To fathom

To fathom

I’m leaving a Pilates class in a bit of a tense neighbour-hood that borders a chic one. Think Broadway; but cracked at the edges. You have to cross major avenues where a timer shows you how long you have left and making it across in time is already enough to work up a light sweat, but if you’re too late and you get hit by a Tesla truck, no need to worry because the Pilates class is pressed right up against a cemetery. The most visited cemetery in town, where the graves are raised because the city is sinking little by little. Raised, in response to the frequent flooding from the surrounding lakes to the hurricanes that wreak havoc on everything. Raised too, at a time when yellow fever and slavery were decimating the population. Swollen bodies floating all around the city, haunted because each plot of land smelled of death. This is a cemetery painted all white, where the bodies are also white. Elevation comes at a cost. 

Here where we have Nicolas Cage’s conic and iconic tomb (he’s not dead yet but that’s all he’ll have left after the bailiffs come) and then there is Marie Laveau’s grave, regularly vandalized with XXX in red chalk marks, cigarettes, open beer cans, and hair ties, to summon the powers of the Hoodoo Queen. 

A sensual city in the sense that the flesh of the living who do Pilates, the flesh of future-fallen stars and that of the dead all mix downtown in the endless flood of pulsing music and odour of fried food. 

This place where I spent two months doing Pilates and Yoga—part of an attempted escape into an afro-culture different than my own, an escape to regain strength in a country even more steeped in the rage that racism, capitalism, fascism, imperialism ignite in me—was a break across the Atlantic, in the United States of America…

In this cradle of the worst, I was repulsed by many flags flapping in the wind, during the half-spring I spent in New Orleans. In this country where things are worse, survival tactics have already been sharpened, respite is so recent that people are still wary, and you have to nourish yourself at the root of all evil.

Here where I was going to purge myself, cry, suffer, heal, is a black-owned studio. A place where the owner is a black woman, and the instructors are 97.5 percent non-white. Ajax, Ciara, Gisèle, 6-month pregnant Kayleen, Gina, Alysha. The studio holds hot yoga classes where I can’t really do 12 of the 26 poses, Hot Vinyasa, meditation classes, breathing classes, self-empowerment through self-defence, Yoga for diabetics, people with hypertension and/or chronic illnesses. I watched my body weep copious amounts of sweat. And learn to hold itself upright like a tree but also bend like a reed in the fascist wind.

I learned everything to better choose my posture. I didn’t know the extent to which I needed to transform this flexibility I constantly put on display. That I needed a community that could repair my blackness which feared the history it replays like a film stuck on a loop. Start over completely? When we were just beginning to see people change their behaviour around us, supporting us… Blacklash! 

Hmm… The first time I went there, I pulled up in an Uber at 6:15 a.m. 

It’s the type of crazy thing you do when you escape your life for a bit. 

When suddenly, it makes you feel unkind to no longer appreciate the fact that you are invited to act out your creations, that the red carpet is rolled out for you to invent shows, that you’re invited to write, speak your truth to the world because you’re exhausted by the productivity culture that you’re addicted to (and that destroys you as it nourishes you), tinged with guilt for not saving the world with one project at a time, for not resisting, occupying, defying to the extent that your status allows. 

What’s the problem? 

Truth is, it’s a skinny little problem. 

As thin and selfish as it is mine and only mine. The thread between imposter syndrome and professional potomitance (that compulsive need to uplift, mother, hold everything together) frays quickly. 

We indulge in crazy things when we want to have one last good time before crisis catches up to us again. As long as it’s on screens, you can keep denying it.  

And what if I became this person capable of getting up at 5 AM to go to yoga? When before I would stay in bed procrastinating, going to sleep at 5 AM to catch up on the time I stole from myself and to play Candy Crush. 

Just to hear a voice tell me, “Juicy Tasty Divine Delicious Marvelous”. 

To whisper things to myself in this imperial language whose nuances I lack. I just understand that these words are validating rewards. Dopamine in a language I know, one with colours and rewards. A treat for a female (downward) dog, so she forgets to bark. 

One day, we tell ourselves, something’s not quite right here. And we go somewhere else to check things out. For me, things were going well, but not very well. 

I understood that I had a comorbidity, I understood that I was playing with death, that my knees trembled with pain due to the weight carried by my hips and my shoulders. I recognized the weight of my trauma, the congealed oil of my joy, my tissue fattened with anxiety. 

Anyway, I am in my yoga class with plenty of fat women. 

Fat like I’ve rarely seen. 

Fat and black, many, well they’re the ones I saw the most. 

I saw myself everywhere. But the fat in different places. 

American fat is ruthless; it lodges itself in the most incredible places, making parts of the body that I was just discovering hang. It makes me think of the cold room in a butcher’s shop where the bodies expose themselves confidently. Except that it’s 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius, but that’s less impressive) and we’re all watching ourselves melt in the same mirror. 

We hope to master the heap of cellulite, create hormones of joy, exhaustion that isn’t psychological, strengthen our abdomens, stimulate our microbiota, calm our ballooning stomachs and swelling emotions. 

The fat becomes an armour, a reserve of energy to last longer in a fight, but above a blanket to hibernate and think under.  

My breasts hang but I like that because I can tuck my lighter between them when I don’t have pockets and I’m smoking while biking. What I don’t like is the police at every intersection, and so I pull my hood down outside even when I’m cold because I’m scared to be gunned down before I can say that I’m French and harmless (since I do more theatre than I do protesting).  

Another time I was really scared, I was with some French friends who were white, and we were driving too fast on our way to the lake. We were driving too fast because we didn’t understand “feet and inches” at all, and when you get pulled over, you suddenly remember your black body. You flash back to all the videos that you shouldn’t have watched and you tell yourself ‘I’m black, I’m going to end up under a police officer’s boot, under the weight of multiple police officers because I lost my passport (on day 2 of the trip) and for a moment lost sight of my blackness’— when I’m surrounded by white people I sometimes forget. In my day to day back in France, I’m aware of it, but I know the rules of the game better. I know that my eccentricity, my size, and the fact that I’m usually read as a woman mean I’m not perceived as a threat. 

Here black means a black person that’s not white. 

And yet, I had never thrummed with such communal energy. 

And not just because the people here created chicken wings. 

But because day after day people manage to make you forget the dictatorship for a few minutes by embodying and reinventing past struggles and acts of resistance. Segregation has left festering wounds, and I felt a westernized diasporic blackness whose presence struck me as powerful.

Even the mayor looks like me here. 

Well, I want her to look like me, she is black, muscular and thick, and when I see her moving across the screen, I get the sense that she’s a lesbian. A trans-Atlantic cousin. 

Here we devour grilled oysters, stuffed crawfish, alligator nuggets, turtle soup. The city is surrounded by water. 

And this water rises almost as quickly as fascism. And the city sinks despite the piling up (and the designs for other habitable planets) by those that have the means of being elevated. 

It’s crazy to be at the heart of rising waters, to feel the bodies floating again, to feel everything asserting itself, the earthquakes accelerating, the hurricanes intensifying. 

In the eye of the cyclone. 

Seeing people who carry guns, mistaking and hating the outrageous blue and red lights of bars. Passing a MAGA hat while leaving a bookstore named Baldwin and urgently buying banned books. Calling people losers (in my head) but feeling like the curse is far from reaching them since they deny even that which cannot be disputed. I was 20 when Katrina hit, and 20 years later I visited a greasy, groovy, bady city that still hasn’t disappeared despite the waters and winds that hounded it. 

----

Translated by: A.R. Pearson

Edited by: Titane Michiels & Dagmar Dirkx