Blind Eye of the Beholder

A few poems really stood out to me this week but especially Ebony Page's To Become Unconscious which deals with so many issues--western beauty standards, decolonization, linguistic racism, self-love in such a short space on the page.

When I say linguistic racism I'm talking about the way dark/brown/black is consistently codified as bad/evil/dirty and light/white means good/holy/clean. Many people don't think about the way we position words in our society, definitions of words are not static things get added and taken away all the time and they shift with society. And when we have the society we live in things associated with marginalized people get taught as insults and jokes. I love how the narrators realization of this, such a small thing to look up a word in a dictionary, but it cracks open her world, makes her interrogate all the things she's been taught to belief are absolute truths and seem them as transitory and subjective.

I think she uses/mis-uses/re-uses the words conscious and unconscious to deliberately show us how subjective language can be. Page is evoking a lot of language of social movements that had consciousness raising session to break out of a colonized mind set. By calling herself unconscious when she realizes these things the narrator not only evokes the definition of black again she's also turning the script around and saying that yes what is consciousness raising for a community may be seen as being unconscious by the mainstream. So it makes us think about what is knowledge? What is beauty? What are all these things that we've been told are defined by a very particular set of constraints and what if those constraints are actually liberation for a marginalized community? All of it depends on perspective.

The narrator then goes about confronting the standard of beauty in Western society which is a decidedly white ideal of beauty. Physical traits associated with Europe are good and those of anywhere else are either ugly or othered to the point of exotification. There's a new documentary coming out soon by Chris Rock called Good Hair which explores the billion dollar a year black hair industry. When the words black hair industry are used what we are talking about are products and processes that involve making hair look similar in texture to European hair. The media makes us complicit in this as well. What's the last black actress you can think of that sported a 'fro, not for a role but just in general? Maybe Pam Grier in the 70's. It's a vicious cycle because the standard makes it near impossible for women who don't fit into the ideal standard of beauty to make it. And so they force themselves into a mold and by the time they might be famous enough to start to change the system they are already invested in the structure too much to be willing to tear it down.

I've been thinking a lot lately about black female identity and how it's portrayed and through which lens it gets viewed. The controversy of Tyler Perry adapting, directing and producing the film adaptation of Ntozake Shange's landmark choreopoem For Colored Girls who Have Considered Suicide...When the Rainbow is Enuf which is a text that many black women cite as a landmark work about their experiences in our society is a classic example of the way that even texts written specifically for black women by black women to tell the stories of black women can get co-opted (note: a black woman was at the helm until Perry decided he wanted the project). Looking at the situation from one perspective it's great to such a seminal work made into a film but at the same time it's being taken from a specific community and being filtered through someone else's lens and who knows what that'll do to it.


I wandered away from the poem a bit but I think all these things are connected--the way beauty is structured, the way identity is structured doesn't come from us, it comes from society that tells us who's good, who's bad, what's right, what's wrong and only through decolonizing our minds, undoing what is constantly being done to us can we break free. But then the result seems to be when you do your work will jest be taken and reinterpreted through part of the lens you were trying to escape. Huh, not a particularly peppy post but some of the things I've been contemplating lately.

-Naamen