She speaks from between her legs
Ella habla por en medio en las piernas
“I love my nakedness, love the tremor of my naked body before the pool of ink. ”
I am a refugee in the territory of sin.
On my knees and begging, I won asylum in the island of sinners. I escaped the carpeted country of curtained rooms, where women swallow their songs and bend their curves to the voice of an unseen man.
They sacrifice the call of the belly for the call of prayer, mistaking again and again that punishing voice for god’s. They close their legs, pin their fabrics, empty their bodies into a man’s mouth asking for ownership. Again and again mistaking their bowed men for prophets, losing their fathers and lovers to the crowd of beards and robes surrendering the colors of their desire to the singular, black of The One.
Tell me again that Eve was the poet of our punishment.
The reason we are here on earth, birthing babies, making love, pursuing the pain of desire, then alchemizing it all into art, into life, into memories, into grief and dance and wounds, rather then.. what exactly? If it were up to the first man’s passive obedience, we would all be birthed by a stream of wine, and all we’d know is this permanent and drying silence of a heaven that denies us this necessary, messy, wild passage. Eve gave us this, she understood that disobedience —the assigned no — was an invitation for a warned against yes, the life-giving water of yes. She was teaching us that what lies captive and waiting in the forbidden is precisely what begins life.
So maybe follow your serpent’s whispers, disguised as the devil’s, speaking to you from the belly. Open what you use in desiring a lover and use it to reach for what you were told to keep far from. Touch the dance you were told would poison you. Follow the lover you were warned against before you knew anything about love. And watch the blessing of your long fall from the lie, into the muddy truth of the life waiting for you.
Open your legs habibti. And listen to the instructions that come to you. You will be damned, and re-birthed in your exile. Resurrected into who you were really meant to become, waist deep in the mud of all you were really meant to live. I promise you. It is worth the long marsh walk away, and alone.
“The body doesn’t lie.”
How much of the truth I speak relies on how wide I can open these legs.
I am speaking of stream of conscience truths. Truths that are reckless about consequence. Confessions that are unknown, even to me, until they are written.
Last night I felt it rising under the warm streetlights of Brooklyn. The feeling came quickly, as it often does for me. I touched with my eyes what I couldn’t touch with my hands: those curls, as if god paused the whole world to rest his hands on this man’s head, as if he asking for more time away for the rest of us just to spend time with his hair. His shy smile, his soft mouth that carried a language I couldn’t speak. I returned, holding this desire in my body. Wanting him. This morning, I found it still there, alive and urgent And I asked myself, what would happen if I used this desire, a desire we only open for the other’s body, to write instead? What if i used it as my source today?
Audre Lorde talks about this. She has told us about the hard, uncomfortable truths about this massive erotic power we have, how we often only open it for sex, and leave its powers unused in every other part of our life. We underestimate its ability to serve us outside the bedroom. This erotic being — we ignore because she doesn’t arrive in polished heels and a crisp, demeaning attitude. She is the wild haired, torn stocking, chain-smoking, coffee spilling woman, smart as hell, wise as the desert herself, asking you to listen to her shy voice, a voice that gets lost to the suited, boring as hell, punishing woman screaming over her.
***
Before the arrival of Islam, the matriarchs of our region would turn their tents a certain angle when they wanted to invite a lover, and turn it away when his time was over. I found myself thinking of that last night. I wish the invitation to this beautiful man could be as simple as positioning my tent in Brooklyn at the right angle. A wordless come replacing the long, complicated, full of almost moments that we often lose each other to.
Maybe I needed the departure and the unanswered yearning to lead me elsewhere. I needed to be shown the degree of truth I can reach if I open these legs to more than man.
All the truths lost in the ‘dubbi rijlaiki’ and ‘ghati sidrik’ and ‘watti sawtik’ — all the versions of myself I missed meeting along the way with my legs closed, my breasts hidden, my voice low.
