Stolen Black-Brown Girlhoods.
*Inspired by the powerful words of Patricia Williams’ (1992) Alchemy of Race and Rights. And thank you to great professors who encouraged me to find my personal voice in writing. To all the survivors of patriarchal sexual violence, I believe you. And for all the beautiful Black and Brown children whose childhoods, whose girlhoods were stolen from them. You will always belong with me.*
“If I didn’t define myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive” — Audre Lorde
Patricia Williams shares with us so beautifully the deep and complex emotions involved in taking up space, trying to “do good,” fighting for progress, transforming the world while your very being, your existence, your body is unwanted. What does it mean to exist at the borders, at the margins, as outsiders? To have your identity scrutinised, vilified, marginalised but simultaneously exoticised and exotified by the very same people. Sometimes, I think about my identities, my positionality, my place in the world and realise that my presence was never meant for the places that I entered. Born in the UK, in the very country that raped, pillaged and decimated my ancestors’ homeland. My birth was unwanted in the place that my citizenship belongs to; where the majority of people think the British empire was a good thing. My birth was unwanted for other reasons too, somewhat also caused by empire. 2nd generation mixed-race. But not the mixed-race that gets “too much” screen-time, not the Instagram model mixed-race, not the mixed-race that came from white rape of Black women. No, the mixed-race that we don’t discuss, mixing that occurred from white people deciding to steal African and Indian people to the Caribbean. So here I am, existing at the intersection of wars on Black vs “non-Black POC.” I am told they must be separated. There must be a distinction. And I wonder what happens to those of us who can’t be separated?
Existing feels like perpetual liminality, a never-ending process of being unwanted. I delve deeper into my histories, desperate to feel connections to the Guyana I’m told about from birth, whose customs and music and language envelop me and mother me. The Guyana that no one wants to take me to, that I later find out is because my brown grandfather hates Black people. The land of many waters. One people, one nation, one destiny. But not in my family when my own blood tried to kill my own blood. I hear that Guyana is part of the Caribbean. Looking at the map, I see my country in South America. Hmm, I wonder if the liminal space Guyana is in between wars of culture and possession; of curry duck and chow mein, of pepperpot and methai, of reggae and chutney, of Mashramani and Diwali, of the pictures of Hanuman and Jesus next to each other in my grandmother’s house is just like me. Caught between two worlds. No, multiple worlds? Not quite Black. Not quite African. Not quite Indian. Not quite Indo-Guyanese. Not indigenous enough but somehow all of these things at once. I hear my mum angry about Venezuela claiming our land; I hear my mum defend Guyana’s place in the Caribbean and I reach up at the bookshelf and pluck out my mum’s copy of Wasafiri. I read my mum’s own words about being mixed-race. About Guyana’s place-less-ness in between two worlds. About her own place-less-ness. I wonder if this place-less-ness, this liminality is perpetual. Hereditary? It feels never-ending.
I go to school. I am the only Black child in my class. Wait — not Black. I look at the few Indian kids and sadly, feel disconnect. India cast away those who were stolen to my land. They didn’t want us either. Too dark. But not Black. No, Indian is not Black I am told. I’m unsure how to interact socially but my tooth falls out and the smiling white girl takes me to the bathroom and we are now best friends. I’m happy, I’m wanted, I’m blissfully unaware that in 10 years, her naivety will be gone and my sexualised racialised-gendered body will be too much for her. Competition.
Not much time moves past and I am called in to the headteacher’s office. I am 5. I am told that I am using inappropriate language and must stay inside during break. My 5-year-old profanity is my 5-year-old experience. “Gang.” I said the word gang. My gap-tooth smile ends and I close my mouth, questioning whether they know I live in a war zone, inside and outside my home. Shootings outside the window and screams inside the window. I hear my mum sobbing. I’m not sure if it’s because she’s just been beaten or because I am in trouble at school. I think about this after I am told to sit inside on a bench while the white kids go and play outside. The word gang is not to be used at school. It doesn’t matter that my mum tells me to get down on the ground in the car as we drive home from school because there are people fighting with a crowbar in the street. It isn’t my fault I heard the word gang. I think to my 5-year-old self that this is unfair. But I learn in my solitude, watching the white children obliviously play, that I must not use it at school. My mum complains. She is the angry Black woman. Wait — not Black. The stones thrown at her in childhood, her white mother fetishising her Black father, and the taunts of “(golly)wog” don’t matter because as melanin fades, she is told she is white-passing and now she must acknowledge her privilege.
