This Will Be My Undoing

by Morgan Jerkins

  None of this is to say that I was not aware of my blackness in Japan. Obasans, middle-aged Japanese women, touched my waist-length Senegalese twists when they discovered that I spoke Japanese and were stunned to learn the number of hours it took me to complete the hairstyle. But to the best of my knowledge, that was the extent of it, even though I have heard of other black people experiencing far worse. I was not in a country where my ancestors had been enslaved. I was not stared at when I walked through different neighborhoods either in the day or the evening, no waitress gave me poor service, no one made any snide remarks about my body, and I never heard a racial slur. In short, I was free. Until I heard that George Zimmerman had been acquitted.

  I was sitting in my room in my dorm. It was early in the afternoon, and I had just finished translating some of Hagiwara Sakutaro’s poetry. Like most afternoons, I was using Twitter to catch up on all the breaking news. Immediately after logging in, I saw a photograph of George Zimmerman’s gleeful face, looking up and smiling at his lawyer, on my news feed. I don’t remember breathing as I read through hundreds, maybe thousands, of tweets from black users expressing their grief and sorrow for Trayvon Martin. It was a shock wave that reverberated throughout the world, but because I was so far from America, I felt a deep pain at not being around those who looked like me during this moment of collective mourning. The walls began to close in around me. The sun piercing through the windows became too bright for my eyes. There was no word in Japanese or English that could accurately encapsulate how much I was sinking on the inside. I confided in one of my friends, a woman of white and Chinese Malay descent, who was a passionate Democrat. Like me, she was appalled with the ruling. That relief in sharing my disappointment, however, was short-lived. Her anger was political; mine was personal. I needed someone black to talk to.

  Why would I call myself a black woman when I could just be a human? Why?

  Because when I walk out of my front door, I am not simply treated as a human being. I am treated as a black woman. I am both unconsciously and consciously aware of how others’ biases kick in when they see me, and how their subsequent treatment of me differs from the way they might treat someone else who is not black and female. The responses I get when I report my treatment to other black women let me know that these behaviors are patterns. My experience flattens if I believe that I can freely roam this earth without thinking about how my body impacts where I will and will not be tolerated. When a white person asks a black woman why she cannot just be a human, he or she is asking, Why can’t you be like me? Why can’t you partake in the humanity that I have as my birthright, even though I can rip that humanity away from you by casting you out of our society if you do anything that I don’t like?

  When the George Zimmerman verdict was announced, I only had a short time left in Tokyo and my sadness clouded my enjoyment of these last few days. Whenever I boarded the train on the Saikyō Line, I was more aware of how Japanese people are not comfortable with making eye contact with gaijin. Whenever my eyes connected with a Japanese person’s, their eyes would drop to the floor, and that aversion began to shred me like cheese against a grater. Could they not see me? Of course they could, because looking away meant that they knew that I was an outsider. But I wasn’t just an outsider. I was a black outsider, and I was also a woman. They had to realize this. I stood out among the white expats, who were mostly young white men who loved anime and fetishized Japanese women and white women who could easily seduce a wide array of Japanese men. They had to know. I wanted them to, because not acknowledging me was a dismissal of the body in which I lived. Then again, wasn’t this what I’d wanted, to flee to Japan to become merely a foreigner? Wasn’t this the whole purpose of my relationship with Japan, for it to wrap me around its cherry blossom trees, stretch me far across its expansive mountain ranges, and then squash me into a two-dimensional image that could be splashed across the television screens of Shibuya Crossing? Isn’t this what I’d wanted?

  Everything became distorted. I walked around Shinjuku and sneered at people taking selfies while making the peace sign with their fingers. How dare they be happy when a black child met his untimely death and his killer went unpunished? How dare they be happy while I was sinking? There were Nigerian men who hung around Shinjuku, and I had been told that they were notorious for scamming, robbing, and drugging naive tourists. I’d ignored their gaze until now, but after the verdict all I wanted was to get drunk off plum wine, hobble over to one of them with teary eyes, and beg them to hold me—whether in public or a nearby hostel—for a few hours. I wanted to press my black skin against another black person’s black skin, breathe in synchronicity, and remember that we were alive and that this was resistance in and of itself. Each Japanese word I uttered felt like a spritz of salt and lemon juice on my tongue. I was a fraud, pretending that my education and multilingualism would somehow protect me from the ever-revolving cycle of black death. I should have seen all of this coming.

  I could not sleep. Each time I laid my head upon my pillow, I imagined that Trayvon Martin was hiding in the corner and that he would emerge—with blood pouring out of his fatal wounds—to stand before me with a look of sheer disappointment. How dare you sleep? You have several hours while I have eternity. It was not my time to go. When I closed my eyes, I saw George Zimmerman’s smiling face—only this time he was facing me and not the judge. In his pupils I could see the reflection of Trayvon’s cold corpse lying on the pavement, a body transfixed on the Floridian ground by bullets, a body en route to see his Father. And in Zimmerman’s smile, I would see that I was next, that the destruction had already begun. I had to sleep with the lights on, and with a movie playing on my laptop, to get any semblance of rest. I didn’t tell any of my friends on the program. I feared that they would think that I was losing my mind and would perhaps report me to our supervisor. Besides, I would be back on American soil soon enough.

