The Island of Lost Voices: Love (in Colour) for Black Girls
Silk + Water is now officially a podcast! Scroll to the bottom to listen to this blogpost, and you can also find it on Spotify and soon come on Apple Podcasts too! The beautiful podcast cover is designed by the wonderful Tasia Graham, so get at her!
In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.
Matthew 5:16
Today’s post is a little bit different from the previous ones. It is neither a piece on how I navigate the freelance world nor is it an interview with someone in the media industry. Today’s post is me sharing some of the writing that I do when I am not writing specifically for the blog. So here I am, back and better, posting the first post of the year on my anniversary and what a fitting essay it is!
It's been a good break and I'm in a good headspace to get back to the writing and audioblogging! This post is a bit of a cheat though. I wrote it last year, in September and been trying to find a home for this piece, alas in vain. But I did have many internal discussions about the value of my work independent of whether or not others want to publish it. And so came the idea for a shelter on my own blog called The Island of Lost Voices for work that I produced but was unable to house elsewhere.
They are likely to be personal essays but who knows what else the island can be home to.
The first post in this series(??), section (??), is an essay called Love (in Colour) for Black Girls, about my experience reading Bolu Babalola's Love in Colour as a former Meg Cabot aficionado. I hope you enjoy!
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Love (in Colour) for Black girls
By Yasmina Nuny (18/09/20)
I don’t remember when I became burdened by desirability politics. As I reflect, I see all the ways it governed the playground: in the invitations that weren’t extended, in the repulsion at the idea of being romantically linked to me. I knew exactly on which side of the spectrum I fell. A little chubby dark-skinned black girl with tight short coils, I was never one of the pretty girls.
It would follow me late into my teens as I watched them fall in love as quickly as they fell out and speaking to the older (which somehow also meant cooler) boys at school. Never realising, consciously, what pretty was code for, I let myself be convinced that love was not meant for me, even if I could not articulate what “like me” was quite yet. And so, I learned to stop having crushes on real boys.
Instead, I revelled on the flings and romances of my trusted companions, the ones I carried to school with me and back. I avoided the playground, preferring imagined worlds during break times. I dedicated myself to reading and re-reading Meg Cabot’s canon, and feeling (every single time) as I imagine Mia would have felt when Michael confirmed that he was in love with her, surprised that she needed to ask at all. I would smile into the pages, reading them over again until I was ready to move on.
To this day, The Princess Diaries remains close to my heart. Michael Moscovitz and Jesse de Silva were among my first loves, though, unable to imagine myself in Mia or Suze’s shoes, I figured that even in these fictitious worlds, I wouldn’t have been their type. For all the ways I saw myself in Mia’s awkwardness and literary prowess, it seemed insignificant when worlds of race separated us on the spectrum of desirability.
Now in my early twenties, it has been a while since I read (or even wrote) teen romances. I traded the Meg Cabots and Sarah Dessens for the Chimamanda Adichies and Yaa Gyasis whose novels are not absent of love, but rather the love stories were deeply afflicted and complicated by trauma. They left me melancholy, in contrast to the fuzzy warmness of Mia and Michael’s love story, teaching me lessons about the world that I was to navigate through. Teaching me how that world was synonymous to hardship for girls like me. Not even our Disney princess got to be free from it.
Somewhere along the way Black features, that had previously marginalised me, became desirable. Large behinds became subjected to ogling rather than giggling; big lips became all the craze. Black girls, though, found themselves being pushed out again, too dark for our features to suit us. Still undesirable. So, imagine my surprise (and pleasure) when my seventeen-year old self, nappy-haired because my mom had banned relaxers was on the receiving end of a (white) boy’s desire. I had been so enamoured with the idea of being desired that I buried, deep inside me, Adichie’s lessons on microaggressions and fetishes. I chose to believe that being a ‘different’ Black girl – which at the time meant that I was wholly in my respectability bag – was a truth, a compliment even, rather than a form of violence. My love story, surely, was not doused in trauma. I had not fully developed the language that I would have needed to navigate the relationship.
And so, university came along. Less than a year in I was single again, finding liberation in how much I was desired under the dizzying club lights, and simultaneously, finding Black female solidarity at university societies where I would learn for the first time the language of my invisibilisation and/or hyper-sexualisation. I became militant, still armoured with Black female fiction and non-fiction, and yet still yearning for something easier, like being swept off my feet by an unproblematic Black man who would not call my worth into question.
