{"id":1329,"date":"2017-05-23T13:33:02","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T12:33:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blackstothefuture.com\/en\/?p=1329"},"modified":"2017-05-24T23:59:55","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T22:59:55","slug":"blue-blouse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blackstothefuture.com\/en\/blue-blouse\/","title":{"rendered":"BLUE BLOUSE"},"content":{"rendered":"

The walls could have burst. It\u2019s funny. I instantly felt weary. There. Snippets of conversations on Afro-pessimism had emerged.\u00a0<\/span>What do you know about it? What is it? You tell me. You could have asked instead of opening your mouth<\/span><\/i>, he said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pardon ch\u00e9ri.<\/b><\/p>\n

I left him voice mails in a foreign language, we even tried to chat on Skype but he is too busy, he said. I also get busy: I send other voice mails to another guy who lives on the other side of the earth. We feel so close. My phone is dead, shit. Is it broken or do I say to the others that it is broken?<\/span><\/p>\n

You know what language will get me to the other end.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is what I say.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0What?\u00a0<\/span>You still haven’t told me what you meant by Afro-pessimism<\/span><\/i>. I do not know. I do not know either. I told you I heard bits and pieces. The other returns and asks me if he can love me. “You’re hard to love”, I said. I could read the notification “seen” below the text message. He should have seen it then, right?\u00a0<\/span>Make a screen shot and zoom in the image, the word will disappear into the pixels.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0YES – but it doesn\u2019t change anything, I feel humiliated.<\/span><\/p>\n

No, I was not in front of him.<\/span><\/p>\n

You are afraid of confrontations<\/span><\/i>, she asks. \u00ab I\u2019m more\u00a0of\u00a0an avoider \u00bb. I love this expression.\u00a0Where does is come from?\u00a0Well, from the US, you know. They are good at inventing stuff like that, like making everything more complex and especially validate their culture of avoiders. Last time I was there, I found myself in front of a crowd and I told them.\u00a0<\/span>It is so obvious with you: you are always so anxious! You worship anxiety! It really gets you worked up. This is your last fuel, for you to feel you exist, godammit!\u00a0<\/span><\/i>They all took a serious air, commenting, deconstructing the formula of anxiety, as if this was not another Western invention. In the end I didn’t even care. I just wanted to say that they were dicks to always speak of anxiety, because it is starting to make me anxious while I am peaceful, <\/span>you know what I mean<\/span><\/i>. Anxiety is contagious.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/b><\/p>\n

I have displayed a lot of talismans, protective hands of Fatma and Egyptian cross of Eternity on my room wall. I felt just as if I were my mother. And then all of a sudden, I asked myself:\u00a0<\/span>But shit, protect me from what?<\/span><\/i>\u00a0\u00a0And my Sahbi in front of it all:\u00a0<\/span>You\u2019re so stupid, the only thing that protects us is Allah and none of your bullshit<\/span><\/i>, he said. I was naked.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So, that\u2019s it. He never answered. I felt stupid to have wanted to be transparent, then I just went outside. I needed some air, I was listening to Missy Eliott, the radiant sun embraced me, he wanted to rest on my heavy eyelids. I took the road opposite the metro and went toward the trees and the forest. The opposite road. I started dreaming of a life on another planet.<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/b><\/p>\n

One day, while I was doing some research on Google, I fell on Mu\u00f1oz. My friend Alan had told me about him, and had lent me <\/span>Disidentifications<\/span><\/i>, saying that I would surely be interested for my research. Vaginal Davis was on the cover: a young punk artist with an inordinate and muscular body, her head adorned with a crown of flowers, a hazy look and hair of gold. Disidentification. To make it short, it is a radical approach for colored people with minority sexualities. This approach allows us to reread the idea of identification that is often described or addressed in the queer theory and critical race studies, in the light of a less polarized and more hybrid reflection. Disidentification is to use a code, a matter that was already manufactured by a dominant system, and modify this code to add new information, so that it will be visible only by the minority subjects.\u00a0I have read this book two years ago, and I have reread it for the needs of a workshop I was invited to. Rereading Mu\u00f1oz\u2019s book was like an immersion heads on into salted water. I was deeply stirred as soon as I went outside. Or when I stopped reading. It has its own Wikipedia page since then.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00ab B\u00e9b\u00e9, d’o\u00f9 viens-tu ?\u00a0\u00bb<\/span><\/p>\n

