DECOLONIZING TOUCH: CLAIR DE LUNE

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

(“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.

---

Sophia Terazawa

THE DECOLONIZER
February 2016

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DECOLONIZING TOUCH: WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?

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.

What's Love Got to Do with It?

What's Love Got to Do with It?, Illustration by Sophia Terazawa

He was nothing more than a street cleaner, but he sang beautifully―with such gusto and dignity, in fact, that no revolutionary could help but fall in love with this man, who swept Saigon’s dusty avenues by day and led Party rallies by night. If Uncle Ho had a canary, this man could lead an entire choir to liberation. He sang for the hearts of many. He sang for dear Vietnam. But why did he have to go and marry my sister, too?

Thus began my mother’s dreadful story of how romance should claim no space in war.

OHH, WHAT’S LOVE

GOT TO DO, GOT TO DO

WITH IT?

My aunt, the stubborn second daughter of a wealthy businessman, was much like me, or so I have heard. Her tongue was quiet but stung when needed, and she never cried during a beating.

She also believed in equality. Not the normal kind, my mother shook her head. She wanted to fight for decolonization. This brought her to the streets. This brought danger to our family. My mother paused and stared into my eyes as though to emphasize this point. Our family.

WHAT’S LOVE

BUT A SECOND-HAND

EMOTION?

True, there was danger all around. My mother already knew how to load an AK-47 by the time she was 16, and she already knew how to fire it, if necessary (with mami eyes, closed, she added with a giggle), but my aunt carried a bullet in each eye and a pin in her chest. My aunt was deliberate, her convictions for the Party, righteous. This was a dangerous time, indeed, to have a revolutionary as a sister, and when she married, we knew it was over.

At this point in the story, my mother sighed and looked into her open palms on the table between us.

Sophia, understand what mami try to say, she asked. And I said, yes, mami. I understand.

WHAT’S LOVE

GOT TO DO WITH IT?

I understand that history works in more intimate ways than we realize. I understand human touch as much as I understand grief. I understand the painful act of self-healing because I have spent my childhood watching my mother fall apart. This country fall apart. And I understand change.

It works in the heart. It can only work through melody or a serpent’s bite, the ambiguity of metaphor, madness, and matrimony. The whiplash of protest. Demands. A barricade. And I am not speaking of what happens in the open. For the people. The People.

WHO NEEDS A HEART

WHEN A HEART

CAN BE BROKEN?

He was nothing more than a man, but really, this was the story of heartbreak between two sisters. My mother started to cry as though to say, and that is when I lost her. As though to say, and now I will lose you, too.

---

Sophia Terazawa

THE DECOLONIZER
January 2016

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DECOLONIZING TOUCH: SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS

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.

Sweet Dreams are Made of This

Ripe for Business: A Self-Portrait, Illustration by Sophia Terazawa

Last night I woke up repeating, “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me.”

Talking in my sleep was not new, as my family and college roommate would always let me know the next morning.

“Who were you talking to in your dreams?” They asked.

I never remembered.

To stir awake in the middle of a conversation, now that was unusual.

SOME OF THEM 
WANT TO USE YOU.

In this dream, we wore black suits. The man’s hand was on my back. His voice, quiet but firm. We were standing at a conference table with a large map spread upon it like a bed cover.

I stiffened as he moved his hand around my waist but did not hesitate to snap, “Don’t touch me.”

In that moment, my eyes opened. The man was―poof!―gone, and there I was, awake, chanting in the dark.

SOME OF THEM

WANT TO GET USED BY YOU.

White men are everywhere. I cannot avoid them, even in my sleep. Worse still, I have the feeling they want to colonize me (yes, my subconscious, too). Let me explain.

SOME OF THEM

WANT TO ABUSE YOU.

Last night in my dream, the map laid out on the table represented my identity, the land of my mother’s people before the French colonizers arrived, tapping on rubber trees and milking them dry.

According to one of my Aunties, we were rumored to have French blood in our veins. Perhaps it could explain the peculiar phenomenon of our eyes changing color with age―black, hazel, and finally, sky grey. By the time my grandmother died, her irises were golden yellow, a sign of old nobility.

But I digress.

The man wanted more, clearly, from me. I was not just a guide, some shrewd topographer. To him, my name was Indochine. My flesh, the giving tree. Coconuts, dragon fruit, warm papaya seeds. He wanted more, just a taste of jungle deep in me.

My blazer could not hide it. Perfected English could not hide it. Composure could not hide it. I was there, in my own mind, ripe for business. Ripe for picking.

The horror of it all was waking up to the same reality.

SOME OF THEM

WANT TO BE ABUSED.

The colonizer with no spirit―no depth beyond what he takes―is inside of me already. He is a real person with a real family and a name. In every movie, I am taught to sympathize with his hunger before my own. In every conflict, I fear his power before my own. I give because he asks, and nobody ever taught me how to ask.

Why are your eyes so empty?

Why are your lips so cold?

Why do you stand so close?