What is in there? In that dark place we open only under the covers. What happens if I open here before you. The hell with formalities that disguise what we mean to say under polite and useless sentences. Do you see how we close the legs of our words? Sit, but with your legs together. Speak, but with your mouth hardly open. Say it, but with the tightness of a kinder, less shocking way of saying it.
But I want to know, what does our orgasmic journey hold for us? What chapter of humanity lies unwritten in our individually assigned apples?
Rotana, a woman built of mountain truth and moon water, says to us: follow the shame. Follow it into the loss, into the exile, into the absolute unknowing. Memory is something that takes place when the present eases the tension in her body, lies down for a moment, parts her legs. Surrenders. And from this new pleasure of slowness, what has been attempting to return to you finally finds you in the clearing.
So yes. Open the legs, and with it all else opens. And be prepared.
“When it is most challenging, consider offering your body.”
Having heard what it was trying to reach her, she begins to speak from between her legs. The sleeping god in her begins to wake. And the ones who claimed to love her run from the coming flood.
Where does the water of truth go when the river that needs to receive it runs?
A little girl in the park with a dress and brown stockings is yelled at by her mother. Dobbi Rijlaiki! But it goes on. Do you want everyone to see? You want everyone to see don’t you?
I re-write this scene from my ashamed silence. Here, in the space of what could have happened, I walk her away from her mother, into the forest. I tell her that was wrong. I’d tell her to sit over the grass alone. To remember to do this, often. To come and listen to the screams and songs that want to be birthed. To the bodies they want to follow. The whispers and burnings they want to deliver. Open wide and listen, I’d tell her.
And when the flood comes, when it is too much, when the scream arrives too late and the audience is gone, what do I do? Isn’t it more bearable to keep it all tucked between the sealed lips of our thighs?
I imagine her returning to me later to ask this.
What use is all this truth while there’s nothing that can be done?
What use is desire while the desired is gone? Why the agony of confessing a dream, in the space of an earth that leaves many unanswered? Why excavate the horror trapped from the wordless and far memory of our wombs? Why pursue the proximity of all that is there, while the distance and the silence spares us?
I don’t know my love.
Maybe, because yes, when we dare, the heaven of our lies ends, and there is a long, embarassing descent that follows. We become earthly, naked, more… of visible in the mud of all that is real. We are exposed, raw, graceless.Yes, we could have gone on as we were. In that heaven. It depends what you find worthy, I guess. If you find the ease of an eternal, un-parted illusion to be beautiful, if you are spared this ravenous hunger for a life you can touch and be touched by, then maybe keep those legs closed and holy. Nourish yourself with other fruits that keep it all closed and neat. You’ll have a soulless time but yes, it’ll be a lot easier.
But if the barbed-wire walls of your own body tempts you, if you are drawn to where you are told not to go, not to do, not to say… if, when looking in the mirror, you feel the urge to scream, and when speaking, you feel the claws of your lie, if you are awake enough to realize hell disguised as heaven, death disguised as ease, real poison disguised as obedience and silence, then, even while there’s very little to be done with what your parted legs deliver, take it. Receive it with the full palms of the hungry, the grateful. Receive it as a prayer answered. And what a gift. That in you lives something strong enough that opened your legs and walked you into the dark hole of yourself. And who said the dream is meant to find its answer and is only useful to us then? Who decided that the truth of your pain only serves the one who authored it in your life? And how did we begin to believe that a horror, unspoken and forgotten, is one we have been spared and separated from?
It depends, would you rather it all be there and unknown to you? Or would you rather touch it, and allow it permission to take you through your “necessary death” — your rite of passage into all that waits for you. Into your earth story that will scare the hell out of you, in exchange for access to the river of life.
“If I fail to recognize...the woman who remains closeted because her homophobic community is her only life support, the woman who chooses silence instead of another death, the woman who is terrified lest my anger trigger the explosion of hers; if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own.. ”