Dry throat. I kind of liked you though:\u00a0<\/span>Ugh.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

(\u2026) with “disidentificatory spaces,” a strong link to language was unveiled that explains my writing attempts: using French terms and words, but impregnating them with English and Arabic slang. For example in a video called “hard to love”, I wondered how difficult it was to love a language, a mother tongue that was considered foreign, to which I found hard connecting because we hardly spoke Arabic at home. I am drawing a parallel with the complexity to love in a society that is predominantly white and capitalist, when your body is brown and that you want to be in love. In this video, where I decided to speak in English, I repeat several times the same phrase “I didn’t learn to speak \u2026\u201d and I complete the sentence by a phrase corresponding to a language: English, Arabic, French, Spanish. Then I shift and I go on “I didn’t learn to talk about myself”. I wanted to link the difficulty to speak, in a first time, the difficulty to speak in Arabic, French or English, and finally the difficulty to express yourself when it comes to the self and to certain emotions. This visual experimentation – where you can see a hand that grabs a glass of water and puts it back to infinity – was a way to think about exhaustion. The exhaustion of the self, of expressing yourself, and this depletion to express yourself in a foreign language.<\/span><\/p>\n

veux-tu (m’)aimer\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0toi<\/span>\u00a0?<\/b><\/p>\n

je n'(t’)aimerai\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0moi.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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And Marlon Riggs? : “queer is a white thing” \u2013 you can \u00a0hear in non-white communities. Marlon Riggs rises up against this idea through the documentary “Tongues Untied” (1989) where he filmed some friends of his, mainly gays and Blacks, who talk about their experiences and describe their own codes. He describes being completely lost in “a sea of vanilla” as soon as he arrives in the famous Castro district in San Francisco. He then describes the different stereotypical images that are circulating on Black people. And his absence as a black man, who is not represented anywhere and thus criticizes the whiteness of the queer and gay spaces, which do not seem to care for including other minorities.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

= Lack of images to identify with.<\/b><\/p>\n

Starting point = 0<\/b><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

How many images until you start to exist?<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00abIn one of my dreams, Vaginal Davis wore a blue blouse (blue in Arabic is said “Zraq”:\u00a0\u0632\u0652\u0631\u0642) and was president. She was spitting on everyone but with elegance. The other time I saw her for real, it was in a small restaurant rue Rambuteau. The mascot of the place was a big bulldog. She was elegantly gossiping about. She was telling me secrets about Jos\u00e9, varnishing her old memories, and I felt like a queen.
\nSome other time, I escorted\u00a0her to choose and buy flowers. In the middle of the display I thought of Mrs. Dalloway. Delighted, ravishing herself, she hesitated, like Mrs Dalloway, and finally did not know which ones to choose. I pointed to all the blue flowers, those which seemed the most elegant and original.
\nAnother time, the last time, she was at the National Archives in Paris. Before appearing on stage, under the make-up, I discovered a thousand wounds, cracks, bursts of interrupted reminiscences – under her eyelids. Sitting on a sofa, surrounded by vases and records of Barbara and Nina Simone, she was telling\u00a0the same secrets before an audience. It was called a performance. I felt betrayed. I saw a message in it \/\/ \/\/<\/span><\/p>\n

\/\/ but in what dimension are we?<\/span><\/p>\n

I just have to make one last trip: go and see the Nile.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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In the book by Munoz, there is also Pedro Zamora. Just like Marlon Riggs or Barry Jenkins and his film Moonlight<\/i>. These three there made me realize that I could love myself and love someone who had the same skin color than me. <\/span>\u00ab A few years later, another made a significant appearance on MTV: Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz devotes a chapter to the appearance of activist Pedro Zamora on television in 1994. The young man has used a famous media, a genuine production that affects the masses in the United States, to subvert space and “exist” in the latter as a gay, HIV-positive and Latino person. He invested the field of the reality TV show to disseminate messages of prevention, educate the spectators to the practice of safe-sex\u2026 operating a radical act, he made the large audience channel a platform, or rather a scene where he could publicly perform his identities – and own it as a homosexual and a HIV positive man – was a radical act and a public call to tolerance.\u00a0<\/span>\u00bb<\/p>\n

_<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n