Glamouring As a Way [Not] to Live
A Glamouring
“I like to say black people do this thing I like to call glamouring, we glamour…What black people tend to do is we tend to mesmerize the person who’s acting on us. A lot of what we do, everything from shucking and jiving, to Michael Jackson moonwalking, it’s all glamouring.”
-Arthur Jafa
(from “bell hooks and Arthur Jafa Discuss Transgression in Public Spaces,” The New School, 2014)
“Love: an art form slightly removed from its intended context.”
-An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012), dir. Terence Nance
“Like an artist without an art form, she became dangerous.”
-Sula (1973), Toni Morrison
She told me every night, over after-dinner orange slices, the blue edge of the plate chipped
so much it looked like part of the pattern. She told me if I kept swallowing whole orange seeds, I
would grow a tree from the middle of my head, and then we would keep on growing—the tree and me—
through the ceiling and the roof, splintering wood and metal alike.
Determined to become an expanse of living things, I grew:
I stretched my legs into the ground, and my back turned black soil flower bed. Orange blossom
curled out of my ears and over my shoulders. I became a whole grove, all flourish and sweet,
and too much of me will ruin you.
My arms wrapped around myself as long as it takes generations of women to laugh and die and run
and glamour. I stood there hugging myself, tall and unwavering, tree trunks draped, then strangled by vines.
Then I came back, and this time I wasn’t so precious, so careful:
My high shoes planted their pointy heels between new shoots struggling toward life. She
was watching from the window, louver blades drawing long darts of shadow across her frowning face.
I stood under the tallest tree I made of me
Me: one grand motherfucker
I lit a cigarette until fear turned molten in my chest and flowed out
Me: a wild fire
For years to come people would cough ash over their plates of after-dinner oranges, would swear
that they could still feel the glow.
A Rendering
“What the author has[…] An aspect […] A misplaced photograph she finds at times in a mirror.”
-“Verso” pp. 172, The Blue Clerk, Dionne Brand
I stretched my left hand out of the mirror and towards myself so I could feel with my fingertips the point where self and reflection were indistinguishable, mostly because I was hoping it would burn, or at least sting, to look on and experience one’s own self with something other than contempt, maybe not exactly with admiration, but at least curiosity, or an openness to being.
So I stretched out my hand expecting to breach in some way the naturally cruel ordering of things in which I am to understand that my self is only able to exist in so far as it is pliable and easy to dismantle, but not too brittle or quick to crumble, just willing to endure the swallowing of small indignities daily, followed by certain destruction.
But aside from the uncomfortable slip and slide of the mirror’s surface—old toothpaste-tainted water and fingerprints marked in hair oil—our meeting was basically painless. The slickness of the mirror’s [un]clean meant that I didn’t really feel the pieces of glass burrowing into the most fleshy parts of my palms. She did though, and she frowned at me, or at self, or together, as I continued to climb out, hardly taking an eye off our face except to avoid the wet places on the countertop so I wouldn’t fall.
“And both of them, all they could do was give birth to fragments of possible selves and then more fragments of themselves would sit in a window…”
-“Verso 2.3.1” pp. 18, The Blue Clerk, Dionne Brand
There was no splinter in the continuity of space and time; the sound of the neighbors now crying, then laughing,
continued in that muffled way like they were screaming into pillows, the on and off clicks of light switches in the next room
went on with their usual sharp efficiency, engines stuttered and growled outside, fighting the freeze of February air. There was nothing monumental about this sort of reflection,
this deliberate self-regard.
Your vision is blurry because when the tear film is dry, the light scatters.
-optician’s office on a Monday afternoon waiting to hear how much of my sight neglect may have cost me
I, (the reflection), and me, (the self of whom I am the imperfect likeness), had in the near past been spreading out and searching for the fragments we were wherever we could. We sought glimpses of our self in the glass of someone else’s eye, shining with want and momentary care that lasted only until the want subsided or was sated. We caught our self in refractions between spots of rust on a silver door handle, and again in the water-stained window of a store we would never think to enter—
“La façade en miroir d’une vitrine me renvoya le reflet de mon visage. Je n’en crus pas mes yeux […] Oui, j’étais une étrangère et c’était la première fois que je m’en rendais compte.”
-Le baobab fou, Ken Bugul, pp. 59–60
In pieces and not enough, we began to despair. I, reflection, watched me, self, turn against us. She pressed a powder compact into our palm so fiercely
its glass shattered and dripped grainy brown and red sliding to a stop at our wrist.
I shouted at me to stop, but our scream was one and the same. She could not hear. We scoured our wound into the sink and scoured our mind for people we knew we would not ask for help for fear that they saw us too clearly—
…but I guess I was tweeting hoping someone would reach out. Thank you for always seeing me
-sent 9:43PM
I see you, my brilliant child. You’ll be okay.
-received 9:49PM
So, I and me, we have decided to turn to our self. We are new to our self, maybe even a little infatuated. Knowing that the world will not halt its terror
and its magnificence neither for me nor
for I,
we turn to our self with kindness, and as if we know we are the most miraculous thing we have.
“-Don’t you go nowhere, mirror bitch.
-Where imma go?”
-Insecure Season 3, Ep. 4, “Fresh Like.” (1:10)
Zoë Gadegbeku is a Ghanaian writer living in Massachusetts. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she worked in communications and taught first-year writing. She was a participant in the 2017 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop at the University of the West Indies-Cave Hill, Barbados, and a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in June 2019. Her writing has been published in Blackbird, Saraba Magazine, Torch Literary Arts, and Longreads, among other publications. Her first novel, Blue Futures, Break Open, will be published by West Virginia University Press (release date TBD).
