The Sexual Lives of Black Women, In Their Own Words
In a culture driven by sexual and racial imagery, very few honest conversations about race, gender, and sexuality actually take place. In their absence, commonly held perceptions of black women as teenage mothers, welfare recipients, mammies, or exotic sexual playthings remain unchanged. For fear that telling their stories will fulfill society's implicit expectations about their sexuality, most black women have retreated into silence. Tricia Rose seeks to break this silence and jump-start a dialogue by presenting, for the first time, the sexual testimonies of black women. Spanning a broad range of ages, levels of education, and socioeconomic backgrounds, twenty women, in their own words, talk with startling honesty about sex, love, family, relationships, and intimacy. Their stories dispel prevailing myths and provide revealing insights into how black women navigate the complex terrain of sexuality. Nuanced, rich, and powerful, Longing to Tell will be required reading for anyone interested in issues of race and gender.
The Sexual Lives of Black Women, In Their Own Words
In a culture driven by sexual and racial imagery, very few honest conversations about race, gender, and sexuality actually take place. In their absence, commonly held perceptions of black women as teenage mothers, welfare recipients, mammies, or exotic sexual playthings remain unchanged. For fear that telling their stories will fulfill society's implicit expectations about their sexuality, most black women have retreated into silence. Tricia Rose seeks to break this silence and jump-start a dialogue by presenting, for the first time, the sexual testimonies of black women. Spanning a broad range of ages, levels of education, and socioeconomic backgrounds, twenty women, in their own words, talk with startling honesty about sex, love, family, relationships, and intimacy. Their stories dispel prevailing myths and provide revealing insights into how black women navigate the complex terrain of sexuality. Nuanced, rich, and powerful, Longing to Tell will be required reading for anyone interested in issues of race and gender.
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Overview
The Sexual Lives of Black Women, In Their Own Words
In a culture driven by sexual and racial imagery, very few honest conversations about race, gender, and sexuality actually take place. In their absence, commonly held perceptions of black women as teenage mothers, welfare recipients, mammies, or exotic sexual playthings remain unchanged. For fear that telling their stories will fulfill society's implicit expectations about their sexuality, most black women have retreated into silence. Tricia Rose seeks to break this silence and jump-start a dialogue by presenting, for the first time, the sexual testimonies of black women. Spanning a broad range of ages, levels of education, and socioeconomic backgrounds, twenty women, in their own words, talk with startling honesty about sex, love, family, relationships, and intimacy. Their stories dispel prevailing myths and provide revealing insights into how black women navigate the complex terrain of sexuality. Nuanced, rich, and powerful, Longing to Tell will be required reading for anyone interested in issues of race and gender.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429923453 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2004 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 433 |
| File size: | 583 KB |
About the Author
Tricia Rose is a professor of American studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. She lives in California.
Read an Excerpt
Longing to Tell
Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy
By Tricia Rose
Picador
Copyright © 2003 Tricia RoseAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-2345-3
CHAPTER 1
Through The Fire
AT FIRST GLANCE, it could be difficult to see what Sarita, a twenty-two-year-old ex-Muslim biracial woman, has in common with Linda Rae, a forty-eight-year-old woman with AIDS whose life has been significantly shaped by sexual abuse, drug addiction, and prostitution. But if we look closely at the emotional currents that drive them, a theme emerges: while vastly different, these women share a sense that victory lies in how they grow from the pain involved in coming into one's own. They carry their desires and hopes through and beyond difficult, sometimes traumatic, experiences, sexual self-doubt, trauma, and confusion. Inspiration emerges from how they struggle through the fires, not from imagining a world in which there is no flame.
Sarita tries to negotiate her intense love of black men and her profound disappointment over how many black men treat black women: "Why should I love you?" she says. "Men have hurt me as a black woman for so long, so why should I put down my anger? Why do I always have to sacrifice for you? So you can feel loved?" Later she says, "Black men are so full of love and life. They really are amazing people and they go through so much and it's hard to cut them out." Rita painfully questions her desire for white men over black and their seeming lack of interest in her: "I used to think, Why am I so ugly, why don't they like me, what is wrong with me that I always seem to like white guys, or those were the guys that I seemed to pursue?"
