Brown Skin, White Masks

dear bell

When I was a little Indian girl, growing up in an apartheid-constructed Indian township in Durban, South Africa, I created a fantasy image of myself in my head. A little heroine who experienced all of life’s adventures on a very grand scale within the walls of my skull, who eventually always turned out the winner despite all of reality’s painful mishaps. This little girl was called Christine and she was white, with blonde hair and blue eyes. She grew as I did and in truth, it was only when I went to university that I truly left her behind. Thinking about it now, thirteen years since Christine and I parted ways, I feel ashamed of her, of myself. And yet I understand why Christine came about.

Christine was everything I was not. She was not stuck in an ultra skinny brown body with sore marks on her legs which all poor kids seemed to magically manifest without any adult being able to tell you how they got them; or a scar down her right leg from trying to high jump a low wall, instead hitting it full and being draped limp across it until her father carried her indoors. Christine’s body was a healthy, normal sized (whatever that meant!) scar-free zone. She did not have to endure teasing by both her family and friends and have to grow up with names like Bones, Skinny, Ironing Board and Skeletor because her arms and legs were thinner than those of starving Ethiopian children. No, the only other name Christine was called was ‘Chris’, which sometimes made for amusing tales of people initially thinking they were expecting a boy when in strolled a luscious blonde. Christine didn’t have to worry about her ankles being thinner than most people’s wrists and a complete lack of hips, which meant that she could never find pants that ever fitted without sagging on her. Pants that were made for ‘real’ South African women who had plenty of hip and arse. Christine didn’t have to worry about wearing her Physical Education white shorts inside these pants so that they fit. Christine could wear anything she wanted because she was normal. Christine would know nothing about the three times in my life when I have worn a dress or a skirt in public and then with absolutely no self-confidence and a sense of exaggerated shame, trying to simultaneously keep my eyes averted from people while also apologising via a look for my skinny legs. But there was often no need, because people would not look at you, and embarrassed for you they would simply pretend you was not there. But luckily, Christine was always comfortable and cool in crowds no matter what she wore.

Christine did not have burnt black knees – which may have made a teacher once ask her in front of class whether she was on her knees scrubbing floors daily, nor an overly dark bum causing the owner to wonder how black bums which were never exposed to sunlight still managed to get blacker and not more lighter. No, Christine had a white bum, which she could tan and get yummier and which was then envied even more. A bum that could be seen through bikinis, short shorts, shorter skirts and the shortest of dresses. Yes, Christine’s white skin could turn shades of cream or tan, which was coveted in magazines and on TV and which ‘glowed’! Since Christine was not Indian, she didn’t have to worry about being burnt charcoal black if she spent a day at the beach in the shade with horrible sun protection cream which made her skin look purple and oily. Christine’s skin baked in the sun. Mine simply braaied.

Christine was not sent home with lice in her long, coconut oil-soaked hair by stupid school department nurses who came two or three times a year to find all sorts of grossness on little kids, which caused their mothers endless humiliation. Mine still hasn’t forgiven me for this twenty five years later. I’m not really sure why, cause pretty much everyone I knew had lice, some even had several species of lice that would have made Bob Marley envious. To this day I keep a bottle of lice shampoo in my medicine cabinet ‘in case of emergency’, although I haven’t had lice for over twenty years. You never know though. One could randomly pop up one day, and this would be the day that the school nurses miraculously emerge at work and send me home to Durban, back to mother to seek revenge. Christine could not imagine these dramas. The only hair Christine had was long, blonde and streaked, which she could blow dry straight, dye any colour and which stayed in place for an entire month. My hair reached to my knees and was probably the only healthy looking part of me (except for my abundant Muslim nose) on my whole body. This hair had to be separated into two by a middle path down my entire head, plaited so tightly by my mother that they probably pulled memories out of my head, wound into a U-shape and tied tightly with white or black ribbons at the base. On weekends, I had the luxury of the one plait down the back with a love-in-tokyo tied towards the end which allowed my hair to swish around like a horse’s tail on my back (probably the closest I came to being near a horse in those days).

