Confessions of Desire
From the ‘Brooklyn Bedouin’ Series
This month I will be writing intimately about sensuality and all the ways I continue to wake up to how deeply significant a part of our lives it is, and the consequences I’ve lived through in leaving it ignored and misunderstood for so long. And of course, the price I paid when, after all that time, I tried to touch it, to know it, to re-unite with it.
I understand if this makes you uncomfortable. I still struggle with it too. But I want us to understand that sensuality is political — and I say that as an artist who does not believe all art and all aspects of life are political. This is something I’ve always disagreed with as an Arab artist — calling all Arab art political art. But with sensuality, it simply is, especially because of where we come from, what we’ve lived through, and what it means to inhabit an Arab body in this era.
First, desire is deeply political for the Arab whose sensuality continues to be occupied by a religion that has been rewritten by a misogynist patriarchy (a religion that never came into this world with the intention to disrupt our relationship with the body.) Two, sensuality invites the world’s gaze towards the very body it is attempting to erase, and not just to look at us, but to intimately experience the drums of our being. Sensuality was always a form of protest for me growing up in an Islamic school and religious family, it was my way of saying, ‘no, I will not be invisible.’ So with this tool I use the political curves of my body to say — ‘no I will not disappear.’ And third, there is the medicinal and healing qualities of sensuality. We come from a land where a very long time ago God was worshipped as woman, and during the great goddess era, ‘sacred prostitutes’ were highly respected and revered members of society who used their bodies to tend to the pain of their visitors. As a poet, this history of sensuality leaves me curious to explore in my writing what it means for a society to employ the remedy of touch for healing — to remember the body as medicine…
When did I discover that my curiosity about sex is in fact a thirst for knowledge?
The desire for knowledge fuels my desire for men. No, my desire for men fuels my desire for knowledge…I began to judge ever man in my life based on his pedagogical qualities above all. The more a man teaches me, the more I love him..I could no longer put up with a man who couldn’t teach me.
—The Proof of the Honey, Salwa al Neimi (Syrian Writer)
Tonight I am not an artist. I am not a writer, I am not even a woman. I am a body sitting in the nameless aftermath of waking up to a life that isn’t at all what I meant to build.
And it is the incredibly hard, dark passage back into the womb I abandoned that shows me what I’d rather not know. This mud is what I prayed for. I asked to know. It was me who went haunting with the torch of my regret in the interior alleys of my body for that little girl in me who walked out in righteous rage and never came back.
That is to me what sensuality is — a retrieval of something lost. Not the calling after the daredevil woman I was who did mindless things with men so undeserving of my time. No, I am talking about the deeply erotic journey of swimming through the dark river of my own body for the low whisper of the girl lost in me. The one who stepped onto the stage like it was nothing, who knew things just because she knew them, who slipped naughty notes into the neighbor’s mailbox because there was something deeply sensuous about breaking rules that never made sense to her. The one who knew that her words would mean trouble and still, she wrote them. And not only did she write them — but she delivered them by hand, one by one.
This is the erotic journey: an intentional passage back into the native self. To open each interior room and kick out the tenants of a life you left behind and accidentally took its characters with you. I am talking about the deeply sensual uprising of shouting against every body you stumble on inside you. Of reclaiming every occupied organ.
Sensuality is not as I believed it was. It isn’t my hair blowing in the wind on the long highway out of my family. It isn’t the layers of fabric I shed far from them. Or maybe, that was sensuality to me — in that era of my life. But it has become something far deeper than that, something that takes place under the skin.
It is no long about filling myself with the objects of my desire — much as I still crave the meal of the body. Instead it has become about emptying the body, and removing all that I am not.It is making space in this ephemeral vessel for what has been attempting to arrive. It is thrifting the old words, the old desires, the old losses and trusting the new bareness of a room where the old has left and the new hasn’t yet arrived.
