It's Time for Recess
"To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger."--On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, O. Vuong
The other day, I recognized that most of my pieces include an aspect of prayer. Perhaps, it is a vestige of my journaling days, an autograph of my creative origins illuminating itself like a palimpsest of secret ink upon my writing.
Face en face with suffering, I pray. In close observation, I attempt to distill a truth hidden in the things I witness. It’s like a vibration in my body that demands to be expelled, which is why this essay began in the Notes app at 2:40 in the morning. That, and jet lag, and my mother’s snoring. It’s in this lack of quiet, I whisper to the Muses, “let me write bad shit.”1 I know that I am on the precipice of butchering their offering once more. It is a request for forgiveness before the sin is even committed. Is that not the definition of “grace?”
Pouring out of my alabaster jar, I do my best to ignore the watchful eyes of my imaginary crowd. I admonish my audience to concern themselves not with what’s in my jar, but in the performance of my intrepidity. One of my favorite teachers freed me when she said, “the nature of being a writer is writing terrible stuff.” So, forgive the situational irony of asking permission to be misunderstood, mediocre, and mundane. By fire or by force, this will be a safe space.
To be knowingly seen as execrable, low-grade, downright crappy is the thing I secretly wish for when I blow out the candles every year—to age out of embarrassment. I want to taste the freedom of humiliation without having the cake smeared all over my face. I want to be unafraid when I’m seen trying. How haughty does it sound when I say that I don’t want success to make sense for me? I would rather be that little engine, or Burna when he was just a boy and not the “African Giant,” or the pre-2015 Golden State Warriors, Toni Morrison the editor, not the author. There are only bits of gold in this straw; I’m not Rumpelstiltskin, yet. Right now, I long for the liberty found in obscurity. It would mean that I could spend more time in the gym than on stage. It would mean that no one would be waiting for the next album to drop or the Substack notification. It would create time for play, for experimentation, for failure without consequence.
Perhaps, I mistake my shit for potpourri. After all, my mother, Chief Technology Officer of Scent, trained me to decorate both myself and my surroundings with candles, diffusers, perfumes, and sprays. Matriarchs-in-training, my little sister and I often cackle in the face of baseless criticism. Decanting the oil off water, we preserve the sanctity in the belief of our own unrealized potential. We are Nigerian, and therefore allergic to humility. So, when my nose detects a malodorous scent, and it recoils itself in repugnance, the thought does not even cross my mind to check the longevity of my Baccarat Rouge 540.
A dollop of palm oil, a spoon of shea butter, and a sprinkle of magic, black girls, like me, know oppression well, but humiliation is a foreign concept. I never dreamt of standing in front of my peers, naked and afraid. I knew that if I was to be on any stage, it would be to be crowned, adored, and bestowed with a bastion of my excellence, intelligence, or beauty. Otherwise, I would be invisible, overlooked, ignored, or taken for granted—this is a different kind of shaming. Maybe, it is because the black women I know and were raised by don’t let shit stink for long.
Yeah, nah, they take that shit personally, using it in righteous indignation as fuel for the come-up, the glow-up, the next move, the next man. They don’t let the smell of shit linger in the air; their mothers, their grandmothers, taught them better than that. They “curtesy flush,” forcing the toilet bowl to remove its contents before the anus can even remember what it has expelled. Hovering above the seat, they are even ignorant to the sight of their own shit. Yeah, we are, as a survival tactic.
Amnesia of our own humanity keeps us standing in the face of humiliation, but our memories are sometimes too short for testimonies. It turns us into taciturn superheroes, fros to the sky, unbothered by the billowing wind. Crushed by the expectations of impeccability, now, when we appear to trip for a moment, very few reach out their hands to catch us. Believing in our infallible magic, those surrounding us remain stoic and unmoved. They are not surprised when we catch ourselves, spreading out our arms in weighted air for balance, and continue strutting down the street in red-bottomed, bloodied stilettos. “Phenomenal Woman.”2
So, I almost shed a tear, a subconsciously-interrupted catharsis, when I saw the sculpture of a toilet bowl in the San Jose Art Museum. The ceramic urinal yellowed by the artifice of dried piss had the word, “smile,” almost finger-painted into the base of the bowl.3 What Robert Arneson was thinking when he brought himself to this mound of clay, I won’t feign to know, but it felt like permission. It was like he granted me license to be vulgar, crude—to sit in the shit of my creation, to smile in a pool of pee.
Last week, I was watching over my little cousin as she played on the playground. Baby Girl is not yet two, and she fell down twenty times in twenty minutes. Each time, she popped back up with a celerity that needed no comfort. Before I could announce, “you’re okay sweetheart,” Baby Girl was running off to her next adventure. She has a large scratch over her left eye; her pink leggings are almost black at the knees with so much dirt; she has pulled out all her little braids; her toothy grin unbroken, her spirit unwavering, bronzing her skin underneath the sun’s glare. She has me questioning when I began to learn fear and prioritize safety. Baby Girl ain’t afraid to eat shit if it means she may have the chance to fly.
I recently saw a TikTok that boldly declared: “I don’t know which young woman of color needs to hear this today, but you cannot afford to self-deprecate in a world that already does not think highly of you.”4 In response, I remind the young black girl inside the fiercely independent woman I am today, “Remaining unscathed, pure, faultless, above reproach and exquisitely immaculate will not rescue you from the scorn of the world. They need neither evidence nor excuse. For they will find defect, manufacture flaws, and invent sin to create culpability, to suppress triumph, to squash dreams. There is no salvation in toeing the line.” At my big age, I’m learning to prioritize play, realizing that this, too, is sacred.
Now, without warrant from my audience, or my peers, or my mentors, I permit myself to be bad, without synonym or euphemism. Just bad. Ignoring the norms of our time, I reach out my searching hand to simply have the tip of my fingers graze the hem of the Muses’ garment. In my failure, I pray:
“Before shit gets crazy, before shit hits the fan, before it stains my pants, please let me continue my diarrhea of the pen. This bad shit that litters the page, that soils the mattress, that fouls the air, let it remain. Let me remember it, suppress the desire to revise it too heavily, and just play. Amen.”5
Let’s play a drinking game. Every time, you see the word, “shit,” take a sip. Have fun, and I never said the glass had to contain alcohol. Ready Player One? Remember, drink responsibly.
If you don’t get this reference, I actually cannot help you.
https://www.georgeadamsgallery.com/news-and-press/robert-arneson-at-the-san-jose-museum-of-art-ca2
If you got this far, what’s the “shit” tally?