Love Is an Ex-Country

Home > Other > Love Is an Ex-Country > Page 14
Love Is an Ex-Country Page 14

by Randa Jarrar


  Z’s Islam was, like mine, more of an identity than a practice. We spent the first day of Ramadan getting stoned and driving forty-five miles out of town to attend a LARP, or a live-action role-play game, where nerds gather in large spaces and pretend to be vampires. We arrived too early, and I began jerking him off in the car, a mile away from the exit. We ended up fucking in a parking lot for half an hour, him calling me his good girl. At the end of Ramadan, he came over, and we drank Eid champagne. We pretended that the label read “Halal. Enjoy for Eid!” In the morning, I asked him if he thought the pork chorizo I had in the fridge was bad. He smelled it and said he didn’t know. I told him I didn’t know anything about pork. He said he didn’t either, and we laughed. Two Muslims trying to make eggs and chorizo? It didn’t happen.

  •

  The first time I asked Z to collar me, I was nervous. I didn’t want to be rejected. But I trusted him; we had been playing for five months, and I knew I would be safe if I went into submission with him. He said yes. So I brought out A’s collar, which is black leather with red floral stitching, and we stood facing each other. I threw a pillow on my wood floors, the floors A once licked my feet on, and got on my knees. I asked Z if I could look at him, and he said, “Yes.” I looked up and he fastened the collar on me, gently, and then hooked the leash onto the metal circle. I breathed deeply. It was a relief to finally be the one taken care of. To not constantly be working to ensure a sub’s safety. It was finally my turn to let go.

  21

  TAKING THE KNIFE

  A year later, I found a dungeon that hosted events that were exclusively queer. Most attendees were of color, and I would walk in to the sounds of slaps, moans, and laughter. L, the doorboi, was usually dressed in slacks, a dress shirt, and a black tie. One night, they told me I could walk right in, but to be prepared that Mx C was being fucked with knives. L was biracial and had a side shave, roots dark and curls bleached blond and haloing their face. They were a bratty bottom and a commanding presence. I trusted L more than any cisgendered dude bouncer. They asked me to leave my belongings in the coat closet and welcomed me in.

  Beyond the front waiting room was the loft, decked out in gear: a St. Andrew’s cross, glowing red and black; a spanking horse bench; a large bird cage; a white four-poster bed; hooks hanging from the ceiling; a padded bench with a cage locked underneath it. Someone was curled in there, sucking a lollipop.

  When L had said that Mx C was being fucked by knives, I had no actual idea that they meant it literally. C was spread on a bench while a butch daddy stood between her legs, holding a large play knife, and pumping it in C’s pussy. I was standing behind C so I couldn’t tell if this was really happening. There was a crowd cheering on the scene—all women, mostly of color. The domme yelled at us, saying we were missing the whole view. A few of us moved over and sat on or around a bench just a few feet from C. We could see the knife pumping into C. I told myself that the knife was dull. It was flat and glinting. I kept looking to see what the trick was, the way I had once when I saw a magician sawing a woman in half at the Magic Castle (a kinky but awful dungeon in its own ways). C was orgasming. I could tell because her clitoris had enlarged and was bouncing against the silver surface of the knife that was making her cum. When she was done, the domme stopped and untied and held C while we all applauded. She was melting in the domme’s arms, enjoying the aftercare. When it got quiet, C sat up blushing, shouted, “Holy fuck!” and jumped off the bench.

  •

  There is a stereotype that those interested in kink come from abusive families. But the truth is, almost everyone in general is brought up in homes where we were taught to obey our parents without question, and to believe that our bodies belonged to our parents, to the state, to our bosses, or to God. I didn’t have a lock on my door until I moved away from my parents’ house.

  •

  No one can touch you here, unless you ask them to. No one can hurt you here, unless you beg them to, negotiating the level of hurt and a safe word, if “stop” does not suffice.

  You may not touch anyone here, unless they ask you to. You may not hurt anyone here, unless they beg you to, and negotiate with you the level of hurt and a safe word.

