7

Skin

The story of the little boat that crossed the
river night after night, and who was in it.
The story of a man and woman, standing
together in the moonlight. Skin to skin.

Skin is our largest organ, the unique size of our individual bodies. It is the organ of touch. When we blush or are hot or cold, it gives us away. It shows when we are excited or repulsed. Like the rings in tree trunks, it reveals the life we’ve lived — our scars, our wrinkles forming where we are most susceptible to irritation or unhappiness or surprise or laughter. Skin is our life’s record.

It can be grafted to heal wounds; it can be donated to other bodies. In this sense, it can live apart from us, beyond our natural lives. It can be a canvas for art. There is no other organ that changes colour regularly, that does so much to protect us, and yet is abused or underappreciated to such an extent. No other organ is the frontier between the outside world and our insides. No other organ is used against us.

Early anatomists saw skin as having little value, and flayed it to reveal the more important workings of the body beneath it. But in the seventeenth century, anatomists like Jean Riolan the Younger became curious about the source of blackness within African skin. Riolan blistered the skin of a black African body with a chemical agent, then removed the seared specimen to examine its layers. A similar experiment later that century identified the actual layer of skin where dark pigmentation is found; another anatomist even asserted that blackness came from ‘dark scales’.

Early anatomists disregarded skin as an important organ. Source: Juan Valverde de Amusco, 1559 — Copperplate engraving. National Library of Medicine, Rome.

Today we know that skin needs melanin to protect it from being destroyed by UV rays from the sun, and these natural pigment levels vary. Dark skin is dark because it has a higher percentage of eumelanin than lighter skin. Dark skin is the product of a survival mechanism that helped early human species who moved out of the rainforest and onto sunny savannahs to survive. Darkness is a means of evolution; it is necessary in relation to light.

But a congenital disorder can result in the reduction or absence of melanin pigment, and a black person can appear white-skinned. For me, this porous quality is the most potent image of skin as the barrier between so-called races. Skin as a marker of race is a false border — merely an illusion of a border between us and the outside world, between us and other bodies.

Psychoanalysis gave me language around dark and light in which racial blackness was only possible because of the white state of mind that feared it most. It offered an explanation for racism and allowed me to look beyond it. Jung’s language of dream interpretation became another world-building tool for me to use in storytelling, a way of understanding life through language and a way to dissect human interaction. I was in it for the process of excavation.

All systems of belief — Eastern and Western, the dharmic and the evangelical — involve storytelling, with myths and legends, heroes, warriors, lovers, victims and conquerors. Most systems get stuck in a single story, but in psychoanalysis the most important thing is the process itself, the sharing, the self-reflection, the healthy distance that can be found when one tells one’s own tale, over and over again, with the findings themselves being less significant. Similar to writing, the story of the self is true in each particular telling. We change, the story unfolds and changes, but the telling itself is eternal.

My sense of being whole after analysis increased my feeling of being porous to people around me. Instead of putting up barriers to intimacy, feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere and that I had to protect my corner, I felt more belonging. I felt even more love and more suffering. I felt more from and for other people — my family, friends, colleagues, strangers in the same tube carriage, crowds in photos, individuals in the news, students in my office, grizzled men sitting on the pavement. Feeling responsible for myself, I was able to be more generous to others. My focus shifted from inward to outward. My happiness was still not possible while black and brown and yellow and red bodies and women’s bodies and less-able bodies and queer bodies and poor bodies were still targets of neglect, hatred, violence. I knew I had to demand responsibility in others.

Police pull a black man over because his car is missing a taillight. The man gets out of the car and runs. Police shoot him in the back.

A white man on neighbourhood watch shoots a young black man for looking ‘suspicious’.

A white woman brandishes a ten-inch knife, screaming ‘I want to kill all you Jews’ as she chases Jewish children outside a synagogue.

A government puts brown children in cages.

A brown woman who is thirty-four weeks pregnant is on a bus with her children where she is abused by white passengers for not speaking English. ‘Sand rats, ISIS bitches,’ they say. ‘Go back to your fucking country where they’re bombing every day … You’re lucky I don’t kick you in the uterus and you’ll never have a baby again.’

