Your Skin (2022)
“Melanin is not your enemy”- Joy Crooks
Hating the sun was a learned attribute. I remember returning from a holiday, and a boy in my class not recognising me because of the tan that had kissed my skin.
My mother, frustrated as she had tried to keep me shielded with parasols and hats, to prevent me becoming too dark.
My mum’s skin was fair, olive at most when the sun wouldsweep it. A tan that Mums in the playground would envy, a glow that radiated modestly. Ihave my father’s dark roast, enriched with the rays, sweat dripping like dark chocolate streams as we poured ourselves into the sea.
When you are young and Brown, they try to stop you playing outside. Girls must always be careful. It is always different for girls.
For when we feel the warmth bestowed upon our cheeks by thesun, we enrich. The dark pigment will tell people that our status and class, that our hands must bare labour to survive, a trait that is frowned upon by others. Our dark Brown skin doesn’t tick the boxes in the survey when they try to find us a husband. Whiteness is wealth, whiteness is power, and anything close to it is close enough.
Aunties and Mothers will plaster their cheeks withanti-agers, retinols, and skin bleach. Fair and Lovely to keep the melanin at bay. They will celebrate the fairness that coincides with starvation and iron deficiencies, and they will instil a fear of nature’s greatest feeder.
May bank holiday, I sat in a tent while the sun cooked mefrom the outside like a boil in the bag rice. Layer after layer of factor 50, as though the melanin would be activated from steam alone. I proudly stated “I don’t want totan” to my white peers, as though it made me closer to them in some way. Nightly routines of lemon juice rubbed into my cheeks, across my moustache and sideburns. Constantly spending my childhood erasing parts of me in hope it would remove the otherness of being the token Paki friend.
Doing anything and everything to create as much distance from my brownness as possible and falling into a hole of misplaced identity that would take years to climb out of. Parts of myself would stay stuck in the hole, parts I do not know if I can even reclaim to this day.
I was twenty when I fell in love with the sun. I accepted I was South Asian, and allowed the melanin to thrive through my body. I grew back the hair that had been ripped from my arms and I allowed my shoulders to bathe in the warmth.
My largest organ has been nourished once more.
Ammi (2022)
When I was a child I loved being in the room with my mother as she completed her night-time routine. This won’t be a telling of a glamorousexotic woman who brushes her long silky hair one hundred strokes or bathes her locks and skin in aromatic nourishing oils. This is a lightly tanned Brown woman, with thinning, bobbed coils, and sagging breasts. Rough spikes and cheap razor burnt legs, and modest pyjamas. This is the embodiment of a working-classwoman through the lens of a Brown girl.
My mum would unsuccessfully try to shrink herself, hiding the folds of her stomach with her work clothes from the day. I would lunge forward from my parent’s bed, desperate to trace the purple-red dents around her back and shoulders with my fingers. When I close my eyes now, I can feel the warm soft sensation of our skin touching. The hair on her torso is fine and almost unnoticeable when I compare it to my own.
As my own body ages, I witness it transition through healing and recovery. My collar bones and ribs have sunken back into their body, and my inner thighs find comfort in their touching. My own softness has begun to resemble that of my mother’s. Nutrition once again brings curls to my hair and folds to my stomach. I adorn mybody in colour and serotonin inducing fabrics, that remind me of mothballs in the cupboards and suitcases of silk. Nani’s gold hoops and bangles rest on my skin as they once did hers, and I run oil through my hair as she once did for my mother.
Sometimes Mum fights with me, says I need to live within my means, live modestly. I resemble a magpie drawn to the vibrant, loud, maximalist things that glisten in the light. We are very different. At twenty five had to provide a stable household. A balanced world between traditional South Asian housewife, and modern working woman. I like to believe she had a choice to have that life, but I know that the world had already set a course for her to take.
My very own, South Asian, working class hero.
Homesick on Eid
Im homesick
In a flat with my dogs
And my lover
But the smell from the kitchen
That wrestles with the extractor fan
And floats down the street
Does not smell like home to me
I want to wake up in the morning to sweet desserts and spices tickling the hairs in my nostril
The doorbell to ring once or twice and it not be a delivery from an order I forgot I made
A morning kiss and cuddle could never compete
With a tight embrace over the shoulder one two three
Tea and coffee rounds after every meal and in between
Uncle and dad coming home after their namaz
And we hug one two three
And we feast
Scraping the last grains of rice that try to stay on the plate into our mouths
Fingers running along the inside of the bowl to get every last drop
This morning I don’t even get a text
I don’t know if it’s today or tomorrow
Waking late to a meeting on the sofa
My thighs fused with the plasticy cover beneath them
I eat hash browns and bbq sauce while watching strangers travel the world
And I cancel plans to fall into a habit I’ve spent years breaking
Climbing into an empty bed with my screen rotating through clips of strangers
To make me howl with 15 second laughter
And swipe
Swipe
Swipe
My mood swings to the far end of the spectrum
I want wetness to fill my eyes
But instead I frown
Thinking it’s my flakiness or ruined plans
But I’m just homesick on Eid
Blue Box Blues
Maybe Derby’s not so bad
A room in Lewisham for a grand a month
I’m sat in a blue box
2.5 beds
1 bath
Garden.
Buildings growing taller around
but I stay small
low to the ground
leaky window
1.35
under market value
I’m waiting for this email to come
for that one to become a two
Market value
market value of a blue box
social housing
buy it back
private social housing
if you take the poor person out of the social housing does it become luxury?
US embassy
swimming pool
tube station
Clapham Common
market value
I’m having a crisis
who’s got a grand to spent on a bedroom anyway?
If the housing association are increasing rent I’ve got no hope with the private private housing
I’m in the private social housing
the private social blue box housing
the knock down the furniture shop to build luxury social housing housing
It’s still a council estate
with private social housing
and young professionals from home counties
who’ve got a grand to spend on a room so anyway
the private social housing would rather they live here
than aunty and uncle next-door
and Kim the cat lady
I’m in the middle
with my private social housing
under market value
working class but my parents own their home now
upper working class? lower middle class?
but I don’t have a grand to spend on a room
so when that one becomes a two I’m really
screwed
screwed because I have things in every room
screwed because I’ve become comfortable in a housing crisis
I missed the first wave that knocked my friends back to their parent’s
I’ve settled in a temporary blue box that’s heading the same way as the furniture shop
but in the mean time they want to squeeze as much profit from this poor
blue box
and that means
market value
and luxury housing.
Maybe Nottingham would be okay…