I hate being vulnerable, but sometimes to feel vulnerable is actually to be strong. To write this book is being vulnerable, and it is the only way it will work—not to close off, but to open up, which takes a lot of strength. People think I am very tough and, sure, I can be very tough, but to be really tough, you need to be vulnerable. Sometimes you need a good cry. In private. Not necessarily about yourself, but about others who you have known and loved, who you still know. It makes you feel, and sometimes when you shut yourself off so much, you stop feeling. I don’t think of time passing, but it does, and I don’t get sentimental about that, but I feel it, and notice it.
People I know from twenty, thirty years ago look older. They look at me, and I don’t really look older, for whatever reason. They ask, Have you sold your soul to the devil? I think it’s because I don’t believe in time, I don’t believe in age, I don’t believe in getting older. I believe in getting wise. I believe in having more memories.
I’ll never forget this Twilight Zone episode I watched where all the faces looked like the faces of the women in the Housewives programs: bloated lips, ballooning cheeks, distorted, warped, sliced up, oddly proportioned. People today often look like they are from this episode of the Twilight Zone where the idea of being so facially maimed was a living hell. There are people I knew thirty years ago whom I now don’t recognize because their faces have gone through so many changes. They are attempting to retain their youth, but their efforts don’t make them look younger, only stranger.
People ask me if I have had work done to my face. I say, “No, I fucking haven’t.” Would I have work done to my face? No, I fucking wouldn’t. Why would I want to look in the mirror and not recognize myself again? Why would I want to see myself in the mirror and wonder, Who is that? That sounds like the definition of madness. Of course, I am also very afraid of needles. And pain.
Then people say, “Well, one day you will have surgery, when your face finally does start to age.”
I say, “Well, no I won’t. Absolutely not.”
I am not sure what people think they are doing. The pressure in certain worlds and professions has become that if you don’t have Botox, filler, a face-lift, you don’t belong. It’s like peer pressure at school trying to keep up, but it’s a global peer pressure among adults. The individual spirit has been devoured. Everyone starts to look the same as well, which makes you think that in thirty or forty years there will only be about thirty or forty separate looks. The world will be full of monocultural clones, all adopting and repeating an apparent, ultimately very stale, ideal.
There is a mass panic among women, especially, and it seems to lack humor and wit—it’s a form of self-destruction. Those who surgically alter themselves seem indifferent to how grotesque it makes them look. Attacking their own faces is a hostile act of self-hate, not an act of love. They used to say my lips were too big; now they would be saying they are too thin and telling me to pump them up.
It’s troubling that people put their trust in this kind of mind-set. It is all so permanent and addictive, whereas how I would change myself, and manipulate age and time, was through imagery. I didn’t literally cut into the skin and move around the muscle in my face. I was stretched, fractured, crushed, expanded, liquefied, but always as a performance, as an effect, a consciousness, never as a real human being.
Versions of me were manufactured, as real as anything, but they emerged out of me, and didn’t scar me. At the center of all these multiple versions of me, there was always a mystery, my mind, where the truth about me really exists, which remains beyond all this interference. My body is a language, but it’s not the only one I speak.
Perhaps in the future, where life is imagined more than lived, you will be able to separate and decorate yourself in the ways you can in performance, sending an altered and adjusted variety of selves out into the various spaces of the world, while at the center of it, you remain untouched—yourself, pure spirit, staying in your own skin, close to your soul. In one world you age, in another you exist inside a fantasy.
These Housewives and those fetishizing youth who pursue a reshaping of their faces and bodies are taking too literally the techniques that have been used in the production and retouching of image in entertainment. The face and body can be twisted out of shape, or given the illusion of perfection, on film or video, but there are those who actually do it to themselves, to their flesh and bone. I loved the idea of metamorphosis in my performance, of my persona being infinitely malleable, able to transmit the notion that anything is possible, but I never had the urge to do that to my actual body.
I would say to those women plumping up their lips and cheeks, Eat more pumpkins. Healthy skin begins from the inside out. The beauty products made from aloe vera—eat them, don’t slap them on yourself. We’ve been eating that in Jamaica since we were kids. Red wine, honey. That keeps you young. Eating the pumpkin. The melon. Don’t put all this shit on your face, eat it.
Don’t do those quick fixes. It’s like doing heroin. You become addicted to something that in the long run will harm you. Don’t they see it in the mirror, that they look distorted? Or do they keep doing it to themselves to correct the mistakes? It’s like one thing breaks, you fix that; then something else breaks, you need to fix that.
I would never consider cutting into myself to pretend to stay young. It’s bad enough going to the dentist or the doctor for a shot. If I ever need a shot, I say, “Hit me as hard as you can where the needle goes into my flesh. I do not want to feel the needle go into my skin. I want to feel numb there. Hit me. Harder! Harder! And don’t show me the needle, I don’t want to see it.” They think I am a masochist. Can you image the pain of all those needles in the service of smoothing you out and pretending you are still young and attractive even as death gets closer?
When I became a grandmother, it still didn’t make me think, Now I must burn away the wrinkles, lift the breasts, pump up the lips. There was no sense of panic. How could there be? Becoming a grandmother was simply another stage I was moving through. Paulo became a father at the same age that I became a mother. His daughter Athena was born in Paris, and I happened to be there on the day she was born doing some promotional work for the Hurricane album, including a photo shoot with Jean-Paul. The day she was born, the album entered the British charts.
I got to the hospital not long after she was born, and when I first saw her, she had her eyes closed. I had to leave soon, and I was begging her to open her eyes. Before I leave, please open your eyes! A few moments before I had to leave, she opened her eyes—and my God, what a shock. I shouldn’t really say it, but it was like a Rosemary’s Baby moment. She had these deep purple eyes, and this little spray of red hair, and her skin was so white (her mother is half Italian, half Finnish) it was almost transparent. She was like Elizabeth I in wrinkled miniature. Her blue-purple eyes locked right on mine. It was an extraordinary moment.
I rang Jean-Paul when she was born and said, “If you don’t get down to the hospital immediately I won’t do the photo shoot.” He still had that fear of the newborn, but he came down. It was one great ending to our story, and of course another beginning: to become grandparents and feel how much that stretches reality.
Paulo had a group with the mother of Athena, Azella, called Trybez, and they supported me when I did the Hurricane tour. I would look after Athena while they were on tour in much the same way I would have Paulo with me when I toured after he was born. I would have her in my dressing room as I was putting on my makeup. It was continuity. You could see Athena respond to the music as it came through the dressing room walls, and notice how she was reacting to something she had been hearing when she was inside her mother’s womb. There was a definite connection with a noise and rhythm she was familiar with.
I am glad that I had a boy and that Paulo had a girl, which means that, in a way, I can have a girl. I never wanted a girl, because of how I had to compete with all my brothers, and how they can be boxed in and denied freedom. Girls are treated as inferior; it just seems to be the way things are, however much you fight. Now she’s here, I want her to be tough and work out how to do well in a man’s world.
When she was born, there was some debate about what she should call me—Nana, Bonne Maman, Aunt Grace. “No,” I announced. “I deserve to be called Grandmother, with emphasis on the grand.” I never really had a grandmother, not in any traditional, nurturing sense. Athena made me feel grand. I definitely wanted to be Grandma.