A body yet, that I loved so much
Everybody knows what shame is, everybody feels shame. But sometimes, it is necessary to re-explore the meaning of words, as they are very powerful tools.
Phaolô
Shame has always been a very inherent part of my identity. The relation that I have with these feelings is a very intimate one. They have strongly shaped who I am today. There are many things that trigger shame in me. There are many things that I feel ashamed of. But when I think of shame, the first thing that comes to my mind is the relation that I have with my body.
For so many years, whiteness, as a powerful, unspoken, uncontested and omnipresent set of prescriptive norms, tricked me into feeling ashamed of my own body — a body yet, that I, at the same time, loved so much.
When growing up, I have been taught to be ashamed of my body, my brown beautiful body. For so many years, I have been ashamed of the darkness of my eyes. Ashamed of their almond shape, that I have relentlessly tried to reshape with excessively round glasses. Ashamed of the colour of my skin, an in-between undefined colour, that my brother used to describe as “dirty”. Ashamed of the darker tones of some parts of my body; ashamed of the browner shades of my penis and nipples. Ashamed of the thickness and the darkness of my hair, that I have covered for so long, and still continue to cover with a cap. Ashamed, actually, of every single hair covering my body. Ashamed, yet, of the absence of hairs on my face and torso, making me a less of a man. Yes, I remember being very ashamed of the femininity of my body too. Ashamed of the delicateness of my hands. Ashamed of the graciousness of my legs. Ashamed of my girly traits. We might think of whiteness and the heteromatrix as two very distinct sets of norms, having very distinct effects, but in fact, they are inherently linked, maintaining and relying on each other, hence the need to decolonize our gender conceptions and queering approaches. But that is another discussion that I will not take right now.
I remember spending a lot of time on my dad’s computer, photoshoping my brown face and wishing that I was as pale, as pure and as beautiful as these tumblr boys that I envied so much. Blond hair, blue eyes, white skin.
I am not sure that when reading this text, everybody will fully grasp the shame that tainted the relation that I used to have, and continue to have with my body. I am convinced that a few might doubt whether shame is the appropriate word to qualify this relation.
In fact, as I had already written these few lines, I myself doubted it, and questioned it. I wondered: “Is the concept of shame really suitable to describe the former feelings that surrounded my perception of my own brown body?”
So I interrogated myself and attempted to find satisfying answers to this question. After a few reflections, I concluded that yes, it was definitely shame that I was feeling. Drawing this conclusion required me to go back to definition of shame. Everybody knows what shame is, everybody feels shame. But sometimes, it is necessary to re-explore the meaning of words, as they are very powerful tools.
Shame, according to a very basic definition found on the internet, is a “painful and uncomfortable feeling of humiliation that you get when you are conscious that you have done something wrong or embarrassing”.
A “feeling of humiliation”? Yes, my body did feel humiliating.
“Painful and uncomfortable feelings”? Yes, my body certainly created a lot of these in me.
But “conscious that I had done something wrong or embarrassing”? It is this part of the definition of shame that seriously made me doubt whether it truly was shame that I felt. Yet, it precisely is in this part that the answers to my question lie.
Whiteness penetrated my consciousness and convinced me that what I am was wrong.
“What was it that I was conscious of doing wrong? Being who I am? Living? That does not make sense…” I thought. Everybody knows that there is nothing wrong in just being, existing, living and breathing. But if it is so easy for me today to know that, to write these lines and be convinced that my body is anything but wrong, it has not always been the case. It used to feel wrong.
And that is precisely how whiteness, as a prescriptive, pervasive, invasive and destructive set of norms, created feelings of shame in me: whiteness penetrated my consciousness and convinced me that what I am was wrong. Because that is how prescriptive norms work: they consider as wrong any attempt of transgression in their regards. Without even knowing it, I was perfectly conscious that my body violated and transgressed these norms. I perfectly knew, without knowing it, that the one wrong thing that I did was breaching the prescriptive standards of whiteness. That is why, I was ashamed.
As I said earlier, my experiences brought me over the years to realise that whiteness — as a set of norms de-possessing us from our own bodies — is fucking bullshit; allowing me thereby to find a bit of peace for myself. From that realisation, the feelings of shame that I had for my body started to fade away, and gradually got replaced by other ones: feelings of anger, rage, disgust, injustice and violence, not directed towards my body this time, but directed towards these norms.
Today however, there is a new feeling of shame that I am struggling with. If I have managed to smash those rules for myself, leaving me the space that I needed to embrace my own beautiful, brown, divergent, othered body, it appears that I have not smashed these rules enough yet to be able to embrace other brown bodies. If I have learnt to appreciate my subalternity, my otherness and my brownness, I have not succeeded yet in fully appreciating these same things in others. Today, I am ashamed that these rules, norms and systems are maintaining and perpetuating themselves through me and my sexual desires, creating in others the exact same feeling of shame that I used to feel. Yes, of that, I am ashamed.
