Open Letter to Love and Lover

                

Hey Beautiful,
                I just read Merle Hodge’s article about violence. And as you know I am struggling. Hard to admit this because I do hold the opinion that I have the right to be. But since I started to walk this path of spirit I really can’t hold firm to stupidity and selfishness like I use to. Damn brain always examining things, accessing things and I feel like I am constantly becoming my best self.

                Anyway, about this article: I never finished reading it before I began to think about my past. You know me always connecting the past to everything. This is about to sound like a therapy session and I am not ashamed just uncomfortable. So in this article I am seeing the way the abused child and the abused man and the way plantation and capitalism works to create the frame for violence.

                Wait. Yes, I know I am not a man. I mean I have no penis. I am a girl child, a woman, a queer woman. And the things that are a part of manliness don’t readily or easily apply to me. But watch me, I am the top in our relationship. I put the sweetness in you in ways that make your mind blurry about what you feeling and doing. I love you good. You know I have a machismo in me that makes you feel like you are taken care of. Where you think that come from? I too am part of the problem because just like my dream about marriage all this is learnt behaviour.

                You don’t understand? OK. So, I have no father, well not in the way people have fathers, but I grew up watching Disney and forming ideas of self closely connected to the idea of loving and lovers and marriage. One of the things I learned that I use daily, if you paying attention you will see, is an exchange of loud vibrant energies as if to say I am here look at me. I not ashamed to tell you that this exist. I can tell you even why this thing exists. It is so as part of my identity. This is evidence that I am here and I am worthy of attention. It’s my pheromones. Now this bravado synchronizes perfectly with my words my gift of gab. And so, I say things and the room dances and attraction occurs and you my lover though concerned and maybe even slightly disturbed will fall in my arms tonight. I am hard and present. Or that’s the way I think it works. But sometimes, sometimes I won’t identify with it but most times I will use it. Where did I learn this? From the man in the bar, the boys in school, the things girl desires, the television shows, the songs I listened to et al. I was inundated with this as a way of being. And it works trust me.

                I am a gay woman with issues of violence and masculinity conferred upon my being. But I am also a woman and gay and a child who has been victim of violence on my person. I remember being beaten in prep school until I was red, welted and black and blue, isolated and embarrassed in high school and then separated and shunned in adulthood. I was even raped and molested in my youth. To have that violence enacted upon you makes your loving strange and contentious.

                As a young lesbian, I would always shout at women, although I never did that “I would fuck them up”; standing in the position of violence, face crumbled, hand raised then hiss and fuss and leave, carrying the violent promise with me. There was that one time where I strangled a girl and that I will never do again except in bed. But that’s violence conversation for another day.

                Anyway, back to Merle Hodge. There is an awareness in the article for healing. Strange my lover that by loving you healing you will always be my focus. It’s weird because the art of healing is knowing that you are sick. And I really do feel it’s my responsibility to play doctor in all kinds of ways. I diagnose illness just as soon as I read it. I am as vocal as a warner woman with a drum. And let me tell you I do this for myself as well. I call out my illness from the narcissism, to the gayness, to the anger, to the inability to communicate, to the atrophied love muscles. And I call them out not as an indicator of my inability to try to work but as an awareness of my illness. So, I am the cancer patient who is aware that my hair is falling out and I will say I have no hair, but I will wear a wig because well you need hair. But I don’t want you lying to yourself that there is hair. If there is hair, it’s bought and not shooting out of me. Don’t expect it. It won’t be there.

I am invested in healing. And I think the thing that irks, irritates and pains me is when in loving out and away from the violence, that has been enacted upon me and the violence that I am owning and running with, it leads to an expectation of violence or a space where I cannot heal and be more than the violence.

                You not understanding? Ok A few years ago, I said to an ex I am violent but I will never hit you. A few years after that she hit me. Now the conversation of hitting happened only because she was adamant that her person was not a place where violence should be acted on. But she never accounted for her body being a source of violence. And so it went with trust and all the other things that are necessary, they say, for the building of a relationship. In the end, even though the ultimate sign of violence never happened to her body, I mean I did raise my hand as if to but never landed the blow, we never worked, mostly because I could not be trusted. I was regarded and, with good reason, handled like a cheater. That in itself is violence, right? But even in moments when I did not cheat that is all I was. That gives me no room to be anything but a cheater in action and in thought.

                For us my lover, my violence cannot be all I am. Or is it? I don’t desire to identify with it. I wish to heal from it. But the statement of healing from it incurs on it the presence of the damn thing. My very person is strained by the thing I refuse to identify as. Our love is scared tainted and strained by it. Should you still love me and help me to heal. Or do you leave?

                Back to Merle Hodge, she says in a very Tanty way, “only when our lives cease to be governed by the shadow of the whip can we begin to heal the grave disruption of relations between man and women that we have suffered in the Caribbean” (530). And I want to say to you my love that this relation extends to us. Especially in so tightly wound a space as our loving.

                My whle life is a shadow of violence, my DNA, my understanding of self, my daily interactions, will I be helped into healing? Am I on my own in this? I fucking hope not…
               
Notes:
Hodge, Merle. The Shadow of the Whip: A Comment on Male-Female Relations in the Caribbean. The Birth of Caribbean Civilization: A Century of Ideas about Culture and Identity, Nation and  Society. Ed O. Nigel Bollard. Ian Randle: Jamaica: 2004. pp524-530

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