by Sophia Terazawa
“Decolonizing Touch” is a monthly column about love and intimacy. If the revolution will not be televised, then the erotic, the heartbreaks, and interpersonal relationships most certainly will go unseen. But I believe that what happens in private is the most radical space of all. What does it mean to desire the Other? How does it feel to need the oppressor? I hope to answer these questions (and more) in my column.
Clair de Lune
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| (“Mùi Đu Đủ Xanh” by Sophia Terazawa) |
Decolonizing love requires awe. Oracles would have me thinking otherwise.
Recognize strangers touching dead bodies as another kind of embrace, and the camera watches strangers sending bullets hugging strangers as voyeur, a drone kissing children in the field.
The fire takes it all. I’m tired. Are you?
My uncles were oracles. My uncles carried ships on their backs. Once, they swam like queens, my uncles. The water takes it all.
*
Before I even learn how to walk, my mother tosses me into the shallow end of a pool. To survive in this world, she knows I must learn how to drown.
And before I even learn how to talk, my mother drives me from Dallas to Galveston Bay. To survive in this country, she knows I must learn how to recognize my womb.
According to my mother, she sat me on the dock while my father took photos, and right then, I pointed joyously at the unforgiving ocean. And right there, I shouted my first word in this country’s wretched language: “Pool!”
According to my mother, she wept.
*
Decolonizing love requires awe.
It requires one to embody the multitudes of ancestors and move through fire. For many, this fire is very much a reality: the policeman’s aim and border patrol, tear gas, smoke, protestors burning at rallies, protestors burning for simply existing at the end of an executive order, ash and music, the music one hears underwater, the music one hears when making love under fire, the colonizer who cracks open like a flower.
That pain is recognition.
That pain has no words but a sense of loneliness in one’s chest, one’s fingers, the face reflected back in the mirror. Decolonizing this face is simply a measure of time.
When I cry after fucking, I feel my uncles watching.
*
The colonizer often mistakes his lover’s rage for hatred. That is not true. My grief is as wide as the ocean, and I fight for his freedom, too.
*
In Kolkata I develop the habit of breaking dishes. It is the sound of glass and ceramic against ruby oxide flooring needing recognition. It expresses what the oppressed have been screaming for centuries: “Enough!”
When I cry, I feel my uncles watching.
*
Decolonizing love requires awe. I need the oppressor’s touch, though the oracles would have me thinking otherwise.
Sometimes all it takes are those three words: “I see you.”
Sometimes all it takes is a spark to really know how to drown.
