black woman and her desire.
the body and it's scores: a short story.
The Black woman is a desirable creature in the most primal form imaginable. The Black woman is something to take apart and use, No need to put her back together. The Black woman only knows desire, sees herself desired and runs towards this source of light. The Black woman is desire materialised.
I think about a Black woman’s desire often as I am both Black and woman. I think about how our forms have been sexualised since our days of being inchoate masses of bones and teeth. I think about the way we are shamed for not desiring, but being desired. Taking on the shape of desire as though we’d chosen this build when in reality, this body chooses us. Desire is not the same as intimacy, despite what you might think. Intimacy requires tenderness, a certain kind of desire that flew over out heads and met the lighter colours along the way. A Black woman is not soft because she has no time to polish her scales, their rough edges grazing skin and pulling. Her own skin sullied by men who see her as less than. The skin that’s applauded only for it can be stolen.
Black woman and her desire is hard to explain but I will try. She is dating this guy (she considers dating women but her desire is not meant for softer hands). The man is tall, brown, lighter than her. That’s important. The Black woman meets him at night when all things have blackened and her skin shines like thick, tooth rotting chocolate. She blinds him. She knows this and uses it, curves it, rubs off on him to create a symbiotic mould.
The Black woman is ass and titties. The Black woman is a conduit of sexual violence. The Black woman knows not why she’s desired outside her shape, believes herself to be the embodiment of an armoured creature, builds up these high, sparkling walls that take years to climb. When the guy she is dating finally gets past the barbed wired tips, the Black woman is sure that he is the one. They have become an inseparable force, a power couple, Jada and Will pre-entanglement. The Black woman begins to revere her body, because it is loved by one man and herself.
It is then, and only then, that he morphs into a sinister being. The fact of her body is suddenly an issue, suddenly a cause for concern. After the Black woman has been drained of her fight and her desire is no longer enough, she is discarded. She is softened, tossed out like wet fish. The Black woman, in search for another parasitic affair, continues this routine, the contours of her hollow impulse pulling men into her snare. Married or cuffed, there’s no one able to resist he.
These same men, do they not ridicule her in fear of her power? Say ‘you’re a thot, a bitch, a pussy with legs, not even pink. No one wants you outside of your desire, and even then, your desire isn’t your own.”
Can you imagine? Shamed for the shape everyone assigned to you. Can you imagine? ridiculed for taking advantage of something stuck to the back of your neck, suddenly apart of your soul.
But the Black woman doesn’t know intimacy. She has never asked herself what she desires. Wonderment is a beautiful thing. It is a privilege to be curious when you are always trying to survive. The Black woman searches for her own curious desires, which is to say, she familiarising herself the shape of her body.
The Black woman is trying to be both madonna and the whore. She is scouring the internet for someone to tell her what it is she’s meant to desire. There is no one in her life willing to tell her, mothers and aunties appalled at lust that isn’t first borne from a desire to please a man, no, the Black woman is trying to please herself. She takes up dating apps, she finds it hard to define herself in words. The sultry pictures do a better job but it has been weeks and she does not recognise that woman. The Black woman is dating, is laughing with old men with older money and boyish grad students that wear glasses and exist only to please. The Black woman is somewhat uncomfortable when they show her love. The Black woman at times takes their love and shits on it. She believes the problem is her. There is a root cause somewhere in her body but the threads keep spinning. How does one find desire and cut it off? How does one live with both lust and intimacy? Truthfully, she wants to fuck. Is that so bad? Needing sex? Of course it is! She reads the bible, craves damnation. Prays to a god she’s never believed in to take her vagina away. She has nightmares of female castration, of being rid of her womanhood if it means being rid of her sin.
It is a horrible way of living. trying to understand a body that has never had agency, trying to seek help from families that looks at you in disgust. Where to turn to except for the men who see desire in her form and relish over it? she feels a sharp sense of guilt, the kind of pain that swells under the skin and itches. She feels a rip, a tear in her fibres, the kind that snap from a bunch. she howls in pain, thrashing in her clothes. She is burning, keeling over in rage, trying desperately to understand why she cannot simply exist.
Her body is morphing, shuddering as it sharpens at the edges and falls away at the edges of another lover’s bed, reaching it’s crescendo. There is no way of stopping it. Who’s desire is this? Who is this body for?
Eventually, the Black woman reaches a cress, the ephemeral bridge of a rainbow that holds up the meat and bones of her soul. She opens her eyes and the clouds wave at her, saying, you owe no one but yourself an answer.
She takes this as an absolute truth and discovers something in her splintered parts, the shards winking back at her as she assesses, looks, tries in whatever way to see other parts of herself not defined by a whole shape designated at birth. The Black woman and her desire look inwards, waiting for the clouds to part again.
this is beautifully real sis ✨😇