embodied responses: what it takes to feel real

“i commenced to buying pieces of gold/ 14 carat/ 24 carat/ 18 carat gold/ every time some black person did something that waz beneath him as a black person & more like a white person. i bought gold cuz it came from the earth/ & more than likely it came from south africa/ where the black people are humiliated & oppressed like in slavery. i wear all these things at once/ to remind the black people that it cost a lot for us to be here/ our value/ can be known instinctively/ but since so many black people are having a hard time not being like white folks/ i wear these gold pieces to protest their ignorance/ their disconnect from history. i buy gold with a vengeance/ each time someone appropriates my space or my time without permission/ each time someone is discourteous or actually cruel to me/ if my mind is not respected/ my body toyed with/ i buy gold/ & weep. i weep as i fix the chains round my neck/ my wrists/ my ankles.” pg 51, Spell #7 of Three Pieces 

For me, Spell #7 was harrowing in its candidness. In between the lines of the banter and bar talk and blackface, the text ate away at me. This quote was particularly salient in my reading of the text. Here, Maxine describes painful experiences of appropriation, disrespect, humiliation, and oppression done to her by her oppressors and by those of her skin kind. Maxine copes with these experiences by materializing them. Her pain is embodied by jewelry that reminds of where she comes from, or where she’d like to be, or where she should be. She identifies with objects of gold from this place with bodies like hers experiencing things like she is. She puts the gold on her body. The implication of any kind of adornment is weighted with questions of identification, self-concept, history, and context. The implications of this diasporic woman putting a diasporic object on her body are huge and almost agonizing as these objects represent a lost connection and a visceral connection to pain in her immediate life. Adornment is thus a historic and revived identification with pain. Maxine wears these pieces of gold to remind herself and others of the pain of being; the realness of being a black body in space, in a world that rejects that realness as often as it can.

The act of adorning one’s self is often seen as this purely positive means of communicating one’s self, one’s means, one’s class, and one’s convictions. This excerpt from Spell #7 shows the reader Maxine’s or anyone’s greater reasons for decorating their bodies in the ways that they do. The quote calls to mind the explicit detail with which Shange describes the women and their colors in for colored girls– their “rhinestones etchin the corners of her (their) mouths” and their “oranges & magnolia scented wrists” … signs of fragility and femininity and also a kind of armor against oppressive forces. A kind of homage to the many sweet ways a body can be and an acknowledgement of why they are that way.