  When I returned to New Jersey, nationwide protests were under way. I saw black people my age standing outside in the sweltering heat for hours with signs, refusing to lower their eyes whenever a police officer surveyed their mobilization. I didn’t go to any protests that year, although I would in late 2014, months after Eric Garner died. That is how grief and resistance works. It is a cycle, and a revolution never ceases for a black person, no matter where we are or which languages we speak.

  After that lunch at Augustyna’s house, I began to reassess the many different settings in which I was one of the only black people, if not the only black person, in a room. Are white people only able to talk to me if they’ve trained their minds not to see me as black? Is the only path to acceptance not breaking the fantasy that white people have of everyone’s equality? I’ve never thought I was anything but human. My black womanhood does not cancel out my humanity. These are not facts that repel each other.

  Physiologically, of course, we are all human. Socially, we dehumanize people of color daily. We judge their clothes, speech, hair, and education level as criteria for whether they have earned the right to be treated with common decency. We use these same criteria to judge if they deserve to die at the hands of law enforcement, or men like George Zimmerman. Because the question that white people are asking is not Why can’t we all be human?, but Why can’t you be like us?

  Before Harlem, I had never experienced a space where blackness was so real that I could taste it—the consistency of baked macaroni and cheese, the sweetness of yams, the smoothness of the surface of fresh corn bread. It fills me up and comforts me, but I understand that our relationship cannot be one-sided. I have started to go to block association meetings, to explore more parts of Harlem, to pay more attention to the politics surrounding me. Blackness is like an engine that needs constant oiling.

  My judgment of the black people I saw on the train—the woman I thought was crazy for speaking about the Lord to a white man, the man who spoke of the book of Deuteronomy to all those who boarded at 125th and Lenox, the men who rapped aloud, the black youths who
played music without headphones—was made inside the context of a white world, a world that is measured by reason and protocol according to white people at the expense of people of color. I did not know why black people couldn’t keep to themselves, why they could not remain invisible, why they couldn’t shut up, why they couldn’t stop trying to bring others into their spaces. Harlem is not a white space, and so black people do not need to behave in a way white people find respectable. We cannot, and should not, have to live our lives according to traditions of Western European civilizations because they are not natural to us. We are intensely spiritual and communal. We are a feeling kind of people. We can drop into a song at any time—the right time—and be on beat. We use our whole bodies to convey feeling. No parts of ourselves are closed off to others, and especially not to the environment; our black spaces reaffirm our connection to nature, our reality.

  I still dream of Japan. Whenever I see a Japanese restaurant, whenever my teeth sink into onigiri, whenever I see paper lanterns, I yearn for it like a long-distance lover. But the truth is, it’s not that simple. Japan hasn’t come around to accepting Ariana Miyamoto, a half-black, half-Japanese woman, as Miss Japan—because I suppose her brownness nullifies her nationality. I often wonder if this love affair will be different the third time around, if my newfound comfort in my own skin and ability to question all I see will make me privy to all the things that I did not want to see before. What then?

  I call myself black because that is who I am. Blackness is a label that I do not have a choice in rejecting as long as systemic barriers exist in this country. But also, my blackness is an honor, and as long as I continue to live, I will always esteem it as such.

  8

  Who Will Write Us?

  She walks through the waters of Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain with five women behind her. They are all dressed in white, and their hands are clasped together in front of their midsections. The sun is beginning to set; the sky is tinged with hues of blue, light gray, yellow, and magenta. Besides a branch, no other entity is in the water to detract from these women. No birds or planes fly overhead.

  As they cross the shallower parts of the lake, their moving feet create ripples that expand and multiply. They walk slowly because they need to take their time. Their leader is “going through,” as older black women used to say. She is “going through,” an ambiguous phrase that sounds small but encompasses a wide range of experiences and emotions. The only way to get through is to go through, and so she and her black female companions have taken to the water. Enslaved blacks went through these same southern waters to escape captivity. They would submerge themselves in the water to throw the slave catchers’ dogs off their trail. But this scene reaches back further than 1619, when the Dutch sold the first captured Africans to the colonists in Jamestown. Water is a part of the Dagara cosmological wheel, an element that focuses on healing and reconciliation. It is a belief system used to build identities and communities. This water is about reconciliation; water creates balance and restores peace. It is a conduit through which someone can see beyond her turmoil. Immersion in water represents rebirth across many major religions: a Christian baptism, a mikvah in Judaism, the release from the cycle of life and death for Hindus who bathe in the Ganges, the Islamic practice of wuḍū. This scene, when she crosses the waters of Lake Pontchartrain with five black women behind her, is called “reformation”: reformacion, reformationem, reformare, an improvement, an alteration for the better. She is moving across landscapes and traveling through emotions, and we are privileged enough to journey alongside her. Her name is Beyoncé, and she is both who we thought she was and everything we were not prepared for her to be.