Why do your hands feel like they know how to pull a trigger? I ask because my cousins say they don’t speak Vietnamese in public anymore in case a white man is listening. I ask because my Muslim sisters now cross the street when a white man comes their way. I ask because my Black brothers now say a prayer when a white man blocks their path. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil... I ask because our lives depend on what you say.

---

Sophia Terazawa

THE DECOLONIZER
December 2015

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REPORT FROM KOLKATA: BURNING DEVOTIONALS

by Sophia Terazawa

One.

The neighborhood called Jubilee Park in Kolkata is exceptionally quiet at dawn. For the time being, the street dogs have ceased their nightly howling melodrama. There are three patrolling the block below my window—all muscle and limp—that growl and bark and bite at each other for their rightful place as alpha male. The fights erupt from the tiniest infractions. A bump on the shoulder. A look.

The regular brawls are quite exhausting to hear at midnight, as everyone bleeds and nobody sleeps. But like I said, the theatrics inevitably end at dawn, and it is in this moment that one can feel the silence of this city.

I am sometimes awake at this time to write, as I write now, when a dream pries open my eyes and chokes out the sound of what needs to be said. And I think what needs to be said is the smell of holy places―mosques and black churches―burning in America.

Two.

My flat in Jubilee Park is a dusty ten minute walk from the Tollygunge tram depot, and somewhere between the two, the dogs are finally napping. They are a pile of legs and heavy, fresh torn bodies. I imagine each morning that they are finally friends. I also imagine my mother working. She is a refugee in a new country that once bombed her previous country, and I imagine her paycheck in U.S. dollars. I imagine her laugh lines, the ones that deepen around her eyes with every passing year, the ones that fold and break easily into hysterics. She laughs, even when she is hurting, and I think about this before writing, but I cannot write, not yet. I cannot write until the first call to prayer.

Three.

The mosque is so close that I can hear the man clearing his throat before the microphone. It is a soft cough, a gentle cough, and he could shatter the spirit in two if he could—however mournful the previous day, however high the body count rises, however brown and black the faces of his murdered children around the world—yet he does not halve anything but the silence. In this place and in this time, he is the song and glory that pierces the distance between Kolkata and South Carolina. And it is precisely here that I write about devotion in flames.

Four.

Homes of worship are combustible places. The sight is more immediate from a television screen in West Bengal—a grainy video from a cell phone of the fire, the yelling, the grief. A mosque burns, and a young man howls into the shirt of another. One elderly nun is raped in a church. A temple falls. Bangladesh is there. Nepal is there. Pakistan is not too far away either. There are conversations all the time with the people of Kolkata—some hushed at the vegetable stalls of Lake Market and some roaring at the universities, in Esplanade, a blocked intersection of Ballygunge. It is an insistent demand for justice, and though my language fails me in some instances, I am witness to the calls for accountability, peace, and equality for all by any means necessary.

“What in the hell is going on over there?” A Bengali professor had demanded to know, as we sat over tea and politics. I replied that yes, Niladri, it is hell over there. America is hell. In the name of progress and freedom, the country is a falsehood for the hungry, the tired, the poor, and worst of all for the policed. There are images of hate, and then there is the reality of hate. I did not have to leave that place to see the difference.

Five.

There is something peculiar that happens to rage, as the morning light becomes brighter, and the street vendors begin shouting. There will not be another call to prayer until midday. It is more difficult to write poetry at a time like this, but the words come fluidly. It reeks of kerosene and old teakwood, the history still fresh, and there—buried inside the muscle and flesh of such history burning mosques, temples, and churches—is the responsibility to write about the ashes. I do not believe that the dead ask for immortality, as I believe the dead bury no names. And I believe in chaos as much as I believe in grace.

---

Sophia Terazawa

THE DECOLONIZER
December 2015

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A NORMAL LIFE

This poem was originally published in a print anthology of the 9th World Poetry Festival in Kolkata, India.


by Sophia Terazawa

For a woman to write history
is an old way of telling time,

yet she is not ancient

but a girl who stares into the barrel of a gun.


I do not imagine myself in a tunnel.

I do not imagine a helicopter,
 even I
do not imagine the diary of Ho Chi Minh,

for then I must imagine myself inside a jail cell,


and for a woman to be in a jail cell

when her body is already a prison,
I ask
 the historian to imagine the impossibility
of writing time
 through her black, infinite eyes.

---

Sophia Terazawa

THE DECOLONIZER
November 2015

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REPORT FROM KOLKATA: THE LIBERATION FRONT

by Sophia Terazawa

On May 19th, 1890, Ho Chi Minh was born.

On May 19th, 1925, Malcolm X was born.

Source: Ann Arbor Sun, May 9th, 1975 (p. 8-9)

On May 19th, 1970, a mass of university students and artists marched through Kolkata, India. Under the watchful gaze of a scorching pre-monsoon sun, brown youth raised their fists and with a shout―“Hands off Vietnam!”―they stopped at Harrington Street.