A black man is physically restrained on the plane flight that is deporting him. His arms are handcuffed behind his back, seatbelt tight, he is bent over in an impossible position. ‘Please let me go… you’re killing me, please help.’ Thirty-five minutes later he is dead.

A young indigenous woman is followed in the street by police who suspect she is a sex-worker. Arrested for public intoxication, she is subjected to hours of violent humiliation, sexual abuse, an officer’s knee in her kidney. Her hair is grabbed, her shirt and bra cut off, and she is left naked in her cell.

I can’t breathe.

I am a social being committed to others. I first found a sense of political identity through women’s groups and the politics of women of colour. I later identified with other marginalised groups fighting for recognition, inclusion and rights, connecting their struggles with my own family’s history and experience. Our current struggles have precedents: in slave rebellions, among the suffragettes, in the civil rights movement and the hard-won battles of representation and rights for racial, gender, religious, ability groups in a slow awakening, over decades, of ‘otherness’ against the centre. That diverse world we imagined in the 1970s, with everyone singing in unison, has not come into being. The centre still holds.

Released from the fog of sadness that characterised my youth, I now also felt unprecedented anger. I re-invigorated my allegiance with political blackness. And it had broadened. Connection to the self that therapy brought didn’t mean selfishness — it isn’t about self-actualisation at all costs. It isn’t about a particular way of looking at freedom. I look back to that plantation I imagined, where my ancestors undertook various forms of coerced labour and I think about why its structure still governs, why that structure is so deeply a part of our economic reality. James Baldwin famously said, ‘What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I am not a nigger, I am a man. But if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need him.’ Why do we still need a ‘nigger’?

I oppose the treatment of people as chattel, oppose neglect, oppose the lowest price for the lowest labour, oppose coercion and manipulation, oppose exploitation, oppose cages and shackles and shanty towns and ghettos and the borders of race-making. If white is a state of mind that allows the plantation to flourish, with black as its opposite, my politics define my ‘colour’. If I put white on the psychoanalyst’s couch, I see that, yes, it urgently has to deal with its shadow, with the reason for the existence of blackness, with the divisions between us that are creating so much pain. I remember what my therapist said that first day when I challenged her on not being able to understand me: ‘But maybe you’ll explore parts of yourself completely unknown to you yet.’

That’s an exciting prospect for all of us to face together.

—

It’s hot in London and has been hot for over two months, with only occasional bouts of rain in the night, which remind me of Canadian summer rain — hard downpours, buckets of rain. In this normally grey, drizzly country, buckets of rain feel out of place, damaging the roses, drowning low-lying towns, creating a new leak in my roof.

In early July it is usually still green in the parks and gardens, but not this year. I am looking forward to my month in Canada, the lake swims, the cool woods of Ontario, and even the air conditioning in the city, where the summer also has been exceedingly hot.

I walk through my neighbourhood park on a Saturday. England has had a breakthrough in the football World Cup, and the city is electric with hope. Children’s parties fill the corners of the park, with toddlers running about, ignoring the calls of parents too hot to chase after them. Families, black and brown and white and mixed, lay out food for their picnics. Even on a day like today, thirty degrees celsius, there are people lying in the sun. All of these sunbathers are white. The English are known for their sun worshipping, and little wonder, but today it feels misguided.

I am tired, my mind muddled, because sleeping is hard in the heat. My apartment is airless in the middle of the night, even with every window open as wide as it will go. I live at the top of a house and sounds come from all directions below me — the cries and raised voices, the motorbikes and the radios. In the night I hear voices in languages I do not recognise and a few that I do. Men arguing. One night I heard a slap that seemed to come right into my window. Then there were more voices, raised in excitement, or maybe in alarm. There were repeated slaps, a ritual of slapping, flesh against flesh. Perhaps a beating, perhaps a loving. I put a pillow over my head.