Linda Rae has struggled through a lifetime of catastrophic violence, sexual abuse, drug addition, and prostitution that resulted in her contracting HIV/AIDS. Reflecting on the notions of sex and womanhood that shaped her life she says, "You know, sex was a thing for me to do to make you love me. And nothing else in life was important to me but to have somebody to love me. ... I didn't even have a clue of what it was to be a woman. And having no idea how, no sexuality of my own, I always took on 'the man's the leader of my life' to show me how I was supposed to act." Now a fierce activist, Linda Rae deals with that history by sharing it with others, educating young women about sexual agency, and encouraging the black community to fight AIDS.
Comic moments, sometimes even more than the sorrowful ones, illuminate and affirm the truth of life's bittersweetness. After years of unfulfilling sex, thirty-eight-year-old Luciana finally has a handle on her desires but can't yet find a partner: "I'm peaking, and" — bam, she smacks the table — "somebody needs to do something here! This should be illegal sometimes, the way I'm walking around here."
There are no hollow reassurances, no unblemished success stories here. There is no "Ah ha" moment after which all conflicts are resolved, all lessons are fully learned, and pain is finally conquered. Instead, these reflections offer a more complex sense of how some women navigate life while remaining committed to the possibility of deep connections with others.
Sarita
EVER SINCE I was born, my life has been one big drama. I feel lucky in a way just because I've dealt with so much in the short span of time that I have lived on this earth; and when I think that I have twenty more years to go, I think, what could possibly come? Do you know what I'm saying? Okay, I am twenty-two years old. When I was growing up, we were living in a really good neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island. Everybody played together. People on the outside would have called it a ghetto, but I never felt poor. We were on food stamps and all that, but I never felt any different than anyone else, because everyone else was poor, too. My father was a black man. He died when I was three. He was a heroin and cocaine addict. My mother is a white woman. She came from a rich family in New England. My grandmother did our family tree and we are related to two presidents, John Adams and John Quincy Adams. My mother's family lives in a rich white suburb and she grew up there. She never even met a black person until she was thirteen. All of her maids were Irish Catholic. Her maids weren't even black. So, she met my father and it was like jungle fever at first. He was a jazz musician. He played the piano. And back then, for a black man to have a white woman — a lot of them thought that was a big deal. So they met and then they really fell in love.
My father was Muslim and he already had one wife. And in the Muslim religion you can have as many wives as you want as long as you can support them all. So-called support! So my mother married my father, converted to Islam, and moved to the, quote, ghetto. Her family disowned her, and that's where I come in. He already had a few kids with his other wife. Then my mom had me and my older sister with him, and then he took on another wife, a third wife, Khadijah. So there was Fatima, and my mother, who changed her name to Nadia, and Khadijah. Then he had kids with Khadijah. We all lived in this big old rundown Victorian house. ... Khadijah lived on the first floor, my mother lived on the second floor, and Fatima lived on the third floor, and my father would spend time on each floor. And meanwhile, he was supporting his habit of cocaine and heroin by selling marijuana and doing whatever illegal things he could get into. My father convinced the three wives to go and rob a bank for him. He didn't even go. It was just crazy!
They robbed the bank and got caught. My mother was driving the getaway car, so she took off. Khadijah got caught, and she went to prison. So my mother ended up taking care of her kids. Then my father died; the doctor had told him, "If you don't stop doing drugs, your heart is going to give in." He couldn't stop. He died in his sleep. The third wife was still there, but she had a drug problem also. My mother didn't have a drug problem. She smoked marijuana all the time, but in relation to the others, it wasn't as bad. So she had to take care of all of these kids. And we were on welfare, but still we were really poor. She didn't know what to do. So she married this guy, Hamid. Evil man. Evil, evil man. He was part of the Muslim community too. He was also a jazz musician, but see, my dad was like the leader of a group of Muslims, and they all looked up to him. They thought he was the spiritual leader. He was really tall, golden brown, and he had a big beard and thin and long, long fingers for playing the piano. That's all that I remember. He was one of those people that, when he walked into a room, had some magic quality to him. Even though he was doing all this messed-up shit, he was just such a lovely person that you couldn't help but love him. That's what everyone says. But this other guy that my mother married wasn't like that. He was a jealous type of person. But she married him because he offered to marry her and in her mind she had no other choice.
