|
epitome of incomprehensibility
|
My second-last dream showed me parade floats passing by, full of naked or at least shirtless men and women, their bottom halves hidden in the folds of fabric draping the slow vehicles. They were posed seriously, meditatively, like Rodin's oft-copied The Thinker, only with little facial expression. They were all tall and black, with slight figures, and seemed to be the same nationality, perhaps Sudanese or Ethiopian.
I looked at them and tried to puzzle out which people were male and which were female, and how I could determine the difference from the waist up. They all had short hair, and enough variety in facial shape that there weren't two distinct shapes to pick up on. It seemed that women should have breasts that stuck out more, but not all of them did, so I fell back on elongated nipples in particular, and a remembered mention of longer eyelashes.
When I looked down at myself I was startled to see my clothes, embarrassingly encompassing and bright. Perhaps I was wearing my greenish-blue 1996 Jazz Festival T-shirt. My hands were also distressingly white. "I am a different gender and a different number," I thought, like that, but the parade dissolved into reddish-brown eyelid light and the blue of careless sheets.
...
Perhaps this was occasioned by a past remark, on a Ghanaian rainbow-coloured tunic my mother was given and I've tried to appropriate, since she says the pinks don't go well with her auburn hair: "I can wear this to the Ugandan gay pride parade! ...I'll probably get shot, but at least I'll die fabulous!"
Unlike the cringe-inducing, effusive white lady in We_Need_New_Names, there are some of us who know our African country names... and then not much else, because we think we're stuck in one place. That place may be capitalist selfishness, but in Eoitopia at least the Morbid/Cutesy Effuser pipes its attempted humour right into the unconscious mind, with more or less of a filter.
|
140908
|
