From Moi, un noir (Jean Rouch, 1958)
‘At the age of fifteen, I had a face of pleasure, and yet i had no knowledge of pleasure’.
-The Lover Marguerite Duras
I recently read ‘The Lover’ by Marguerite Duras and I really enjoyed it, the ways it discussed desire through the lens of a teenage girl were so revealing to me. It made me think about desire in my own life what it means to me and how it has been projected onto me and many black girls alike. It made me think about the grooming that can happen at those ages, where you're told to believe something of yourself that isn't true for example, the belief that you're a mother but not actually but you are because you hold all the responsibilities of one but you haven't actually bared a child or have you? The minute you become a teen, you become a weapon of mass destruction but also a mother. And in those roles, desire isn't found within you but desire becomes you, but not in a positive way. You nurture your siblings, the men and boys around you but you are also a problem and as a child who is only just becoming, this is a lot to handle. ‘At the age of fifteen, i had a face of pleasure, and yet i had no knowledge of pleasure’. This quote at the beginning of the book reminds me so much of the awakening that begins to happen, something that still to this day I wonder if girls so young should be aware of. Because the truth is men desire girls, every day they walk home from school they are reminded of this, everytime they are told to cover up they are reminded of this, everytime they walk into a religious institution led by men they are reminded of this fact that them alone have to deal with. Desire is made out of you before you choose what you want to do with it. But now I'm at a point where I'm reflecting, and thinking about what I desire because for so long, I have not been able to decide and I still don’t.
“My mother never knew pleasure” I recently went to an exhibition called ‘Acts of resistance’ at the south London gallery in Peckham. What stuck out to me the most was the experience of motherhood under surveillance. When you are a mother in poverty, or who is a victim of the prison judicial system, you are under surveillance. Everything you do is watched and checked and criticized. It is worse because these are man-made struggles, not innate to human life at all. Their experience made me think about desire because it made me realize how womanhood is constantly under surveillance as a whole. My empathy grew in that exhibition because as a society we struggle in seeing mothers as human, people who can make mistakes but can be accountable. These women bear the brunt of every negative reaction within the household and wider society. Whenever an adult male is misogynistic, the mother gets blamed and though women can be patriarchal, this may not always be the case as when you become an adult you can choose, and if they chose to be misogynistic why would his mother be exempt from that? She’s not. I mean why would she? Once you become a mother you aren't allowed to have any nuance in your character, you are just to breast-feed and shut up. For black mothers around me growing up, I often saw this inner battle of their personalities, the ones they have had since a child, muted once they became mothers. Their identities almost erased. Who was your mum before you were born?
To be pregnant also means part of your body no longer belongs to you as it always has it belongs to the state but this is made more apparent when reproductive rights are being debated constantly across the world. Patriarchy causes motherhood to mean giving up your freedom and autonomy. So much is now out of your control, your decisions aren’t only your decisions and your life is no longer your life. To become pregnant means the choice is made for you. But you are a woman, this is what you’re supposed to want, this is just what you do. It really does not matter if your ready or not because you are born to be a mother. The choice of motherhood is interesting to me because if we know all that comes with being a black woman in the UK by yourself, the way our government treats our lives like garbage or non-existent, why do we still desire motherhood, why do we still want to bring possibly more female life into the world when there is harm that exists for them. The obvious answer is patriarchal conditioning in the West and within African countries but I feel as the new generation is coming up we still feel the same despite knowing all of this. Now that leads me to shame because shame is such a powerful tool, shame pushes us to do things we don’t want to do and one of them can be becoming a mother. I want this to demonstrate how big of an emotion shame is. To not become a mother is such a shame that you will do it anyway despite knowing the difficulties that come with it because shame is to much to carry. It’s too embarrassing to bear going to family gatherings childless in your late 20s as a black woman. What is your womb being used for? Why are you on birth control when you should be having a child? What will the people back home say? Shame to me is the driving factor to what we desire when we are from these communities. And the same can go for marriage and any other patriarchal custom. Because to make women ashamed is the effect of patriarchal conditioning. The decision to experience pleasure and desire is not yours to make they are made for you.