That was the next phase in my life: living with him, under his rules, in his house. With my father it was a free-for-all. We could do whatever we wanted. It was like one big playground. We just all had the best time. At that point there were ten kids with only three adults. They were high most of the time. So we did whatever we wanted. And then with Hamid, he had a drug problem too, but he dealt with it in a different way. He was more controlling, and dominating. And there were very strict little rules for every little thing, like when we were eating you had to clean your plate; you had to lick all the food off your plate, and if you didn't eat it all, he would spank you. And you know, when you're a kid, if you don't like asparagus, you do not like asparagus! You're not going to eat it! So I would take my food and ball it up in a napkin and put it behind my chair and hide it under the radiator. One time my mother found all this food under the radiator; and he saw it, and he knew it was me, and he gave me the whupping of my life for it. Peeled my ass.
My mother left him and the religion when I was eight. She just couldn't take it anymore. By that time, Khadijah had gotten out of jail, and Khadijah married Hamid also because she's always had a jealous thing with my mother, where she's had to have everything my mother had. So she married my mom's husband, twice. And my mother's like, "I'm out of here! You take your kids. I can't do this anymore." So she took me, my little sister Latifah, and my mother also had a white baby from a previous relationship, and her new baby, Ahmad, from her second husband, and we left. And we moved to my grandmother's house.
Now this house was huge. To me, it seemed like a mansion. My grandmother had all this land surrounding it in a place called Something Estates — this rich, rich place — and there was a pond and swings. It seemed like heaven to me. But we had been ripped out of the old neighborhood — I can't even explain what it was like — it was like a little womb. In the new place, we didn't know anyone, since we hadn't had any friends that weren't Muslim. There was a Puerto Rican family we used to play with but they never came in our house. In the old neighborhood we went to Muslim schools. So we were ripped from that and from all my sisters and brothers. There was no differentiation, like "You're her mother, and you're his mother and he's your son." We were all of the same thing. If my mother was busy, there were two other mothers that I could go to. That's just the way I grew up, so to be ripped away from that and put in this white world was really traumatic for me. There were no black people whatsoever. And my grandmother was a completely different type of person, and that was really, really hard for us. Also, we went through a lot of trauma because all the people in the Muslim community shunned us after we left. I remember one time, my mother and I went downtown to go take care of some business, and we saw a part of my family on the street; and their mothers said, "Don't look at them." They had to keep walking, they wouldn't look at us, and they wouldn't even say hello.
The religion completely shaped me as a child. First of all, your gender role: when we were little, come free time, especially when we were living with the second husband, Hamid, the boys could go out and play. But the girls weren't allowed to go outside and play; we would have to stay and have classes on sewing and cooking. Then we could finally go out for a little while. And even then, we had to cover all of our hair, and we had to cover down — the only thing that can be showing is your hands and your feet and your face, when you're a little girl. So that made me feel like I had to be always covered up — and it really affects the way you feel. You don't feel very free, and you feel very dominated, or colonized, by these men who decide everything for you. And to be a good woman is to be really submissive and do everything they say, and to do things even before they ask. For instance, you notice that his cup is getting down and you refill it, just like a waitress or servant.
I looked up to the women. They were what a good woman was. The women wore a burkah, which is the thing that covers all of your face, except your eyes. Those women were considered the most feminine and beautiful and the thing to look up to the most. Not all women wore a burkah; they didn't have the discipline. Imagine in the summertime? You're not going to put that on. You have all this clothing, plus something covering your face? You can't even breathe? You're going to be like, "Fuck it. I'm not doing it." So the women who had the discipline were considered so high up. If you could wear a burkah and exist that way, you were considered the end-all be-all. I remember we looked up to those women so much.
My mother would make our clothes for us, and we would go to the store and pick out the fabric; we enjoyed it. It's ironic that we enjoyed our own prison in a way. We would pick out pretty fabrics for our headpieces and make sure they matched our pants. I never thought anything was wrong with it until I moved out of there. We would see the television, and a naked woman in a bikini would come on in a beer commercial, and my father would say, "That's the devil; you see that? That's what the devil puts out for you to see." That's how I was raised. The woman's body is associated with bad things. You're supposed to cover it. They're telling you that in order to respect yourself, you have to be fully covered, and if you're not fully covered, then you're bad and you're going the way of the devil. And the opposite culture seemed to be saying, "You're only beautiful if you take your clothes off." There's no good choice! I'm fully covered now, pretty much, and I feel fine about myself, but I also feel fine about myself when I go to the beach and wear a bikini!