It is is a measure of honesty — a way of knowing if I am speaking the truth by paying attention to how the words feel when I speak them. And I am learning, slowly, how to measure the truth of what I speak by the degree of pleasure I experience in making them heard. There is this sense of an erotic release.. a softening of the belly, a deeper presence, a tenderness for the eye across from you receiving your honest words — maybe not unlike our experience in sex. That is how erotic the truth can be. And with that too comes the tremor of the body: the fear mixing with release mixing with anticipation. This also is part of the tidal movement of truth.
More than anything, sensuality is about finishing the interrupted journey. That be-coming that never completed itself except for the proof of initiation that arrives each month in the blood river between your legs — reminding you of the unfinished story. How the storm that rose against the new shape of your body was enough to make you leave behind the room of your life and live homeless outside this dangerous body. How you were just beginning to learn the language of your camera and the territory of your desire leading a woman into the forest, asking her to let her fabric fall, when you learned before your time the consequence of following impulse. How even your camera never finished coming of age and it would be years before you turned its eye back towards its original desire, and even then, never with the firm, sensuous hands of that young woman following the orders of her body. There was once a time when the belly’s voice and God’s were one. Now you weigh them against each other in separate palms, always mistaking one as the antonym the other.
We despise certain questions for what they reveal to us about ourselves, what they make us confess and what they make us see. Among them for me was this question: ‘What is your deepest desire.’
As a woman who loved all discussions about desire, I could never understand why that question sent waves of rage through me. Why I would spin my mind through my long to-do-before-I- die list and collapse, exhausted from the effort of finding an answer that felt worthy of this enormous question. And then, suddenly just like that, after years of trying to answer this question, this week I realized it’s very simple, the answer. What I want, what I have always wanted, is a deeply sensuous life.
Yes, unfortunately I still carry the city dreams of an artist and this hunger that grows each day, to be heard, to be seen, to be read, but actually more than that, in fact before all that — I want to learn how to live my days erotically.
Life has shown me, in not such gentle ways, how absolutely meaningless the art and life I create from the mind can be. It has shown me that no poem, no job, no gathering, no adventure carries any meaning when it is not lived from the bones. I am talking about an embodied experience of all these things. This is about bringing the body into every detail of life, about inhabiting yourself from the throat down, and letting the water of your work happen in the natural, easy way it is capable of happening when the womb replaces the mind as the creator of your life.
I am not there, not yet, not always. God knows I am not. But I am not as far as I was either. And, there are periods of my life when I have experienced what it was like to live this. I remember last summer, during one of those periods, writing — “What if life is lived from the same place poems are created from?”
And of course, poems are created in the womb, except when I am regressing and I forget to not to write from the mind, But you can feel the difference. Art made from the womb and art made from the mind. Even if you can’t name it, I promise you, you know. You recognize it. You can identify it.
And I remember when I read that sentence out loud to the visitors at my studio, someone replied, “Don’t you think that is an unrealistic expectation from life? It’s too much.” And I remember listening to that very still, calm, low voice in me answering, not at all. I believe what we are living now is unrealistic. What I am living now, this mind-life, is too much, and I am exhausted. I want to hand the reins to those ancient hands living in this dark, low place within me.
“You have to get off the boat of the mind and go down the river of soil and body and have a direct experience with reality.”
-Mirabai Starr
Perhaps the most alarming and obvious sign we’ve become severed from our sensuality is that horror ceases to alarm us. There is no more pleasure and no more rage. No more laugher and no more howls. This was how I woke up to the death in me.
It wasn’t the alarming lack of pleasure. It was — more than anything — the departure of rage, that friend that was once so intimately a part of my life. I mistook her absence for healing. But the lie I spoke scared me even more.
I can now recognize the dead and collapsed womb in the dry eyes of women, only because I came to read it in myself. I have done many things wrong, but I will not lie. I came to know intimately what I am protesting against in my writing because I have lived it.
