the woman with the painted face
There are so many beautiful Things to say but no place to say them.
Not really. No shelf to put down every thought that feels like a slow, lazy realisation slipping past the back of your eyes as they close. Encased in something so sweet but also cold. Like when your still cheek is too close to a train that will not stop for you. The feeling before the wait. The thing on the tip of your tongue but only just. Something you only know you want to say when you’re told not to.
The thing that slips when you’re kicked under the table.
But today’s Thing is not beautiful. Today’s Thing is an ugly, ugly piecing together. Unoriginal and with teeth. This country is no country for anyone but men. But we knew this. We have been taught this. My earliest childhood memory is looking up through a car window to a billboard (bigger than my house, I think) with a woman smiling down at me selling Coke or soap or life insurance or something. At least, I think she’s smiling. I wouldn’t know. There is angry black paint where her face should be.
Nothing is changing and nothing has changed and nothing will change. What happens at the intersection of futility and hopelessness? Seventeen years later I am the woman on the billboard with the painted face. Taught to be so far detached from myself and the experience of my body it becomes impossible for me to talk about identity and being without treating myself as some kind of distant character. And then what? There is no justice here. Which is fine, I think. I don’t want justice — not when justice would be so easy and so close and almost necessary.
I want liberation.
Clean liberation. Cold and steel-cut and detached. Past the arguing and the discoursing and the outrage. A quiet assurance. Something to fill the space where rage made its home all that while ago and only weariness rests now because so many of us have used up our anger with the same fervour men rush to distance their masculinity from violence every time something makes news. Panicked insistences promising these are not men, not like us, these are not men these are animals we promise believe us believe us believe us. In dissecting Pakistani masculinity one finds only delusion and the odd sports fact. For them the woman with the painted face does not exist. She is a distant imagination unvisited while she irons their clothes and serves their dinner and graciously bows her head when she hears a doorknob turn. She becomes a myth — I become a myth — while your masculinity is built on my ruin.
Our pain was invented and shelved like winter clothes in airing cupboards.
Casually. Matter-of-factly. Something so present and uncomfortable every move aches and every ache prompts picking fingers. An old scab never allowed to heal. Hardened and softened and peeled and bandaged and regrown. But how long for? How long for?