As I walk through the park and look at the skin of the white people in the sun, I think I can see it cooking. The grass is brown, leaves are wilted and the sky is yellow, not summer blue. In Canada’s capital, Ottawa, the temperature and humidex have hit forty-seven degrees celsius. Seventy deaths in Montreal have been attributed to the heat. In the Caucasus mountains it has been over forty degrees and the region has experienced major power cuts as people crank up the air conditioning to keep cool. In Japan, the heatwave has been declared a natural disaster because of the mounting death toll. Greek woods are burning; Southern California wildfires are raging.

I touch my neck. My fingers wipe away the perspiration there, and I press down on my collarbone, rubbing my own sweat in like a lotion. I love heat and am happiest in the summer, but this heat wave has frightened me; icebergs are melting, the big Arctic thaw is coming. I wonder why we are allowing these effects to continue. I sit under a tree and wipe my neck again. I scratch the sweaty skin under my watch and notice the tan line formed only in the last few days.

Because I live mostly in the north, particularly in England, renowned for its lack of sunlight, my skin can appear very fair. Once I get enough melanin as protection, though, my skin can get darker and darker, and then I am mistaken for a Mexican or a Brazilian or an indigenous American. A friend in London once referred to me as a ‘light skinned’ black girl and, like the moment when my Canadian friend identified me as ‘socially white’, I felt removed from my blackness. My black skin was lightened through miscegenation, but in even acknowledging different shades of blackness, we engage in what C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins calls the ‘tom foolery’ of identifying quadroons or octoroons or any traces of African heritage. Because the truth is that the dominating fact of a plantation society is ‘fear of the slaves’.

My sister became the first woman of colour to be superior court judge in Ontario. I am enormously proud of her achievements, her intelligence and her tireless, dedicated work, but I wonder if she would have been able to shatter those barriers if her skin had been darker. As a young girl she had been pushed down in the playground and called ‘nigger’, but her skin is fair, her nose petite, her hair tamed and ‘respectable’. Studies suggest that skin tone and socioeconomic achievement are twinned. Lighter-skinned members of racial minorities enjoy higher average levels of education, income, and occupational status than darker skinned members. And light is associated with intelligence, trustworthiness, beauty.1

In my twenties in Toronto I was perpetually included in racist conversations in which people, mostly colleagues or strangers, talked about black people as though I wasn’t one. If they acknowledged my otherness or blackness at all, they treated me as if I was exempt or was aligned with them against something else that they were naming. They ‘didn’t mean me’, which is a classic (‘Oh, no,’ my teacher said, ‘Not Tessa. Tessa’s something else’) racist response. Normally, though, I thought my friends understood who I was. Then a friend whose background was eastern European one day told me that she wanted to move out of the neighbourhood she was living in because there were ‘too many black people’. I can’t remember how I responded or if I did at all. I only know that after many years of friendship I could no longer tolerate her company, not only because of the racist remark, or the sense that my shade of blackness had protected me throughout our friendship, but because I realised that she had not seen who I was at all — a case of mistaken identity. Or, worse, I had mistaken my own identity.

Skin lightening has long been practised in many parts of the world. The widespread use of chemical skin lighteners — containing mercury, corticosteroids and hydroquinone, which is used to suppress melanin production — is a desperate reach to be free of the negative perceptions of blackness. Globally, too, skin colour and social status are linked, with paler skin associated with wealth and spending a life sheltered indoors, and darker skin associated with those who toil under the sun. And, as one user of lightening products said, ‘You grow up knowing that the lighter ladies are the prettier ones. It’s just a fact.’2

In Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Senegal, Indonesia, India, Canada, the US, the UK, Brazil, Korea, Japan and China among other places, products such as Black and White Cream, Nadolina, Ambi, Palmer’s Swiss Whitening Pills, Ultra Glow, Skin Success and Clear Essence, and a Cameroon pop singer’s favourite, Whitenicious, are sold to people — mostly women — who long for not necessarily white skin, but the ‘light’ skin of African-American celebrities like Beyoncé or Bollywood actresses like Isha Koppikar or Aishwarya Rai. In the multi-billion dollar industry of skin lightening, many products are sold to people who claim to want to even out their skin tone, to ‘get rid of spots’. Many seek healthier alternatives to the chemical lighteners, those that claim to be based on ayurvedic medicine and ingredients such as saffron, papaya, almonds and lentils. More Western versions claim to contain Vitamin C and Glutathione, and all produce varying results: I’m so disappointed … not even one shade lighter.