Before I had the words for it, I felt it — the death of the erotic. It was staring back at me in the kitchen when I stood before an older woman, telling what her son did to me. A sentence that should provoke a storm fell silently between us. I was still alive when I made this confession — and I recognized the death for what it was.
But years later, after much much heartbreak, when my own river dried up and I landed across many more horrors, degrees worse than my own, and I watched it fall numb on my heart without response, I realized something had gone very very wrong. It wasn’t the absence of skin and beds that woke me. It was the absence of fire and my own dry face. But I am learning all over again what it means to say NO with the body. I am learning — not easily at all — that there is no use summoning the water if I won’t bow to the terrifying fire it comes with.
“What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?”
—Valerie Kaur
In the long spans between stories, I live off memories, confident that the coming days will bring me my new story… And then? I often asked myself this question, without ever really looking for an answer. the answers, like the stories, came of their own accord, in their own time, as ripe fruit falls from the tree.
—The Proof of the Honey, Salwa Al Neimi (Syrian writer)
I am trying to touch this thing called life. I am watching myself melt into the walls again. This is when I lose myself. No no no! I want life. The life of these erotic artists and writers. But what do I do? How do I re-enter life? to open, to touch… But I feel so tired..
I’m living the life I was forced to live when I had no choice. This basement and room life — when my heart was screaming to go out into the world.. and now here I am. I’ve made my captivity normal. I should be horrified. how dried I’ve allowed myself to become. How far I am…
and when it gets deeply lonely, I open my phone and sink into the lives of other women who are living. But when I am deeply alive and running my own life, I am not studying the lives of other women. I am deep in the architecture of my own. what happens now?
I want a deeply sensuous life. That’s what I want. Of sun and skin and laughter and wild runs and screams and the organic art that comes from all that living. But where do I begin?
Which door wants to open? What wants to be noticed? What wants my time?
I am close.. so close.
—notes from my journal, on desire
My deepest sensual experiences have come through in literature, through the body of the book. I’ve always been deeply embarrassed to admit this, especially as an artist who emphasizes the significance of the skin, how like paper it could if one takes the time to read it, and many, many don’t. But history is heavy and it reappears and relives itself stubbornly in the bodies of men and it complicates the simplicity of the sensual for me. But in the safe bedroom of words, mine and other writers, I get to experience the erotic fully and without the inconvenient intrusion of unwanted hands and familiar gestures that deliver me again and again into those haunting years.
I remember there was once a writer I’d never met in person who wrote to me: ‘I would like to read you. and read to you’ I remember being both disturbed and awed by the deep sensuality of that confession. He didn’t mean, I want to read your writing. He had already done that. He said, I want to read you. And when I shared that I was reading the article he sent me, he added, ‘I can almost feel your gaze falling over my writing, touching my words, and me.’ Sensuality — beautiful in writing, haunting as something lived and real.
And believe me, I have done all I can to NOT be that woman. To edit the original script of my being. To alter the words that spill me into deeply uncomfortable situations with my family, with men, with strangers, with myself. I’ve tried to clean up this raw behavior. To professionalize it, sound it into something academic, intellectual, complicated — all the things ones does to clean up the rejected essence of who they are and what they hold. I paid a very heavy price for it, but between me and myself, I paid a far, far heavier price for trying to take it out of me. For rejecting it. For misnaming it. For cleaning it, distorting it, rerouting its original intentions.
I’ve held her back where she was meant to spill generously — and spilled her embarrassingly into many, many situations that were not meant to receive her and not where she wanted at all to enter. Rather than having a horse that rides me gracefully and powerfully into my destination, I have a wild horse that kicks at me and runs vengefully in the opposite direction. There is no question about whether or not I have this horse. She is there, towering and vengeful. The question is, will she forgive me for my long, long abandon, and for trying to make a sheep of her when she was always meant to be nothing less than a storming horse trotting the silent dignity of one who knows where she is going.