THE COLOUR OF DREAMS
“He merely killed you, that’s all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I am told.”
Dreaming is the art of dying. I knew that the moment I started to write. It was only when life had shut every door to its entry, and you felt denied a place in its performance, that you resolved to sit outside of it or to re-imagine yourself as someone life could accommodate. I inserted myself into every dark haired woman in a soap opera. I was Hope from the Days of Our Lives, I was Taylor from The Bold and The Beautiful. And in my fantasies I was a man making love to a man, or a young woman coerced into precariousness. I observed as a child that little white girls in particular, were well aware that they lived in a world preoccupied with race. They were deliberate in their barricading of the sand pit, and the jumping castle, and the invitations to their birthday parties weaponized in distribution. But there was another kind of girl who existed among them, who was on the periphery of whiteness and otherness, and who belonged, in my imagination, to the territory of dreams.
She’s the image of a woman with jet black hair swinging in the midst of blue skies and clouds over the grand canyon that lends itself to a kind of dream that you are so naively excluded from. But that doesn’t occur to you at first. What one lingers on is the ease at which this young woman can hop onto the back of an old man's motorcycle driving down the open road with her arms stretched open or kiss a stranger in his car and “just ride”. It is more than just the romanticizing of recklessness, or the freedom to, in her own words, ”make her life an art”. It's the delicacy she is accorded despite her recklessness. It's the way you are struggling to tell her apart from a character in an infamous teen-drama with the same dark hair, pouting lips and curves. Both women are enigmatic, both of them are wild and embody that kind of anemic beauty of old Hollywood. It’s as if they entered a surgeon's office with a pre-raphaelite painting and asked for their noses to be sculpted like a Rossetti. Or to be drained of all their blood while maintaining the soft contours of a voluptuous cloud. And as she swings on that tyre tied to a rope hanging from the sky, you think, if only I were loved in a manner that could, at the very least, make me feel that way: Free, and blissfully unaware that this dream does not come in my colour.
There was that famous young actress who professed to slit her wrists as a child in order to feel more alive. She was pale, brunette, slim, with full lips and luminous eyes. She appeared mysterious, only insofar as every detail she revealed about herself seemed shocking and un-relatable. She was naked and raw in a manner one could easily mistake for vulnerability, but she could never admit to her shame. And I was convinced for a time that this was a new kind of beauty: dangerous, born of a different fantasy altogether. But still there was about her that same portrait of the pale dead woman who had cut herself open to come alive. More and more one begins to draw parallels to the Black Dahlia from the range of these descriptions - her pale body severed in half with her intestines neatly tucked back into her corpse. A distilling reminder, perhaps, of what becomes of these figures of beauty. But not before they’ve given us a dream; one where we can imagine ourselves both alive and dead, pale and blushing, like the postmortem photographs of Victorian women. After a while, you begin to picture yourself on the edge of something, held back by a gust of wind or the firm grip of a hand around your neck. It’s the beauty you are striving for. A wuthering heights of sorts. You think it’s your peculiar affliction - to see death as synonymous with beauty. But we’ve been taught to strive for our undoing. It is a fantasy produced in the eyes of men, informed by the paradox of our bodies, and the images of these women: one after the other; enigmatic, dreamlike, damned. They possess me with the desire to be split open and bare witness to the viscosity of my blood. But they are all white. All with string-like hair and fair skin delicate as porcelain.
I think of the Last Generation of Lilly Footed Women photographed in black and white at Tienanmen square. Relics of a tradition banned a century ago with bones bent and feet bandaged like “three inch Golden Lilies.'' Men of those days, I’m told, liked to look at young women teetering around as if about to fall over. It was their delicacy I supposed, the risk they perform with each step. They bound their feet for the prospect of marriage, as it was with their mothers and their great grandmothers. Generations of women crippled for the love of men and the power of their sympathy. A sentiment akin to what I imagined inspired Christian Dior's “New Look'' so to speak, which was in reality uncomfortably familiar. In an indiscreet response to the sudden emergence of working women post world war two. The celebrated house designed a range of corseted garments, hats, long pencil skirts, purposed (whether intentionally or not) to restrict a woman's movement for the desired effect of a delicate beauty. “Dior has dropped a bomb, '' it was announced. It rivaled the androgynous designs of Coco Chanel. It said, the men are back from the war, and the women can go back to being women now. Except, these women had been set against each other: numbered and divided up into women dressed in Chanel and women dressed in Dior; Rita Hayworth in her voluptuousness tightly pinned into a form-fitting dress vs. Audrey Hepburn with that oversized hat having Breakfast in front of Tiffany’s. One would think this particular generation of women, exposed to the work of Simone De Beauvoir, would be deeply opposed to being corseted and penciled down into a skirt. But Audrey with her meager frame is so enviable one nearly forgets she almost starved to death during the war to appear that way. Perhaps it was easier then to be snatched up or tightly squeezed into breathlessness. So attached we’ve become to these standards of beauty one begins to think: if you want to be loved, you must also want to die.