Long term use of hydroquinone can lead to ochronosis, a disfiguring condition that leaves the skin puckered with yellow banana shaped fibres, caviar-like papules and dark pigmentation. Overuse of topical steroids can lead to contact eczema, bacterial and fungal infection, an adrenal gland disease called Cushing’s syndrome, along with skin thinning and kidney disease.

The Caribbean man at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park in 1956 was prescient when he pointed his finger at the white people in the crowd and proclaimed ‘We gwon brown y’all up’. Not in the way he might have meant at the time, but with skin lighteners browning up darker hues.

Anatomist’s drawing. What lies beneath. Source: The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949.

—

While my psychoanalysis deepened, wavered, weakened, became more and less important over years and normalised into my life like regular exercise, I zeroed in on material inequality as the main narrator of race-making. I am relatively free to choose my course in life because I had believed in a liberal dream of being self-made. Yet by following that dream I bought into the plantation hierarchy that established that freedom would come if I strove to work in the master’s house. In Canada and the UK there have been many multiculturalism and diversity initiatives, but the structures haven’t changed. As Audre Lord said, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Diversity programmes, affirmative action and attention to representation in work, government and culture are crucial in reaching towards equality, and yet these initiatives are contentious and are often accused of lowering standards or creating reverse discrimination. The opposition to them doesn’t take into account the history of inequality, nor does it include an understanding of how privilege functions.

As it is in the Caribbean, race is a complex matter in Brazil, where people have many names (Brancos, Pardos, Pretos, Caboclos, Amarelos, Indigenous) for the shades and identities of Brazilians. There, as elsewhere, class plays a big part: ‘Money whitens’ is a common phrase in the country.

In the Caribbean after slavery, the black, yellow, brown and red mix of faces and skin existed in a hierarchy climbing towards white, towards the plantation house and not the sugar-cane field. A similar effort to ‘whiten’ its population, had been in play in Brazil since abolition. Doctors and lawyers were primarily lighter skinned, while bus drivers and domestic servants were black.

While the country had always prided itself on a thousand shades of brown, in 2014 Brazil acknowledged the legacy of slavery in its institutions and the white supremacy it was founded on, and passed affirmative action laws to increase non-white enrolment in public universities and non-white managers in the civil service. The aim was to increase the black elite in Brazil to twenty per cent by 2024.

The government established a quota system. Many people who had previously identified as white — under fifty per cent of the population — had some African or indigenous ancestry and signed up to the quota system in order to gain access to education or jobs. And the administration soon ran into problems with ‘racial fraud’. People with white features checked the ‘black’ box on applications and got quota places at universities, which angered others who looked ‘more black’ and were refused places. As a solution to the abuse of the system, the government introduced an anti-fraud commission, in which a panel of judges determines if the applicants are in fact black or indigenous. This is not an easy task in such a racially mixed culture as Brazil. As my own mixed background demonstrates, both identification from the outside and identity from the inside are deeply subjective, based on any one person’s understanding of looks, skin or heritage. Asked by an interviewer what he thought were the features of his blackness that would make him eligible for a government job, one candidate said that he searched for his skin tone on Wikipedia and decided he was dark enough. Another suggested that even though he had ‘white’ hair, his lips and nose made him black. Another candidate asked, ‘My nose is not that big. Does that mean I’m not black?’

In a reversal of ‘passing’ as white to gain social advantage, Brazil now has more people ticking ‘black’ on questionnaires in order to get jobs. Before the new racial consciousness brought by the affirmative action programmes, light-skinned black people who would be considered black in the US were generally not considered black in Brazilian society. In Brazil, race has not been about roots. If you look black you are black; if you look white you are white. Two siblings could call themselves two different things, depending on how they look. They could have black, white and mixed cousins.

