by Kola Boof
The producers, studio executives, finance officers, and all-around race-deniers got down to business and decided that I was too black to play a black woman.
In fact, the Americans decided that every woman in West Cassavaland was too black and nappy, too Negroid-faced, to represent what we actually look like, what our actual beauty looks like.
They instead cast an African mulatto and surrounded her with male actors who looked like Djimon Hounsou, Don Cheadle, and Taye Diggs—you know how they do in Hollywood.
Killing and killing with images that gradually erase us.
I don’t care what the black Americans and British try to tell you when you grow up, my son—a wood log may float atop a river a hundred years, but it will never be a crocodile.
Look what they did to Kamit-Ama!
I wanted to kill everybody in America for such hypocrisy and blindness, but then I realized: it’s not my country.
It’s not my country.
I will never have representation from those racists and their fifty-six shades of plantation-raised Afro-zombies. It’s impossible, because through my black womb, little black boys like you cannot be erased from their landscape. So, you see, it’s me who they have to erase first.
After losing the miniseries, my agent sent me to lunches with several black American film directors, all men—but fishing for parts from them turned out even worse.
Whereas swashbuckling white men had told me all my life that I was beautiful, I was suddenly surrounded by hip young black American men who seemed embarrassed by my bald head, shocked that my color was real (not computer generated), and whose standoffish glances inferred that I was not just ugly, but no part of them whatsoever. Though their black American lips, noses, and foreheads were unmistakably of a West African mother-seed, some would say things like, “They got some fine bitches in Ethiopia”—and because of that rejection, it occurred to me that perhaps men like Stevedore and James weren’t so taken by my beauty as they were by me being an oddity, a kind of rare alien artifact. A cryptid.
I tell you now: no pure African woman should ever set up house in the United States or Great Britain.
It’s my image that they ban from the screen, so that you lose the memory of your real mother’s face, my beauty in its full, perfect darkness. Then, through their sanctioned Pogo Metis Signare girl, they begin to erase you as well. And I can’t tolerate that.
I love to laugh about how Hollywood and the black Americans treat me now, because this island is my revenge, the proof that I will never be erased.
INDIGENOUS
I love you, my son.
I no longer fear dolls.
I guess I can let you go now.
You are getting bigger and more independent by the day, Eternity—your manish black legs jetting across the white beaches as you leap and fly like a spear into the clear surf, engaging my sense of adventure and reminding me of the freedom-loving Sea Horse and his enthusiastic way of making love to the ocean. He swam with his hips as you do—it’s the way black men dance, you know, with their hips.
You’re growing so fast.
I miss him.
I guess I can let you go now …
On warm sea-soothing evenings when the religion of man’s penis flutters beneath my smirking contemplation, I taste sweet clarity knowing that my atheist woman-reflecting charcoal vagina has brought yet another black man into the world, and that this reproduction is indeed Africa in its purest most realistic state; the earth’s first religion being my black pussy.
Queen Tasso and her children come to visit us and I shake my head, wondering how I survived all that I have been through, because I’m not even thirty years old (this time); and yet, sitting on the porch serving peppercorn chicken wings and iced tea, my bony hands picking up a comb with which to scratch Tasso’s scalp, laughing and talking, braiding her soft, springy jungle of nappy hair— it’s as though I’m the living and the dead all in one, and I know enough to say, “Fear not.”
It’s because of you I’ve decided … I do have a soul.
Don’t be afraid, I let you go.
Don’t be afraid.
Swim, son; your heart rises and falls with the knowledge that nothing truly African can ever escape Africa. Other bitches try to wear my face. The world over; other bitches try to wear my face. But here, black as all black put together—the genesis of vision itself—I am Eternity’s mother. I am the one who said, Beauty is when you look like your own people. “Ife kwulu ife akwudebe ya” (If one thing stands, another thing stands by it). This is we, the Eternity … accept no imitations.