Where i grew up, in inner city London it was not far fetched to me that girls were having kids at 16 and engaging in sexual activities at 13. This was a norm and still is in predominantly working class areas. I would have these thoughts of ‘this couldn’t be me’ I guess that's my projection of the purity culture i grew up on and my naivety of what was happening to these young girls. When we live in a society where pornography is so accessible and young children are consuming it as young as 8 and are also not engaging in any proactive sexual education it can lead to the instances where children are participating in activities they do not fully understand. I’m not sure if those girls knew the risk, that your teenage hormones are developing but also not having anyone to support or educate you through them. Understanding that your desires, whatever they may be are not a threat to your identity but an add-on to who you become as a women, or as an adult. But this is not the reality for many young girls because they are not supported but rather groomed into being in positions they do not want to be in. Women and girls are to be controlled in all aspects of our lives especially through sex, and this is displayed through policy, societal norms and our lack of understanding of consent and how we teach it to children. For as long as we don’t, this will continue to be an issue where girls are thrown into situations that they do not understand because no one taught them the consequences of engaging in sexual activities at a young age.
The pursuit of pleasure specifically the sexual ones comes with a risk that though you may desire this man you still have to weigh up the harm that can be done to you because of how desire and pleasure are weaponized in women, especially black women. There is this internal battle with the shame that despite you wanting the pleasure the risk is the feeling of undesirability because you aren't a ‘virgin’ anymore., or that you are evil because you engaged in sex or became pregnant without marriage. After all, that is a currency and makes you more desirable according to the patriarchy. I’ve noticed that when a person decides not to do this, they face scrutiny and judgement, especially from religious people. Instead of protecting you, they’d rather dictate what God thinks of you. Purity culture is the leading factor for this. The constant need to be ‘clean’ and ‘innocent’ will always be further pushed on black African girls because we are seen as dirty and sexual demons which feels like an exaggeration but it really isn’t. Our innate is bad and so through pursuing purity culture this would allow us to be desired in the good way, not the way that causes shame or embarrassment but in the ‘i see you as the mother of my children way’. I don’t think these people or these institutions see us as fully fledged human beings but as breeding grounds and women to ‘pimp’ out for sex when needed to. That is how we repay them for them providing for us. When this is so overemphasized this does end up dehumanizing girls, which means that when desires that do not involve children are expressed the reaction is always going to be received and responded to through violence. Because it is violent to make children believe that they are inherently evil people.
The conversation that is had surrounding ‘sexual sin’ is heavily directed at women being the cause and fall of man's sin/failure, that if she walks a certain way she is insinuating lust and therefore deserves to be reprimanded for this. If the man is led astray her existence is the cause and she should be held accountable for something that is out of her control. When these conversations are repeated over and over within your childhood, you begin to develop shame over your body and any form of desire which isn’t always sexual but can be. Because you are a girl who later can become a woman this is now wrong. I desire to get married because i am ashamed if don’t, i desire to be a mother because I am ashamed if i don’t, i desire older men because I am told its a shame if I don’t, i desire a provider because I am ashamed if i don’t, why is everything I desire something im also ashamed of? “How can we know what we want, when knowing what we want is something both demanded of us and source of punishment”.
My understanding of desire and pleasure is so shame-filled, I never understood what it meant to truly pursue what I wanted i guess that is why I write but, there are still desires that I fear will have to just be unfilled. But then I think about all the women before me whose desires were never truly thought out let alone put into action because of colonialism causing war and destabilization in my countries. In the environment I grew up in to desire anything but the pastor (ha!) and Jesus was wrong and would in turn mean some evil spirit was in possession of you. Though I’m still somewhat practicing, i don’t believe in this particular doctrine but this is still something that is widely preached in many churches. I always feel like the damage is always worse though, to move forward like these feelings don’t exist in me is an understatement. But the opening quote rains true in this context as for young girls in these environments they are subjected to being sexualized and objectified without them understanding what their bodies are to them and what it fully means to be black, African and a girl/woman in a world that tells you everything about that is a sin.
Audre Lorde once said ‘We have been raised to fear the yes within us’. And i implore any young woman to embrace that instead, let your choices, desires, wants, and pleasures be yours and yours only.
Thank you for reading :))
References:
Tomorrow sex will be good again- Katherine Angel
The lover - Marguerite Duras