  You may ask anyone to touch you and you may ask anyone if you can touch them.

  You don’t have to touch anyone or be touched by anyone.

  You always have the right to say yes, to say no, and to change your mind.

  If you don’t accept someone’s no, you are kicked out immediately.

  In kink, consent is queen.

  Unlike vanilla sex, consensual kinky sex makes sure each and every party is in negotiation and therefore in control of how much they dish and how much they take. Of all and any levels of pleasure, of pain. For people of color living in 2019 America, this measure of agency and power can mean the world.

  •

  Great kink busts binaries wide open. Maybe there is not a duality of the self, but a hexagonal? Maybe we have so many desires that we also have just as many selves? Maybe having vanilla, one-on-one, straight sex is also a kink? Maybe we lie to ourselves all the time about what hurts and what doesn’t and how much?

  Kinky queer sex is playful. All the trauma bonding that was forced on us as children, and that is forced on us now as we navigate and try to protect our bodies in a hateful empire: we can flip that and choose to bond with someone over pain we have both agreed on. Many of the dynamics of being a child are revisited—asking for care, being swaddled, belonging to a crew of neighborhood kids, riding a pony, eating a cake, pinning the tail on a donkey blindfolded, bossing your friend crew around, getting bossed around by your crew, asking your friends to tie you up and pretend to be bandits, tying up a friend and then tickling them—everything is revisited now. And it’s all so much better this time around: you are an adult and can give and receive consent.

  I cannot imagine a life without kinky queerdo friends of color. Being unable to discuss the dude whose ass I’d fucked the night before. Unable to talk to friends about the woman who I can’t stop thinking about, who loves for me to whip her. I need to be able to tell friends that she has the same name as my mother. I need my friends to laugh at this coincidence. To hear me talk about how the woman said, “Touch me everywhere, please,” as I tied her wrists and ankles to the ends of the X-shaped cross, her breasts squeezed against it. How I warmed her up first, slapping her butt and skin, then began to crop her from the feet up, increasing the pressure when I got to her thighs. How we fucked on a bench at the back center of the dungeon, even though nobody was fucking yet.

  When we were ready to move to a spot to cuddle, and she asked me for aftercare, I brought her to the four-poster bed and held her while everyone around us was fucking, finally. We giggled. I told her I was so glad she was there, and that I’d been worried, since this was my first time at this particular event, that there wouldn’t be many people of color. She said she felt the same way, and that she was relieved and excited when she saw me. “When I saw you, I was like, yes! Another South Asian!” I was shocked to hear this; that she knew I was Asian at all, because no one ever does, or considers me that. “Southwest Asian, right?” she said. “Right,” I said.

  She saw me.

  Whenever I walked into a dungeon, I breathed more deeply. I felt every moment. I was in the present completely. I had to be: the person I was playing with depended on me and trusted me completely. After cropping someone against a horse bench, helping tie someone to a hook, or spanking someone so hard my palms smarted, I didn’t feel gravity as much as I had before. Whenever I left the dungeon, I was completely free of all my chronic pain, of my emotional hunger, of my sadness. I was just me, in that very moment.

  •

  When I was two days old, the nurses at the Chicago Women’s Medical Center asked my parents if they could use me as a model during a bathing demonstration they wanted to share with all the other new parents. My mother and father agreed.

  I was held, naked and chubby
, in a small yellow tub as two nurses wiped the fat folds of my newly emerged flesh, bathed my downy bottom, and washed my hair.

  My mother and father didn’t have a baby to wash so they got to watch. For weeks they had been taking childbirth classes in that same hospital, my father giggling as he held my mother and supported her through breath-work exercises.

  The reason I used to love the bathing-demonstration story was that in it, I was a body used to show other bodies how to care for bodies like mine. In the story, there was no dangerous knife, and there was no need to be ashamed of my naked body; it would be years before my fat rolls would be deemed repulsive, before being naked in front of a group of people would be unacceptable. Years before I would learn that fat femmes are both hypervisible and invisible. That Muslim femmes are erased or ignored or used as an excuse to invade and decimate entire geographical regions. That if you pose nude, you get death threats from Cairo and get memed as Jabba the Hutt in America.

