The side that faces you.
A comadre asks a classroom to sit with the courtroom portrait of a militant nationalist, sketched by Picasso. Djamila Boupache captive in Paris for rebellion in Algeria. Clean, firm, lines distort her features towards orientalism.
She is portrayed as abstract and profiled with clarity.
“History can also be unmade and rewritten, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated,” Edward Said said. Ears blocked by bias never listen.
Kajol lines swept under an angled eye in a singular motion: inherited muscle memory. Deep inhales stop working for childbirth and fear. Pain sneaks in. Inflamed nostrils garnished at times with a gold ring. The gleam set against skin too dark to be read as the rebellious accessory of boredom in suburbia. Markers of meaning become a menace.
When did a feeling become terminology on trial?
The heat we apply will never quite tame locks out of suspicion. Strands of your colors never fully assimilate with our (ironically) dominant genes. Orange is what happens when white resists brown, a child in America will tell you. We never fully occupy linear language to liberate: a pursed lip prevents shortness of breath.
Too much bodily cover and you are a violent threat, too little and you’re vulnerable to it. “We didn’t want you here anyways,” says a Berlin immigration officer as the scarf falls from your shivering head.
* * *
The category to contain us, another comadre in Oaxaca says, has “been affixed so firmly to our faces that it becomes a mask that tries to pass itself off as skin, to eclipse our own self-image.”
* * *
This side faces me.
Bloodletting never stays inside the lines. Artistic anxiety itself is shaded, settling differently in the shaking fingers of the dispossessed.
You never realized that the mask of empire was comforting, a lavender-infused soft pillow that blocked the darkness. The enlightened produce well-crafted lines to tether humanity to that which is inherently good. Discourse is the strategically selected filter to cover shadows of atrocity.When it slips, it reveals raw lust: technologies of facial recognition are futile against the technologies of war. In hindsight, it was not enough to recognize the contours of intent when the depths of insatiability were laid bare.
Blood visibly drains from the skin in shock, from the organs after trauma. Rumors amongst the besieged say the enemy (here and there) is experimenting with weapons that render injury invisible. Pain feels the same.
One eye on suffering, theirs and yours. Deep red spreads across the other cheek that never fully turns, only burns under your gaze. Deep breathing does not re-oxygenate old wounds. Blood coagulates around masks that form on the inside. Boundaries, therapists say. These ones never stay secure.
I don’t know if the will to resist outlives the longing for death.
We grasp for each other in a blackout, “Are you ok?” The message hovers between you and her, waiting for the double checks to appear.
“I’m still here.”