I am in the White Sea where days blur into months and months into years yet time stands still. Now the sea is red and I am 9 and bleeding. I read in the book at school that you don’t start bleeding until you are 12. I wonder why I have been cursed. Seeing my mum’s rosy cheeks, I sneak into the bathroom cabinet to put blusher on. Maybe the pink will hide the brown. I get to school and a white man orders me to the bathroom to take it off. I try to slam the door on my way out but it is a fire door and did not understand my wishes. It closes silently and I hear the white children laugh. I bleed and bleed and bleed and stare at my body, questioning why it looks different from the white kids. “Do you ever wish you were white?” I ask another brown kid. I hate my name and my skin and my body. I am told I look 16. I am 11. 5 years later, I change my name.
The white boys want to date me. I wonder why for a second but get distracted as I go home to wax my stomach. The white girls do not have body hair. And the white boys do not like it. I become someone’s girlfriend the next day but the following day I am called a Paki. I am fucked, in all senses of the word, before they ask me whether I wash in the River Ganges? I hear that I am going to be a “man-eater,” or I already am. I thought I was silent enough but the white girls decide that I’m getting too much attention. They start bleeding and plotting to exile me. Exile feels familiar because it returns me to a placeless state. I count down the days until school will end and I will be free. 1,394. I don’t realise at this point that it never ends.
Sitting in assembly after gay marriage has been legalised by the neoliberal capitalist state, my “friend” whispers that her father exclaimed, “What’s next? Marrying animals?” She giggles. My stomach turns. The next Monday, she informs me that I am not mixed race. No, I am a “mix of races.” I wonder what the difference is. But others’ denial is not a new phenomenon to me. My boyfriend calls me fat and I try to laugh about it online before the next white girl assures me that, “You’re allowed to be curvy. You’re mixed race.” I’m confused. Wasn’t I just — ? Anyways, I’m 16 and unsure what she means so I chuckle to hide the grimace inside. My mum had warned me about her, after all, her family think there are “too many Black people” in Dulwich. I wish I could find this surplus of Black people that belong to the non-place. But I realise they don’t exist; one of us is too many of us. We’re sitting at break and the same girl argues that people on the edges of accessing private education should be subsidised. Thankful I’m not studying Economics, I contemplate silently how rich people justify subsidising other rich people while the poor die.
Black Lives Matter. Mike Brown has just been murdered and the white kids at my school are demonising Black bodies again. “If they just followed the law…” I am told that I am being too loud. They don’t want to hear Black Lives Matter. It makes them angry. Their faces turn red. They trapped one of the Black girls in their white grasp and she tells me I’m not welcome in the common room and must leave. Exiled. Too tired to fight back, I go to collect my things, only to find that I too, do not matter. I pick up my bag and it is drenched. My work is lost, my words are lost, our lives are lost. I rush home, hoping no one speaks to me on the bus while they drive home in Audi’s gifted deservingly to them. Blood-money. My tears merge with the water they poured and I am not sure where one sea ends and the other begins. 7 years, and one copy of White Fragility later, they tell me, Black Lives Matter.
1,102 days pass by and I realise that I like women. Years of pleasing white boys and being an object of their colonial desires are over. My mum buys me Zami and I read Audre Lorde’s words and cry. My non-existence becomes existing through queer women of colour’s words. Wait! I’m not meant to use that term. Anyways, we exist? I’m tired of hiding and so I don’t. I want to be visible. Somewhere my visibility became invisibilised. Or was I always visible and invisible? I don’t know, it doesn’t matter because now I’m “out.” I’m out at this boy’s house. I sip my wine slowly and watch him gulp his, we talk about women. I think to myself, wow maybe some white boys aren’t so bad at all. He rapes me.