  But I recently learned that two months after my birth and this bathing demo, my parents’ childbirth instructor was abducted and assaulted outside this same hospital. She had been taken at gunpoint, bound, and held in her abductor’s car trunk; she had knocked against the metal of the trunk in parking lots, but no one was able to help her. The abductor sexually assaulted her, and later murdered her. He was given the death penalty almost two years later, and he died in 1995, years before I would find out that the woman who had helped my mother and father understand how to deliver me to this world was speedily and cruelly delivered out of it by a man who was a rapist and murderer.

  •

  Again and again, the world reminds me that women are never safe.

  When I first started about dungeons, my main preoccupation was with the knife that Mx C was taking. I wanted to explore the ways that kinky sex feels safe while vanilla sex does not. I wanted to really ask myself: what is the knife?

  One night, I was invited by a partner to join him at what was billed as a “sex party.” When I read the party’s rules, I saw that they were mostly suggestions for straight men to behave.

  At the party, only two couples were fucking—both straight. One of the men asked me to bring lube from the other room to help his partner be more comfortable. There was no lube. “Well, shit,” the man said. “Get in here and help me get her wet.” I leaned toward the woman and asked if I could touch her. She didn’t respond, and the man kept telling me to touch her. I asked her again. She finally said, “Only him.” In that moment, I understood—looking at the man and the way he had tried to consent for someone else — what and where the knife was. What and where real danger was: in all heterosexual non-kinky spaces, where women are in the most danger. Where men think that they can consent for women, and women are dehumanized, silenced, and bound.

  •

  “Have you ever been chased around your house by a knife?” my partner asked the morning after the party. I told him the story about being sixteen and running from my father holding the knife. He said I told the story so calmly. He wanted to know what healed me from that pain. If anything had. If I was even healed. I asked him why he asked in the first place. I asked him, “Have you ever been chased around your house by a knife?” He said yes. “I was seven.”

  He asked me why a mother would hurt her child like that. I asked him why a father would hurt a daughter like that. We held each other and I thought about the dungeon and about Mx C and the knife.

  Mx C, spread wide open, chasing the knife with her pussy. Is there even, or can there ever be, a better vision for the kind of love that constantly keeps us, heals us, transforms us, and releases us, cyclically, desperately, longingly, and forever?

  22

  CITIES VS. WOMEN: A BODY’S SCORECARD

  Alexandria 10

  To be a girl child again; to walk in the streets in my one-piece, the color of the Mediterranean, a little blue, polluted, my hair a red-brown cloud. To help my grandfather carry the umbrella he will plunge into the sand at an angle, rolling the umbrella in his palms, shading us for hours.

  Monroe 9

  In Monroe, Utah, I once stayed in a cabin by a collection of hot-springs tubs. The property was 120 acres large. The tubs were built into the rocks, sulfur spring water pouring over the basalt formations, boiling hot. My dog had the runs. I gave her plenty of water and swaddled her in a makeshift diaper, in case she got sick while I was soaking. I climbed the rocky steps up to the tubs, disrobed, and got in. The sky let the last of the sun’s rays dramatically through a thick-gloved cloud, and gazing at it, it made sense that settlers on this land thought God was talking to them. In the tub, I sank deeply as though in a womb.

  Fresno 10

  My yard had a rose bush. Two, in fact. And fifteen rose trees. It was not my backyard, because I didn’t own the house, but I tended to it like it was my own. The gazebo that came with the rental once stood in the center, an ominous dark metal cube, and now it was warm, rung with tiny lights, yellow and blue lanterns hanging from each pole, a pink tendrilled plant, a large red tapestry, green and yellow rattan chairs in the middle, a sheesha heavy on a cheap blue rug from Kuwait. My animals circled me, tended to me. The sun was warm, and good. Aretha Franklin was supposed to bail out Angela Davis in 1970. She was stuck in the West Indies and couldn’t wire the bail, so a white dairy farmer from Fresno, Rodger McAfee, put his dairy farm and property up as collateral to get Davis out. His children were ostracized in schools.