But that was just the beginning of the hair escapades. With lovely knee-length hair on my head, came hair just about everywhere else – a well defined moustache that to this day I am at war with, thick well-meaning eyebrows, eyebrows in between eyebrows, a goatee (a belated joy of adulthood), under my arms, on my back, my butt, my stomach, hairy arms and even hairier legs that tried to desperately hide my bean stalk legs and in failing to do so, only caused me more embarrassment. Christine didn’t have three strands of hair for every pore, which behaved as if they were competing in the Olympics for emerging first, and having won that race, had to be shaved off every two days with my father’s Minora blades and razor, ripping off the skin in every place that had a tendon connected to your foot that hurt every time you took a step. No, Christine had very little blonde hair on her legs which she didn’t have to wax, but did it for the fun of it anyway. Hairless legs that reached to the sky. Christine would not be able to relate the story of how when she was in her final year of school, she asked her father to buy her an Epilady shaver, that was said to go over the skin, pulling out the hair by the root and thereby ensuring a promise of two or three weeks of hairless, smooth legs. Christine wouldn’t know anything about yearning desperately for that promise for months on end after seeing the advert on TV, as the white woman effortlessly moved the noiseless Epilady shaver over her tanned, long leg, gliding her hand over the smooth surface of her skin. Nor would Christine have known the shock of sitting in the bathroom one day when the parents were out grocery shopping, being surprised to hear that the Epilady made a whrrring sound, or an even more louder clogging sound as it mercilessly grabbed at three hairs per pore, yanking it ruthlessly from below the skin, resulting in a red bumpy pore that was clearly in as much shock and pain as I was. And that was just one pore. True, the pamphlet had said it might hurt a bit the first time. And this was the very first time. So I had to diligently fight on, after all, as the Betty Wright song went, ‘no pain, no gain’. As tears flooded my face down one stretch of leg, red little bumps appearing everywhere after the clogging whrrr of the Epilady, it suddenly stopped. Just stopped. It seems the manufacturers of Epilady did not encounter the three hairs per pore phenomena and it was the Epilady’s turn to die of shock. It took me more than fifteen years to throw the Epilady away. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my dad or anyone else I had killed the Epilady within fifteen minutes, so I hid it at the bottom of my underwear basket year after year, a reminder of my losing battle, of my guilt. Maybe a part of me hoped the Epilady could be resurrected to fulfil its two to three week promise. Maybe I was just too embarrassed to except my hairiness. Whatever it was, I’m pretty sure Christine would know nothing about such physical and mental torture.

And Christine would know nothing of the endless shame of ‘growing pains’ making you cry out to God, “Why????!!!!!”. In my head Christine had never had a single pimple in her whole life. Sometimes she had a mole, a la Cindy Crawford, and sometimes not. It was quite nifty having a movable mole, much like an accessory. The joy of menstruation and having an overly large nose and crooked teeth that loved each so much they climbed one on top of the other, was accompanied by an ever growing mass of acne. The kind that becomes part of your life and daily routine, much like brushing your teeth and combing your hair. I don’t think for the last three years of my schooling that there was a single photograph I had that didn’t have the largest zit on the planet. I often felt that the moment my skin heard the word ‘photograph’, it would send an invitation to the Acne company to send one of its best representatives over. And this representative, being the best at what it does, would stay for over two weeks, mass producing oil and puss, and when I forced its departure, it was sure to leave me a reminder of the visitation. Sometimes this reminder was in the form of a dark mark, later on it decided that minor craters in my skin was a better monument. And then at 21, having tried the contraceptive injection to joyfully find that it greatly reduced my PMS symptoms, I developed acne on my teenage acne, even on my back and chest. It took my rather slow brain about a year to realise it was the contraceptive injection that was causing this reaction, so I abandoned the injection for the daily pill. And although the acne disappeared from the chest and back almost immediately and with no visible signs of scarring, it waged war on my face for over 10 more years. Christine could not have known the horror of having a friend proudly show me his photoshop skills on a ‘before’ and ‘after’ pic of myself where he had rigorously attempted to eliminate all my acne. It was finally time for me to admit that I had a problem and off to the dermatologist I went. But as with crooked teeth that my parents couldn’t afford to straighten (my brother got the braces and I got the education), I soon couldn’t afford the last two months of the very expensive acne medication which was proving very effective (yes, no medical aid in my family anymore). So my torturer Acne went away for two years and tried to emerge again, except this time, armed with a part-time job (and still no health insurance), I was able to undergo the dermatological treatment again to the end. So, finally, no more acne. And inspired by my acne victory, I went and got braces and proudly paid cash this time too. But of course the story couldn’t simply end like this. Oh no. Not for me anyway, but I will spare you the long story about the folliculitus that severely scarred my legs after a year of waxing. My Achilles’ heel, my constant shame, had become an even bigger embarrassment. How I wished for the days of shame at the skinniness of my legs and not huge black marks down the back and inside of my thighs! How I wished I could have afforded medical insurance! How I wished I could have been white!