Staring at the mirror, I wonder whether I should even go to “prom.” If I don’t, they’ll think they’ve won. Shaking my head, I try to remind myself that they should never be centred and really, I’m the bullseye target of their world. A new group has taken me in, and I am thankful for moments outside of solitude, isolation, purgatory. I feel out of place but that’s nothing new. We walk in, my brown hands intertwined with other shades of melanin, my best friend’s and another friend’s who has agreed to be my “date.” It doesn’t take long, I’m barely 2 steps in before white hands violate me once again, grabbing my ass. My mind drifts to thinking about the little Black and brown girls raped by their master’s sons… But. I. don’t. have. time. to. think. My body stiffens and I spin around, face-to-face with a different boy whose fingers were inside me a few months ago, or was it a few years ago? Time is a construct. He informs me that he was told to apologise and laughs in my face. I want to hit him but I remind myself that violence is only allowed towards me, not from me, and I’ll be punished if I do. Never mind that they were inciting violence against me online a few days ago… “Under normal circumstances, I would never hit a girl but your truly pitiful performance in Slumdog Millionaire coupled with your white privilege rhetoric has left me with no choice.” Not needing to change my own name, I’m renamed Pacquisha. Parents are involved, schools are involved, the police are involved and their white headmaster assures my mum — Mrs… no that’s Dr… that it’s “just banter.” On all sides? I ponder how merely existing is deemed heated and offensive. Oh, how easily slave-masters become head-masters.
At university, I am determined to find other women with skin tones that don’t echo the colonisers of my homeland. Not just that, but I want to find queer women of colour. They must be here somewhere as after all, there’s others like me. Audre and Angela are like me. I search successfully, but in my search, I forget momentarily to look at the ivory walls in front of me. And beside me. And behind me. Those 1394 days never led to my freedom. Returning, I enter the white sea again. I stare at the white paper in front of me. Do supranational institutions make the world a fairer and safer place? I laugh. Who wrote this question? It doesn’t matter because they are all white and so I inevitably answer my own question. Determined to counter their white sterile colonial ways of answering, I write in colour about women they bear no resemblance to. Smiling, I submit and make my way to the biweekly Black Feminist Society meeting. Someone asks a question, a queer Black woman laughs and asks if we’re talking about heterosexuals? My heart warms and I journey home knowing that I am not the only one who exists in a non-place. Visible and invisible. The sound of my email whirs before I close my eyes to rest, my paper has been graded! This essay did not ask you to ignore men. Grade: 62. I don’t sleep much that night because I am raging. I wonder whether this is what it means when Lorde talks about the uses of anger. Smoking away my fury, I drift asleep.
A year or two passes and my final assignment is due. The freedom that I thought I would find after those 1394 days never came. We are told to make a podcast about identity and citizenship. My time comes to speak of the homeland my ancestors were stripped to and I was stripped away from. Listening back, I hear my awkward voice talking: “Guyana…” “the Caribbean…” “borders Venezuela and Brazil…” my words meander and my podcast ends with soca music. With my final submission, I wonder again if now I am finally free from colonial institutions’ grasp. My computer beeps. I stare at the words on the screen and am unsure whether to laugh or cry or rage or all three at the same time. Ghana was a great… GHANA. Isn’t this a Geography department? I email my complaints and I am told that the white man grader is Dutch and so English is not his first language. “Sorry” they say. I think about Brown bodies whose languages were ripped from them and comrade-lecturers from Mexico who I know have been punished, devalued and belittled for small grammatical mistakes.
I move to the US because Black women don’t become professors in the UK. But am I Black though? Black enough but not enough. I reflect at this point, ever accumulating years of non-belonging, of being invisiblised yet hyper-sexualised. Of whiteness’ impenetrable chokehold. Of sticky white boys’ hands and limbs wanting to be inside me but not wanting to know what is inside of me. This world, marked by colonial whiteness, by colonial white patriarchies, by colonial ableist white supremacist capitalist transphobic hetero-patriarchies will always refuse to see me. Hyper-visible, hyper-sexualised yet invisible and violated. My queer multiracial 3x migrant woman self was never meant to belong. And yet… somewhere along this never-ending voyage across the white sea and the red sea, I found belonging. With the Black and brown and white and queer and trans and gay and lesbian and zami and poor and crips and chubby and fat and hairy and FUCK all these FUCKING colonial binaries. I love my name and my skin and my body.
We exist, at the edges, the margins, the borders, with multiplicitous understandings of freedom, and of liberation. Where worlds and words co-exist and accountability is not a choice or an Instagram aesthetic. We belong, in a world, that you will never belong to.
References
Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.
Williams, Patricia, J. 1992. Alchemy of Race and Rights. Harvard University Press.