While the affirmative action programmes in Brazil don’t, in Lorde’s phrase, ‘dismantle the master’s house’, they offer a different way of seeing. A broadcaster asked a government official on the anti-fraud panel how they would know ‘who is black in Brazil?’ The commissioner, not-so-jokingly, replied, ‘Ask a police officer’, and said he was tempted to create a panel composed entirely of police officers.

A chilling admission. Black is the dehumanised, the hunted, the useless, the criminalised, the poor in the structure of a racist state.

Reversing economic oppression exposes one of the origins of racism — a very basic assertion that there is not enough to go around, resulting in the belief that some must have less than others.

Why does race exist? To do the accounting for who will have more and who will have less. Race-making takes place even within groups of people with the same skin colour. In South Africa, in 2008, migrants from Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe were killed by black South Africans in riots. And in 2015 and 2017, poor blacks violently attacked people in the Nigerian community, beating and murdering some of them, and burning their homes and shops, in anti-immigration riots. Difference and othering can be marked in many ways — the us versus them of a religion, of geographical territory, or of an ethnicity.

In 1994, the Rwandan genocide was swift and brutal, beginning on 6 April and ending on 19 July. During those months, the murder rate surpassed that of the Nazis in the Holocaust and the Khmer Rouge in the Killing Fields. In about a hundred days, approximately 850,000 individuals were murdered, at a rate of about three-hundred deaths per hour, five deaths per minute. Hutu perpetrators came from all levels of society. Using machetes, swords, spears and nail-studded clubs, Hutu citizens and paramilitaries murdered their Tutsi neighbours, Tutsi wives, Tutsi students, Tutsi patients and fellow Hutus who were considered Tutsi collaborators.

Why? How does race work among kin?

The causes and motives behind the Rwandan genocide are complex, contested, and rooted in a difficult history between the two groups, but one theory3 explores the fact that prior to the colonisation of Rwanda in the late 1880s by Germany, Belgium and the British, the Hutus and Tutsis lived relatively harmoniously. Through structural inequalities instituted under Belgian governance and in the Catholic school system, Tutsis gained more power, more access to education, and inevitably became the elite in Rwanda. Segregation ensued, with identity cards being introduced in 1933 and identities of otherness entrenched in what was once a more fluidly diverse society. During the post-colonial period in the late 1950s, political parties formed along ethnic lines in a similar way as they did in British Guiana, when blacks and Indians began to be represented by different political groups. In 1959, Hutus overthrew the Tutsi monarchy and violent battles between the two groups began. In post-independence Rwanda, Hutus began to discriminate against Tutsis, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee the country. A group of Tutsi exiles formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front and invaded Rwanda in 1990. The violence between the groups escalated.

The willingness of Hutus to slaughter their Tutsi neighbours and vice versa might rest in the roots of racism — that need for some to have more than others based on constructed difference. The economic crisis of 1984, in which food production decreased, the price of coffee crashed and jobs were eliminated, caused hardship for many families. For nearly a decade this crisis fed into the hopelessness felt by many young people, and this hopelessness fed their participation in the genocide in which race-making fuelled the blood-letting. Here as elsewhere, race becomes an economic construct that governs who gets ‘more’.

At the heart of othering is fear. ‘Whiteness’ fears its shadow. We fear that the other will take what we have; in the extreme, this fear becomes hate for the sake of hate, a racialised sadism strips our humanity.

Class and race are inseparable tools for othering. Slowly over the last two decades of living in London I’ve seen them in action in ways that, in my middle-class upbringing in Canada, I had not so acutely tracked. When I was a child, my grandmother and I used to watch To Sir with Love, starring Sidney Poitier, every time it came on television. My grandmother would sit through the opening scenes with her hands pressed together in front of her chest, waiting for the moment when ‘Sir’ (Sidney Poitier) announces that he is from British Guiana. Then she would clap her hands in glee at hearing her birthplace announced on television. I remember once asking her what she thought of the way the teacher in the story was treated by the east London teenagers. She shook her head with a kind of hopelessness, indicating how appalling racism must be in England, blind to her own internalised hierarchy of shades expressed when she instructed me to not ‘go backwards’ with a black boyfriend. At the end of the film, she said, ‘You know, when the black people get into power, they will be just as bad as the white people.’ I didn’t understand what she meant then, but the statement stayed with me. She knew about elites; she understood that oppression would always come when some had much more than others.

