Still Kicking
Priyanka Voruganti
After Claudia Rankine’s “Citizen”
You often feel like you need to itch your back but when you turn around there is
nothing there, there is no back, there was never a back and then you realize that
in fact you may not even be a person because what is a person without a back and
without a back you must not have a front and without a back nor a front you are just dust.
“I’ve gotten with black girls before, don’t worry” after
Slobbery insert of his tongue in your mouth after
Sitting on the bed feeling each other’s heat after
Led into a small back room after
His sweaty grab of your hand after
Drunken whispers on the dance floor after
Walking up to him saying what’s up.
Claudia Rankine says that the route is often associative. You try to dissolve into the blues of metaphor but your nose ring is too damn
big and too damn noticeable. Your friend once told you that a nose ring would make you look more Indian. You can’t dissolve into blue
if you are brown and that is a fact. Brown can’t dissolve into anything.
You are eight and you are in a pool. You are wearing your new bathing suit. Or swimsuit. You are always insecure and unsure about the right term. Both mean
the same thing but elicit different responses. Your white friends will never cease to correct you. There is no room for elasticity. You are kicking, kicking, kicking, and for a second it feels like you could kick forever. The water is blue, above it is blue, just blue, blue, blue. You are in Georgia. You haven’t seen another person like you, you, you. Kicking, you and other girls. But their movements are different. More smooth, sexy, even, while you don’t quite know that term yet. They remind you of ballerinas. Or mermaids. Their legs, white and flaky with suntan lotion, dissolve into the blues of the water. Disappear. You stop kicking and exit the pool.
More often than not, you think you overreact. You are doing something called reverse racism.
But didn’t it hurt? Didn’t you want to cry? Didn’t, for a second, for that second,
you see the sky fall, all the way down,
down,
down,
down to the ground and
even further? Didn’t it swallow you whole? Didn’t you drown? Weren’t you gone? Weren’t you invisible? It was just a comment. But in a way, wasn’t it death?
Everyone thinks she is trying to look like Kim Kardashian but you secretly know that she just wants to look like Venus. Everyone wants to look like Venus. Everyone would like to be birthed from the heavens and come out a pearly white. People say standards are changing but Venus is like Eve because she cursed beauty for the rest of us and for that you will always be doomed. Your friend Cara is not trying to look like Kim Kardashian, you try to say, your friend Cara is trying to look like Venus.
For all intensive purposes, you are a freak. You think by being funky and different and saying for all intensive purposes and tattooing yourself and being reckless, you will somehow be more exciting. Acceptable. Interesting. You first tried by painting yourself a nice shade of skin-color but people said you were playing white face.
22/f/aus is a work of video art by Sabella D’Souza that unpacks racial and digital identities through the conventions of online makeup tutorials. It seeks to subvert representations of “authenticity” and the “traditional” within the context of URL and IRL cultures. Through the creation of artificial whiteness (foundation), the artist confronts viewers to examine their own complicity in this act of erasure.
You watch Sabella D’Souza’s art piece and start to weep. Your foundation drips off of you like wax. Slowly, you take the little bits of dried, ugly wax and place them in a box to be put away forever. You want to be a freak. You know being exotic is capitalizing on your exotic culture but what the fuck whatever. It is my culture you say. I can exploit it if I want you say. You want to wear a sari to school to make the white boys scared. You want to wear a bindi everywhere like your aunt Geetha. The only way to face the necessity to dissolve into the blue is to be unequivocally white or starkly brown because simply being a brown body in a white space does not work. You choose starkly brown. You are decking yourself out at the Indian market and patting your left hand with your right saying it’s okay, it’s okay.
You are thinking of making yourself into a kind of meme. The exotic unapologetic spiritual brown desi-girl will be your tag name and then,
with a hashtag, you’ll be palatable. You are finally something they want
to see and you don’t have to wear that chunky foundation anymore. Your
nose ring makes you look Indian but now, without it, you do not work.
To curate your identity you gather all the materials you will need: henna, lenghas, bangles, token Hindi phrases, a lack of self-worth, an oath to fake it until you make it, and a nose ring.
You watched that movie The Sixth Sense when you were a child, before the thing that happened when you were eight. It was your first horror movie and the first movie you loved and the first time you realized that you loved horror.
Probably even when you were in the sky you loved horror.
Hinduism says that before you’re born you’re in the sky waiting to inhabit a body and you think that you were probably just up there looking for horrific things to witness and watch like some gory film. The Sixth Sense is about a boy who sees ghosts. As you grow up, you realize that you have a sixth sense, too. You can see the nuances of conversation. You can see the shadows of people.
You see that, don’t you?
You feel it in your bones. It feels up your limbs and crawls into the small spaces. A phrase or a word or a term thrown around. It finds a way to bundle itself into your body and stay there. And it grows. Like a smile widens, it stretches. Somehow you’re not elastic but it is. It finds ways to gouge out your eyes and feed on your stomach acid until you are sick, so sick, and sad, oh so very sad.
You feel the need to open up to a boy you’ve talked to for a long time because you’ve talked for a long time and now you want to speak your truth. You say you feel other. Amongst all your white friends, you say you feel dirty and less desirable and not as palatable or accessible or objectified.
You’d like to be objectified now and then you say.
He says I understand and I don’t see color.
He understands yet doesn’t see color? This contradiction makes no sense to you. You spend hours and days and weeks dwelling on this statement and reach a conclusion:
your longing is bleached out and if he doesn’t see color then he doesn’t see you at all because all you are is color
You are the browns, the red tones, the orange-y tint of henna. You are nothing but color. You do not dissolve in the blue waters of the pool that you were in when you were eight. You cannot dissolve no matter how much you try, for you are like oil and you buoy at the top of the pool and he does not deserve King Coconut Oil, the kind of oil every Indian mother lathers her hair in, because he does not see you.
Your mother tells you about Seetha and Rama and Hanuman and all the magical people in the sky that bring you strength and then, after that, you don’t feel the need to make yourself into a meme. You are less of a meme and more of a person, after that. Kali is the best goddess and you love her because she also likes horror and horrific things like you. She is violent and weird and funky and freaky and does everything authentically. She is nothing but color. You did not come from the heavens a pearly white but Kali tells you that you came out better.
You had a best friend when you were little, before the thing that happened when you were eight. Her name was Jenny and she was white and blonde and you two danced to Hannah Montana after school almost every day. She always danced in the front and always took the pink shirt while you were left with the blue one. One day, behind the monkey bars, she said something that leant itself towards the idea of goodbye and you got the gist so shortly after, you left. She said I think you are mean because your skin is dark. Such a simple statement, said behind the monkey bars, during recess, in first grade. It seemed so reasonable to you. B happened because of A. Your skin is dark so you are mean. And that meanness hardened and hardened and Jenny was right. You were mean, so mean and so angry. The hardening stopped and suddenly cracked open like an egg and all that was inside was tears. Tears because Jenny had said something that had made you sad and you had believed her truth. And now, at some odd age, after the thing that happened when you were eight years old, you realize that while you cannot dissolve into blue, you exude blue. The waters that flow from you are very blue and very salty and there is so much of it that it could fill thousands and thousands of pools for brown girls to kick their legs in. And you don’t want that. You don’t really like aquatic sports. You are handed a tissue and you blow your nose.