Is desire a weapon against the cistem* or their tool?
#BrightEyes
My body is a diary written in tremors. A manuscript of touch and the absence of it, that rewrites itself over and over fueled by deep curiosity. I trace its contours like a wanderer in unknown lands, marveling at every curved rebellion against the sterile topography of capital. We are estranged from our own skin, our flesh made factory, pleasures rationed, and hungers policed; lives quantified to the absurd (lunch break 30 minutes, orgasm, 5). Yet our bodies remember what our minds are forced to forget, that pleasure is a form of knowing, that the revolution must be felt in our flesh and bones before it can be forged in our streets.
—¡Sí, sí, sí, sí, síii!, the sound of that word dissolves like brown sugar on the tongue, the salty sweat from our bodies calms our thirst while we press into the night. We knew each other so much and so little at the same time. Paris hums outside, indifferent, a machine grinding lifetime into profit, but here, in the dim pulse of a borrowed room in the 10th arrondissement, we are anarchists of the flesh. Capital would have us believe that love is a transaction, that intimacy is a service, but when he arches against me, when my fingers dig into the softness of his hips and my hand strokes his hair back, I know otherwise. This is not consumption.
This is rebellion.
And not just any rebellion, it’s a “Baroque survival tactic”, as Bolívar Echeverría had taught me. We were fugitives at this moment; taking back what was stolen, not through petitions, but through the pressure of our fingernails in each other’s skin, through gasped Arabic endearments, through the temporary autonomous zone we’ve created between these damp sheets.
❦
A message pops up on my phone. —This is Valencia today, there’s a flood taking over the city. Are you sure you want to go there now? If you want to come back to Paris and stay with me… Here’s my number just in case +33 6 00 00 00 00.
I met him near Notre-Dame in a Latin bar where the air smelled like rum and sweat. I was holding the door to the gender-neutral bathroom for my friend when he walked in. His smile was magnetic, eyes dazzling, skin shiny, so I smiled back before my mind could verbalize anything. Our eyes locked with the electric recognition of finding a footnote in a book you thought you’d written alone. The way his Egyptian hands cling on my Mexican hips while dancing bachata in France, was a middle finger to borders.
—You’re leading too much. He teases.
—You’re resisting, I counter. Neither of us was wrong.
My friend and I had bonded over salsa in Mexico City, and now we were reliving those nights in her town. She might be French, but she dances salsa better than me, and my “exotic weirdo meets cute” charm was working overtime. I was already kissing a gorgeous guy from Mali when Bright Eyes cut in, asking for my Insta. —I’m heading to another party, he said. —Come with me? I stayed with my friend but later, the next day, we kept talking all the five hours of my train ride to Hendaye.
—Are you 100% mexicain? —Ok, I will check bus prices for Barcelona, maybe we can meet again there.
His accent is like spiced honey, arab mixed with french and broken english, delicious. —Egypt was my obsession as a kid! I said. —I love everything about it, the mythology, ah… I was just in Turin’s Egyptian Museum, it was a painful reminder of what colonialism keeps doing to “us”. His eyes darkened with recognition. Not only did he find these words sexy, he lived them. Pro-Palestinian rallies, activism in exile.
—They call us immigrants until we revolt. Then, we’re terrorists.
Similar script, different deserts: poisoned rivers for lithium in one, stolen artifacts behind glass in the other, to say the very least. We speak in the shared language of “the wretched of the earth”. Capitalism, colonialism, vocabulary of generational anger and pain topped by radical, and sometimes too stubborn, hope. A language that I could not share with my Italian husband or with my American boyfriend, even if we agree on most of the topics. This is one can not be translated to “whiteness”. Fanon murmurs between us: For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonizer.
❦
The screen of his phone glows between our naked bodies, “They bombed the last bookstore today.” I bite his shoulder, not in passion but in rage, and he moans like it’s the same thing. It is. The system wants us either dead or docile; instead, we are feral, we feast savagely, we become maroons*. There is nothing more frightening for “them”, than two brown bodies conspiring in the dark, stitching a future from whispers and sweat.
We made love again, slower this time, as if our bodies could forge a bridge between the Seine and the Jordan, from the river to the sea… It feels odd when profound joy and profound sadness are present simultaneously, some schizophrenic alchemy that can only be crafted at these shitty times. When the world is reduced to rubble, orgasms can become a manifesto: I am still here. I choose life, kindness, vulnerability, even if it rations my breath…
Maybe we will burn out. Maybe we will build something. Either way, we left marks on each other, both physical and metaphorical. This was not a love story, this was proof that when the system tries to grind us into lonely, obedient parts, sometimes two fragments crash together and spark a fire.
And fire spreads.
Soundtrack
Ma Chérie – Naïka
Egyptian Lover – Felukah
Corazón culpable – Anthony Santos
Un beso – Aventura
Water – Tyla
+ La vie – Ichon
Apocalypse – Cigarettes After Sex
Yo no sé mañana – Luis Enrique
Can’t buy me love – The Beatles
Extra Words
* Cistem, a societal structure that privileges people who identify with their assigned gender (cisgender), and marginalizes transgender people.
* Maroons, refers to enslaved people who fled to form free communities.
Eros o Barbarie 