And she ran.

When I first moved to London, I met John Berger and we became friends. We would talk about art and politics in a way that I had never considered possible; he shone light on a kind of socialism that had art at its core. His Marxism seemed different to that of other activists. His writing was so human and humane, so full of a collective longing for beauty that his politics seemed simple, fundamental to the human spirit — obvious. Race-making was class making, and inequality happened as soon as there was an us and a them. In that moment, Berger said, ‘barbarism’ ensued. He encouraged me to read many authors, among them Arundhati Roy, not only her novel, The God of Small Things, but her political essays, all of which contained a metaphysical solidarity among people that straightforward socialist political writing was often too rigid to admit. In The God of Small Things I found ambiguity and mystery — ‘The sea was black, the spume vomit green. Fish fed on shattered glass. Night’s elbows rested on the water, and falling stars glanced off its brittle shards. Moths lit up the sky. There wasn’t a moon.’ — and a story of love that straddles caste. In that love there is tragedy, because in the Hindu caste system love relationships between ‘untouchables’ and higher castes is forbidden. The novel is skilfully unwieldly, perhaps like the southern Indian society it describes. The plot spirals around two deaths, one of a young foreign girl and the other of Velutha, the male lover in the ‘illicit’ relationship, the God of Small Things himself. I read this novel without putting it down, in awe of Roy’s use of language, her fine ear attuned to tiny moments of individual voice, yet able to capture the symphony of a region; hers was an omniscience that knew that small things are the true things, the best things, the only things upon which to make sense of human struggles.

If he touched her, he couldn’t talk to her, if he loved her he couldn’t leave, if he spoke he couldn’t listen, if he fought he couldn’t win.

Who was he, the one-armed man? Who could he have been? The God of Loss? The God of Small Things? The God of Goose Bumps and Sudden Smiles? Of Sourmetal Smells — like steel bus-rails and the smell of the bus conductor’s hands from holding them?

In this novel, I came into imaginary contact with something that felt familiar from generations ago, from lives and ancestors long gone, but which made sense to my present desire for divisions to collapse. I claimed the ‘God of Loss’ — whom I had been born to appease, being the replacement child.

I am able to imagine my Indian ancestor as a woman standing beside a river knowing its force, fully aware that in harnessing it something powerful will come. She knows equally that strangling a river to make hydroelectricity will be dangerous in ways she cannot see in this moment. She turns to gather the stories of those living along its shore instead.

Berger and Roy gave me a different way of seeing in which caste and class and the history of inequalities became part of my perceptions of my racialised self. Along with my desire to write towards the skinless, fleshless moment when all the bones danced, I recognised that the racialised liberalism in which I was educated — where we strive for a bigger part of some mythological pie that our fractured identities are in competition for — leaves us without a language with which to talk about inequality. It leaves black and white in perpetual opposition, a state that feeds the plantation mentality.

There is a skin condition called dermatographia, in which faint scratches on the skin redden and rise in a wheal similar to hives. Such skin can be written upon like paper, though the marks disappear after thirty minutes. For a brief moment, the skin is a book, is a record of touch. To touch is to love. To write is also to love.

To answer ‘writer’ when I’m asked what race I am is true not because I want to avoid the issue of race, but because I want the questioner to think about why I need to be your brown girl in the ring. I am not your yellow lotus, your angry black woman, your Pocahontas. What happens on your skin? What happens to you when you are touched?

Skin affected by dermatographia can be written on, the writing remaining only briefly, like disappearing ink on paper. Source: R1carver, Creative Commons.