I met a lot of people, especially women, who really helped me out. When I moved to my grandmother's area, some parts were really, really white, but the part we lived in was closer to the city. Her town is really in the middle of the city, but it's a town to itself that the white people took and said, "We're going to make a town and create our own school system apart from the city." But it's surrounded by the city. So there's a lot of different types of people around that area, and one person I met was my best friend, Jardah. She was from Brazil, and she moved to this town in seventh grade. Her mother was a black woman who grew up in the South in the sixties. When everybody was going through all that stuff, she went down to Brazil. She didn't speak a word of Portuguese, and she fell in love with Jardah's father and he fell in love with her. He didn't speak a word of English. They fell in love and had Jardah. Then her mom learned how to speak Portuguese and they realized they weren't meant to be together. [Laughs.] They lived there all that time, and then they came back up here. In Brazil, you're supposed to show off a woman's body. You go on the beach and you're supposed to wear a topless G-string bikini. People love to look at a woman's body. So she was raised in the exact opposite way from me, and she became my best friend.
I was a freshman in high school when we met. By that time, I'd lived long enough outside of the Muslim community to fully assimilate the way people dressed and the way people acted about their bodies. But still, inside I didn't feel pretty, I didn't feel attractive at all. I felt that I was just passing, just okay because of the way I dressed. But when I met her — she's an amazing person — she showed me that it's okay to love your body. She is really skinny on top, and she has this huge ass, and we used to always tease her, and she used to tease me because my ass was flat. We grew up and learned about puberty together, learned about boys. I knew her the first time I had sex, and she knew me her first time, so we explained the world to each other. She explained to me that the woman's body is whatever you want it to be. It can be like a playground, you can have fun with it, or you can disguise it.
She told me that she feels that I'm a very sensual person. I never really saw myself that way, but I think now she was right. What she meant was that I'm very open to men —'cause she's very closed up to men. That has to do with how her and her father acted toward each other. Her boyfriends would say, "You know, I've gotten to this point, but then there's this wall I can't get past." And she would say, "I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know how to let them in." I was the opposite, because I craved attention and love from men, so I would be wide open. I had this ability to love that is special and that I think I was born with. So I think that I taught her that it's okay to love, in terms of men. It's okay to open yourself, because giving love is not something that can ever hurt you. It's only something that can help you. It's like a well; it's never-ending.
Once we hooked up, this became the most special relationship I have ever had in my life, and she is still right here with me now. We just became like two sisters. She is one of the only people in the world that I've completely, fully trusted. I looked at her, and she has no ill will for me whatsoever or me for her. Anything she tells me for my own good, I listen to her 'cause I know that she has only my best interests in mind and vice versa. We formed this bond when I met her in high school, and we were just so confident with each other that boys were our playthings. We had no need for them, really, because we had each other, and she gave me everything I needed; I gave her everything she needed 'cause we weren't really into sex yet. I didn't even know what it was about.
I had first kisses, and I had little sexual escapades with boys, but it was never because I really felt the urge. It was just to say, for example, "I went to second base." She was the same way. Plus we were beautiful. She's unbelievably beautiful, and she's cunning and brilliant. But then when you get to know her inside, her outside is almost ugly compared to what she's like on the inside. We just hung so tight, and the boys followed us around 'cause they wanted to be near us. But we had no need for them, so we would play with them, like little toys. We would go to parties outside of our high school where older people were and people that didn't know us, because we loved adventure and mischief. We would be walking down a street in the city and would see a party up in someone's apartment, and we would just go in and pretend that we knew everybody, and make jokes and laugh around, like, "Oh, you know so-and-so?" And then steal a bottle of their wine and run out and just be crazy. So we would go to these parties and we would think up plans to manipulate people. She would be like, "Okay, see that guy in the corner? I'm going to go over to him and tell him that I think he's really cute, and then you go over and say the same thing, and we'll play off of him." We would play mind games on people! We were cruel to some people, but it was just a way to entertain ourselves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Longing to Tell by Tricia Rose. Copyright © 2003 Tricia Rose. Excerpted by permission of Picador.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Foreword,
Introduction,
ONE - Through The Fire,
TWO - Guarded Heart,
THREE - Always Something Left To Love,
Epilogue,
Afterword: The Past as Prologue,
Acknowledgments,
The Critics Speak Out About Longing to Tell,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Copyright Page,