  When Beyoncé released her Lemonade special for HBO in late April 2016, I was not ready. I have a tendency to avoid watching and listening to highly hyped releases at the same time as everyone else because I think that their often exaggerated anticipation and response will affect my viewing and/or listening experience. But I received an assignment from Elle.com to write about Lemonade, and because I was getting paid, I knew that I had to do it now and I couldn’t allow those exaggerations to affect my judgment. I had been wowed by the release of “Formation” two months prior. I knew that Beyoncé would show that black people are humans who deserved to be treated as such: capable of rage and deserving of respect. As I watched Lemonade, however, I felt like I was being broken open and hollowed out like a gourd, which Beyoncé filled with her raw melodies of ancient heartbreak and grief.

  I was mourning throughout the entire hour-long special. I mourned for a relationship that I’d never had. I mourned for a love that I’d never experienced. I mourned for sons I’d never birthed. I mourned for a marriage in which I was never bound, a man who had never united himself with me, good times that never transpired, bad times that did. I did not know if I was projecting or if, through Lemonade, I was tapping into some deeper, communal spirit passing through an invisible wavelength connecting me to the women who came before me, existed alongside me, and will come after I am gone. I was beside myself, and had no idea how I was going to form a cogent argument, let alone open the essay. The experience was similar to watching something in a foreign language that you understand, and yet as soon as you feel those words with your entire body you are no longer able to translate because in that process, something will be filtered and therefore lost.

  When I watched Lemonade for the first time I happened to be with my mother, who had assumed that, because of the ominous trailer, Beyoncé was up to some scary business and therefore initially had no interest in joining me. But she was intrigued by my unblinking eyes, so she sat up and readjusted her head scarf. She asked me to unplug my earphones from my phone so she could listen. In a matter of minutes, she was able to help me formulate an argument with a kind of clarity that made me wonder if she had watched it before the rest of the world. The truth is my mother had been cheated on and betrayed. Unlike me, my mother could mourn for a relationship, a love that she experienced, a marriage to which she was bound, a man who vowed to unite with her, the good times that transpired, the bad times that had passed but were still engraved in her memory like characters on tombstones.

  When I logged on to Twitter after the special was over, I realized that I was not alone in my mourning. That night, the social network became a reservoir which black women filled with emotions that they might or might not have been fully able to articulate, but felt within all the grooves of their souls. Beyoncé awakened something in all of us. Her songs laid claim to something dormant in us all, something that we had consciously or unconsciously been hiding. Lemonade was not about uplifting black people in general, but rather black women specifically.

  In October 2014, the French film Girlhood (Bande de filles) was released to much critical acclaim. Set in a poor Parisian suburb, the story centers on Marieme, a sixteen-year-old black girl who is failing academically and desperate for a sense of belonging because her workaholic mother and abusive brother cannot provide her with the comfort and support she needs. She eventually befriends a group of other black girls, and although they swear and steal, they are also a tribe that looks after its members. There are true moments of friendship, when they sing Rihanna songs in hotel rooms and dance outdoors, but they engage in vicious fights with other women in rival gangs and attempt to ingratiate themselves with men not out of romantic desire, but rather out of a desire for respect.

  Girlhood is magnificent and fatalistic. It is an exploration of how a black girl can or cannot become dominant in a racist and patriarchal society, one in which a path of continual poverty, lacking any upward trajectory, seems to be already determined for both her and her friends. Frames contrasting silky weaves and natural hair, open doors with men lurking beyond every corner, and safe spaces behind closed doors reinforce the idea that this film is not a simple coming-of-age story. Girlhood is different not only because the main characters are black, but also because there isn’t much emphasis on these teenagers’ psychologic
al and moral growth. They are just trying to survive, pushing back on reality every once in a while through song and dance before returning to their hermetically sealed world, which is completely at odds from the popular perception of Paris that centers on the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Élysées.

  Months after I had watched Girlhood and on multiple occasions argued that it had raised the bar for a film about teenaged black girls, I found an interview the director, Céline Sciamma, gave to Indiewire. Sciamma said, “I’m making this universal, and I decide that my character, who represents the youth of today for me, can be black . . . It’s not about race. It’s not about struggling with racism.” Unlike Marieme and her friends, Sciamma is a white, middle-class woman. Her inspiration for Girlhood came from observing “gangs” of young black girls both in and around Parisian shopping centers and the Métro. I am not sure if Sciamma ever spoke to these young black girls, or whether she is aware that groups of black women are not always gang-affiliated, or engaged in fighting and theft. When she saw them, why did she even feel like she had a right to tell their stories? “I had a strong sense of having lived on the outskirts even if I am a middle-class white girl,” she told the Guardian. “I didn’t feel I was making a film about black women but with black women—it’s not the same. I’m not saying, ‘I’m going to tell you what it’s like being black in France today’; I just want to give a face to the French youth I’m looking at.”