I recall a scene in Matthew Weiner's 2007 period drama - Mad Men, in which a group of copy editors at a creative advertising agency came to the realization that “women...[had] a fantasy, and it [was] not going up the Nile, it [was] right [there] in America.” it was simply, ”Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Every single woman [was] one of them” The debate formed around what the best approach would be for them to advertise Playtex bras. “Bras were for men.” They thought,” And women wanted to see themselves the way men saw them.” They insinuated these to be the two categories of beauty which appealed to a man's appetite. “You’re either a Jackie or a Marylin. A line and a curve.” Jackie was the slim woman, the elegant woman, the symbol of respectability and class. You waved your Jackie around at a dinner party, at a campaign rally, amongst close family and friends. Monroe on the other hand was the woman you lusted for and cast into all sorts of erotic fantasies. You met your Monroe in a hotel room, at the back of a limousine, or bootleg bar. The desire she provoked was unfitting for a wife. She had to be subjected to the profanity she undecidedly inspired. If these two women were to be organized into the psyche of a man in the 1950’s, Monroe would belong in the dark and uncharted domain of the Id; while Jackie might be positioned alongside the punishing parental figure within the super-ego. Since Jackie is the woman he aspires to have, and Monroe is the woman he wants, he must be able to divide himself into two persons, like an adolescent boy, hiding his porn under his covers in order to satisfy his wants without astonishing his mother. But the only true distinction between these two women is the space they occupy in the minds of these men. Something of a strange irony considering the title of the television series.
Conceivably, women have been performing these fantasies for decades, and we’ve been watching them on screen. Wondering which of these women we represent, or how to transform ourselves from one into the other. But where am I in this picture? Where am I, if not dreaming myself into the body of an animated corpse? If I did not situate myself inside her, what would my role be in a motion picture? Perhaps every black woman is Monroe. Perhaps we all find ourselves in one way or another positioned in the crude corners of a man's mind: for the audacity of our lips, our hips, our bum and the unfamiliarity of our mother tongue. But the black Monroe is not known to blush or to faint or to alter the register of her voice to mimic the sound of a helpless child. The black Monroe is not seen to be delicate, and the desire she provokes is not a dream.
Dreams are in the colours of the ones who live them. Like holding hands with your first love in Berlin, strolling down the Reichstag; like pressing your head against the window on a bus driving up towards the French Alps; like diving head first into the ocean without the dread of your hair coiling, coarse, drained of all its moisture; like bathing in the Mediteranian sun, or baring your body without the latent fear of its vulgarity. These are the colours of dreams and the images of freedom. But underneath it all, I suspect, is the desire to be loved and the permission to be protected from harm. It's the desire to be on the verge of death, saved by the allure of your fragility. It is a wish fulfillment. It is the frailty men want. You must be worthy and in need of saving. But like the portrait of the dead Ofelia floating in a lake holding a bouquet of fresh flowers, even in your death, be beautiful. And If you have a talent, it should not supersede the significance of that beauty. Your substance cannot outlive your flesh. It must be in harmony with it. Better yet, subdued to it. Because if the dream cannot be fucked it is not worth saving. If the dream does not end, it is a nightmare. The dream is to be delicate, always delicate. Delicacy is the currency used to keep you up from falling. It will guarantee the sensitive and careful handling of your being. Why delicate I say? because if you’re not delicate you will be subjected to an inordinate amount of pain. We display our China in glass cabinets in the fear that it will break if it falls. But rubber is worn under our boots, and over the wheels of a tractor, because, as is so often said of black women, it is strong.
I severed from myself in order to dream. The distancing occurred first when it hurt to put a comb through my hair, so I permed it. Then I hung a towel over my head and curled its edges behind my ears and told the neighbors that my name was Taylor. When I was seven I drew a picture of my mother with blue eyes and blond hair. When I was ten I imagined myself in a love triangle between two boys; Leo and Hugo. I lost my virtue to an older man who photographed me between the thin veil of a white scarf, and I felt for a moment that I was in a film or that I had transcended the limits of my complexion. My lecturer commented once, upon reviewing the rough draft of my first manuscript, that it appeared as though my character had been estranged from blackness. And I pictured myself tangled in white sheets reaching for a fountain pen to prevent the inevitable stain of black ink.