  I had never felt that I belonged to a city or that a city belonged to me. But in Fresno, on the land that freed Angela Davis, I felt that I was at home.

  Beirut 5

  Three women in niqabs pointed at me, in a tight red dress and fishnet hose, and laughed. I could not see their faces under the niqabs, but I heard their laughter. Later, young women at the airport laughed at me, too, and the flight attendant asked me to move out of the emergency row. When I asked why, he said, this row is not for the elderly or the sick. I knew where he was going, but I said, I am neither of those things. So he made his shoulders wide and said, You are a very fat person. I said, And you are incredibly unattractive, but they let you be a flight attendant. I moved to another row so we could take off, and the landscape of Beirut changed beneath me, becoming something less welcoming, something menacing.

  Fresno 10

  D texted. One line. “Are you two safe?”

  I asked him why. I did not understand how a man who once beat me wanted to know if I was safe.

  He said there was a shooting in Fresno. That the man killed three people.

  I looked up the shooting and saw that it was a Black man targeting white men, and I was relieved.

  I told him we were safe, for once, because we weren’t white.

  Buenos Aires 7

  It was sixty-five degrees and sunny every day, but because it was early May, everyone was determined to wear their coats. It was fall. Teenage lovers kissed each other on the mouth at El Ateneo, a belle epoque theater turned bookstore. I walked the streets from morning to night in a light dress, so when strangers talked to me, it was to ask if I was cold. There were fully stocked bars in the clothing stores in Palermo, which I found obscene. I walked through the botanical garden Borges daydreamed in; I petted feral cats. At the opera house, the tour guide asked us where we were from. Brooklyn, Berlin, Istanbul, Chile, and, I shouted, Palestine. He said the tiles we were walking over were installed by Italian immigrants, and I looked down at the Chiclet-sized white and red and brown tiles and saw young men, their backs curved Cs, homesick.

  Cairo 3

  I stayed in a hostel in the middle of downtown Cairo the last time I went before the revolution. When I left in the morning to buy bread, the women at the bakery had to teach me how to stand in line and what to ask for. I wasn’t Egyptian anymore. Any Egyptian I had was solely my mother, her labor, her driving us to and from the airport in Alexandria, her getting us our ID cards, our beach permits, our meals, our clotheslines; Mama making mulokhiya, lining up for bread, p
aying for taxis, for fish, for vegetables. I realized that if I wanted to stay Egyptian, I had learn how to do all these things for myself, so I could teach my son, and so on. In the meantime, I was in Cairo, and I was fat and hungry and alone, and all my modest clothes were in an airport somewhere, in a suitcase I’d lost. I left the hostel and went to stay with my childhood friend in Zamalek. There, I was able to walk around a bit more freely, and the street harassment went down to about 50 percent. I bought a pair of jeans and some giant T-shirts from a corner store. My childhood friend told me I was crazy to come to Cairo on vacation. She wanted to know what was wrong with me.

  Florence 8

  A novelist, two poets, and a composer: we’d been dropped off here by the residency coordinator. Felt as if we were mental-asylum patients, let loose for the day. Spoiled and feeling guilty, I walked across a bridge and took a photo for my son. Later, he would tell me that this was the worst summer of his life. “You weren’t there for me, Mom, and I needed you,” he’d say. I’d tell him the truth, that I chose six weeks in an Italian artists’ residency over him. That sometimes, I am very selfish. That I understood how angry and betrayed he felt, because when I once told my mother that my life from ages fifteen to eighteen was unbearable, that I felt so abused, mistreated, and in pain during that time, and she’d responded, “Those were the best years of my life.” I didn’t understand her then, but I did now, in Florence, drinking a cocktail, watching a parade invade the square where we sat, actual horses passing a carousel whose colors were the hue of glass-bottled candies.

 

‹ Prev