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Bolu Babalola’s relationship with Cabot’s novels is what drew me to her Twitter page. It had never occurred to me that other Black girls held those novels so dearly. The absurdity of that statement became clear as immediately as I had formulated it; of course, I couldn’t be the only Black girl to be besotted with a ghost boy. But still, no other Black girl had told me about their book crushes, and so in that moment, I felt seen.
I got to know that Babalola was releasing an anthology book, Love in Colour, that had received Cabot’s stamp of approval. It was imperative that I get my hands on it. At this point in my life I had already begun unravelling the lies the world told me about being a Black girl from my hair. I was in love and was loved in return. I had already learned I was deserving of at least that, by watching other Black women, those I knew in real life, and those like Babalola whose online presence informed my praxis. I had already unpacked all the ways I believed myself to be unwanted, but still, the prospects of consuming trauma-free Black love were overwhelming.
Love is colour is (duh) a book about love. Babalola retells tales from around the world, taking inspiration from Asian, Greek and African mythical stories. One of them, Siya’s, had even taken place in a kingdom that I would have belonged to and perhaps for that reason it is my favourite from the collection.
Delving into Babalola’s colourful worlds, I became one with the characters, seeing myself in them in varying degrees. Seeing through their eyes men that I could have loved and who would have loved me back. My face was wet when I came up for air. I was moved by the simplicity of love that was only made complicated by the things that complicate all the love stories I grew up with. The complications that kept Mia and Michael apart between books eight and ten; the ones that kept Suze and Jesse in different worlds. I was moved that for the first time, it could have been me between those pages, written about with such tenderness and dedication, without the need to endure violence.
I saw my teenage self in Naleli, convinced that her world and the boy she longed for would not – could not – collide. I saw myself, too, in Thisbe, settling for what the world thought we ought to be grateful for, because in those moment, we were grateful, weren’t we? To be desired at all? Being wanted appeared less daunting than knowing our power and being alone for it. Love in colour would have taught me that desire should not be at the expense of my power.
I see myself and my partner, twenty-somethings and in love in the distance that kept Attem from Ittuen, and Seye from Tiara. I also see the beginning of our love story in Orin and Deji’s. At fifteen, I never imagined that my real-life love story could be a meet-cute, but I wish I had been given the chance to dream that way. I imagine learning then, the lessons that Babalola teaches alongside Adichie, about navigating desire and being an agent within the confines of socially defined (and redefined) spectra and wonder how much it would have changed me. I would have liked, I think, to have imagined how my first kiss would have been and believed that it was in the realm of possibility.
At an event hosted by Black Ballad I sat in communion with other Black women who had once been little Black girls who loved love and grew up conditioned to believe that love, in the fun rom-comish way of teen romance novels, was never designed for them. When I think of what it would have meant to grow up with these books in my satchel, I wonder about the power we would have had, had we known what we were deserving of. What if we had been taught that Blackness was not a deficit? That it was not a cost that we had to compensate for? What if we learned that we never had to excuse our Blackness, and earn love for it?
I can only understand the tears of reading Love in Colour if I accept that, despite all the unravelling, I kept resentment as a bookmark between book (and my) chapters. I also know that, from communion with other Black women, there are traumas that we must actively unlearn every day because social constructs are as conceptual as they are real and though they are not unmovable, some of us must push against their walls harder still.
I am grateful to Babalola for pushing them by decolonising love tropes. I am grateful to be in communion with women who know love, of self and others, and teach it to me. I am grateful to have Maadi, Ittuen and Adric – who remind me so much of my non-fiction love – alongside Michael and Jesse, desiring characters who could be me. I am also grateful to know that my value does not lie in whether or not I am desired by them, and that desire is not equal to love, for that matter. This is a lesson that I think many of us forget sometimes, though. We forget our power sometimes. But it is etched forever in the technicolour love of different continents, in case we need reminding. Or in case we need reference points for all the Black girls coming up behind us, who will learn love from us. Who will learn that Black girls deserve to feel loved and loved and loved again, uncompromisingly and happily ever after.
Thank you for bringing Bolu Babalola to my attention, i cant wait to explore those stories. The piece on YouTube was a brilliant window into a much larger work. This island as a series or a space will be great to follow. It was such an open and honest tour through love in all the ways that evolves and can develop. I like knowing that there are all this other ways the world can unfold and being offered a window into other ways it unfolds allows me to lean into the world with a healthy curiosity. Im going to come back here after I've had a chance to read the book, sink deeper into the words.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for reading! Once you read her anthology I would definitely like to find out how you felt about it, so definitely keep me updated!
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