whiteness. When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine.” [She cannot believe he meant to write “white dignity.”]
She pauses, looks at her husband: “So how does a black woman feel when her black man leaves Playboy on the coffee table?”
For the first time he understands fully a line his wife read the day before: “The pornography industry’s exploitation of the black woman’s body is qualitatively different from that of the white woman,” because she is holding the cover of Jivers out to him and asking: “What does this woman look like?”
What he has refused to see—because to see it would reveal yet another area in which he is unable to protect or defend black women—is that where white women are depicted in pornography as “objects,” black women are depicted as animals. Where white women are depicted at least as human bodies if not beings, black women are depicted as shit.
He begins to feel sick. For he realizes that he has bought some if not all of the advertisements about women, black and white. And further, inevitably, he has bought the advertisements about himself. In pornography the black man is portrayed as being capable of fucking anything…even a piece of shit. He is defined solely by the size, readiness and unselectivity of his cock.
Still, he does not know how to make love without the fantasies fed to him by movies and magazines. Those movies and magazines (whose characters’ pursuits are irrelevant or antithetical to his concerns) that have insinuated themselves between him and his wife, so that the totality of her body, her entire corporeal reality is alien to him. Even to clutch her in lust is automatically to shut his eyes. Shut his eyes, and…he chuckles bitterly…dream of England.
For years he has been fucking himself.
At first, reading Lorde together, they reject celibacy. Then they discover they need time apart to clear their heads, to search out damage, to heal. In any case, she is unable to fake response; he is unwilling for her to do so. She goes away for a while. Left alone, he soon falls hungrily on the magazines he had thrown out. Strokes himself raw over the beautiful women, spread like so much melon (he begins to see how stereotypes transmute) before him. But he cannot refuse what he knows—or what he knows his wife knows, walking along a beach in some black country where all the women are bleached and straightened and the men never look at themselves; and are ugly, in any case, in their imitation of white men.
Long before she returns he is reading her books and thinking of her—and of her struggles alone and his fear of sharing them—and when she returns, it is sixty percent her body that he moves against in the sun, her own black skin affirmed in the brightness of his eyes.
* “Womanist” approximates “black feminist.”
Fame
“I N ORDER TO SEE anything, and therefore to create,” Andrea Clement White was saying to the young woman seated across from her and listening very attentively, “one must not be famous.”
“But you are famous,” said the young woman, in mock perplexity, for the television cameras.
“Am I?” asked Andrea Clement White, and then added, “I suppose I am. But not really famous, you know, like…like…” But she could not bring herself to utter a rival’s name, because this would increase the rival’s fame, she felt, while diminishing her own.
“Your books have sold millions of copies,” the young interviewer was saying. “They’ve been translated into a dozen languages. Into German and Dutch and Portuguese…”
“Into Spanish and French and Japanese and Italian and Swahili,” Andrea Clement White completed the list for her, omitting, because they never came to mind, Russian, Greek, Polish and Lithuanian.
“And you’ve made from your work, how much? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes, yes,” said Andrea Clement
She pauses, looks at her husband: “So how does a black woman feel when her black man leaves Playboy on the coffee table?”
For the first time he understands fully a line his wife read the day before: “The pornography industry’s exploitation of the black woman’s body is qualitatively different from that of the white woman,” because she is holding the cover of Jivers out to him and asking: “What does this woman look like?”
What he has refused to see—because to see it would reveal yet another area in which he is unable to protect or defend black women—is that where white women are depicted in pornography as “objects,” black women are depicted as animals. Where white women are depicted at least as human bodies if not beings, black women are depicted as shit.
He begins to feel sick. For he realizes that he has bought some if not all of the advertisements about women, black and white. And further, inevitably, he has bought the advertisements about himself. In pornography the black man is portrayed as being capable of fucking anything…even a piece of shit. He is defined solely by the size, readiness and unselectivity of his cock.
Still, he does not know how to make love without the fantasies fed to him by movies and magazines. Those movies and magazines (whose characters’ pursuits are irrelevant or antithetical to his concerns) that have insinuated themselves between him and his wife, so that the totality of her body, her entire corporeal reality is alien to him. Even to clutch her in lust is automatically to shut his eyes. Shut his eyes, and…he chuckles bitterly…dream of England.
For years he has been fucking himself.
At first, reading Lorde together, they reject celibacy. Then they discover they need time apart to clear their heads, to search out damage, to heal. In any case, she is unable to fake response; he is unwilling for her to do so. She goes away for a while. Left alone, he soon falls hungrily on the magazines he had thrown out. Strokes himself raw over the beautiful women, spread like so much melon (he begins to see how stereotypes transmute) before him. But he cannot refuse what he knows—or what he knows his wife knows, walking along a beach in some black country where all the women are bleached and straightened and the men never look at themselves; and are ugly, in any case, in their imitation of white men.
Long before she returns he is reading her books and thinking of her—and of her struggles alone and his fear of sharing them—and when she returns, it is sixty percent her body that he moves against in the sun, her own black skin affirmed in the brightness of his eyes.
* “Womanist” approximates “black feminist.”
Fame
“I N ORDER TO SEE anything, and therefore to create,” Andrea Clement White was saying to the young woman seated across from her and listening very attentively, “one must not be famous.”
“But you are famous,” said the young woman, in mock perplexity, for the television cameras.
“Am I?” asked Andrea Clement White, and then added, “I suppose I am. But not really famous, you know, like…like…” But she could not bring herself to utter a rival’s name, because this would increase the rival’s fame, she felt, while diminishing her own.
“Your books have sold millions of copies,” the young interviewer was saying. “They’ve been translated into a dozen languages. Into German and Dutch and Portuguese…”
“Into Spanish and French and Japanese and Italian and Swahili,” Andrea Clement White completed the list for her, omitting, because they never came to mind, Russian, Greek, Polish and Lithuanian.
“And you’ve made from your work, how much? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes, yes,” said Andrea Clement
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