(New) Sestina for the Coloured Eugenicist
Interrogate the world to find your kin, my mother tells me – examine a tan that holds too long. Infer from a curling hair your cousin’s head, your sister’s freckled flesh. Daily, we dissect a herd of strangers, searching for ourselves in other peoples’ faces.
On buses, we prise open every private face hunting for freckles and dark complexions. Our kin hide in plain, white sight, and my mother searches with a slave-catcher certainty – a November tan is far too early. That woman must be us, our flesh. She’s five seats over, with that chemical-straightened hair.
We scrutinise Us Weekly, skim over Weather and Hair Tips through to Television – are those high yellow faces our own? Hard to believe in such perfect flesh, yet my mother nods, claiming their bodies as our kin. On Bridgerton, the concupiscent TV-tanned pulse with a family long searched-for.
In my off hours, I practice the art of searching: curls, coils, dreads or cornrows, every twist of hair that marks us out from them. A subtle tan or a gap-toothed grin, I learn to recognise our faces amongst the crush of humankind. To be truly kin, my mother says, you must know your own flesh
Some nights, my mother braids my hair, the flesh of my scalp taut like a hangman’s rope. Our search – she punctuates each word with brushstrokes akin to gunshots – gives us back ourselves. Your hair, my skin, our bodies must have context. She faces me. You know your melanin holds longer than a tan.
Outside our miscegenated lives, a tan is just a tan, a curl a curl. We breathe a loneliness where any flesh bleeds white. My mother scans each private face, desperate for our reflection, while I follow her search with my dark brown eyes and fast-unravelling hair. Adrift in our isolation, we cling to anything kin.
Beyond my too-long tan, I wonder – Mother, why am I searching for familiar flesh, to know the curling hair and sweet brown faces of our kin?
If only, perhaps, to better know your reflection.