Christine was my exit out of these battles. She was everything I was not, everything I could never be. And while my adult self feels ashamed that Christine existed at all, the girl-child that was me seemed to understand the higher status given to white people in South Africa. Under apartheid, white skin, blonde hair and blue/green eyes were trophies to be sought after. After all, every Miss South Africa that I saw on TV for about 17 years of my life was only white. And I mean the whole competition was only made up of white women because women of colour were not allowed to participate in the national competition. When South Africa was re-admitted into the Miss World and Miss Universe pageants, these were still dominated by white women from various parts of the world. How could I not want to be white? It was all I saw women being judged against, whether on a national, world or universe level. All makeup adverts on TV, front pages of local and international beauty and fashion magazines, runway shows and Mills and Boons books all featured white women. It was no surprise that I thought that statistically this world was overwhelmingly dominated by white people, which would explain why cosmetics companies only seemed to create foundations, blush and red lipsticks that looked right on white skins (oh please let’s not forget sunblock!), and why the only products that had black faces on them were awful smelling hair straightening products (not relevant if you were Indian) and skinlightening creams (very relevant if you were a dark skinned Indian). Not that it made you lighter of course. What it did was burn and scar your skin so badly that it made you learn to accept the colour of your skin before you attempted to ‘correct’ it. And how tempting such adverts were – the promise of a lighter, brighter future, what I like to call ‘whiteness in a tube’. A promise, like all other promises of whiteness, which was unattainable to those born into black bodies.

As I grew into a teenager and became interested in beauty products, I couldn’t help noticing how I was always followed around the beauty counters of Edgars (a popular clothing store) by their shop assistants, usually waving white strips at me so that I could spray tester fragrances onto these ‘white’ generic pieces of paper. And yet in their monthly magazine, the writers would go about describing the proper way to test fragrances, which meant not spraying more than two fragrances on each wrist and wearing it throughout the day to see how your body influenced the smell of the fragrance. Not in a single article did I ever read about a ‘white’ tester strip. I hated being followed around the store. It made me feel like stealing something just for the spite of it. I often find myself staring at magazines lined on up store shelves, looking upon the many white faces of the cover women and men, and seeing faces repeated within a 4 month cycle without a single black face ever gracing any of the covers. I have wondered about why editors think that a black face won’t sell issues. I mean, will women or men really not buy a magazine because it has a black face on the cover? I can’t believe that. People haven’t stopped seeing movies because Denzel Washington is the lead actor or director. This year, the Glamour magazine that I usually buy had a single black face on the cover for this year, that of Beyonce. And so I’m left with the feeling that the only form of black women that is acceptable is that of the anglicised, small-features black women, and yet in the country I live in, there are so many gorgeous black women who appear inside magazines, on TV, on the radio who look nothing like this ideal.

But bell, I find ways to get my own back. While when I was a teenager I couldn’t afford to actually buy any of the perfumes I tested, to this day I still won’t buy a single fragrance from Edgars because of the lasting impression I have of them and their stupid white strip. I keep a wary eye on cosmetic manufacturers as I notice that some of them, like Rimmel, don’t offer foundation in darker shades, which lets me know they’re not interested in my skin or my money. I’ve written to Glamour magazine letting them know how I feel about their lack of black women on their covers. I wear my hair up, down, plaited, braided, wavy, straight or curled in whatever colour I want (sans coconut oil though). I buy perfumes in duty free or on an airplane. I shave my legs once a week, and in between my 3 hairs per pore can do whatever they like. I still can’t swim properly and look absolutely skinny in my bikini but I get in the water anyway, slightly suspicious that it is all my body hair that is affecting my buoyancy. I have found that they now make sunblock that blends onto brown skin and that my foundation colour is ‘caramel’ (I do really like the sound of that).

And Christine? I suspect that she will always haunt me and yet I feel no need for her since I let her go. Life is hard as a black woman with acne, sore marks and loads of body hair, but there comes a day when you realise that this brown body is all you’re ever going to have and it’s the one you need to make the most of. Thanks are due to people like India Arie who gave me the anthem, ‘Brown skin. You know I love my brown skin. I can tell where mine begins, I can tell where mine ends.’

TGWCR