abide an angry woman.  Or a sad woman.  It is so unbecoming!

I once spent a year not using commas in protest of conventions.  No one cared and I wound up confused when reading my own writing.  I rearranged the order of words, attempting to give new cadence, sound, and therefore meaning, to my sentences and all I got was “Is English your second language?”  Language is such a tricky, subtle and pervasive way to control.  Words scar something much more delicate and meaningful than flesh.  And flesh exclaims to the world which words to choose when attempting to inflict serious injury on that precious thing- the Self.  And such words are with us from our earliest consciousness.  There is never a time without the influence of words, the tone of those words, and the meaning of those words.

I could take the route of reclaiming, as when, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, women began referring to themselves as bitches in the attempt to create a strong, positive image around the word, although, I do not see how that has been effective in that way.  However, I could create my own meaning; apply my own definition to words formerly scorned or ascribed negative connotations.  Rather than dodging She, She-the weaker, She the defective, She- the receptacle of Him, I could redefine She and embrace She.  She becomes the powerful, the amazing, a verb, a Being to be reckoned with. 

As stated earlier, I am a mother.  Mother is not only the female parent of an offspring, but the supposition of other, nonhuman, nonliving ideas.  Mother is hug.  Mother is being at home.  Mother is sustenance.  Mother is at one’s service.  Mother is mother- not a person who may, at times, want to be alone, who has desires apart from the offspring, who is interesting, sexual, alive, and thinking and possesses a Self like one, like men.  So, for me, redefining Mother as life-giver, leader, comfort, and deciding to retain hug because there is nothing wrong with Mother as hug, seems the best way for me to embrace me, strengthen me and recognize my Self in Mother.

The problem, then, may not be simply language itself, but also who speaks the language and how one hears the language.  Much like being “born again” or quitting smoking, one must realize the need, look with one’s own eyes rather than the eyes of others, and choose.  I choose to reject the system’s definitions and ascribed merits or disdain for certain words associated with particular  Beings.  I am a wife, mother, daughter and student.  I am black, low-income, uneducated and not too young.  And by deconstructing these words, then rebuilding them with my own hands, redefining them and embracing their new meanings, I find my Self.  And my Self is pretty damn awesome.