Physical
Traits and Power
I
was a brown-skinned child, and my siblings were colored light beige
(“fair” in my mother’s terminology). There was a subtle but
evident preference for these children in my (maternal) family. I was
fortunate that my hair was not “kinky”—that I had “good hair”
which seemed identical to being a good person, to having worth, to
owning personal power.
Unlike
my mother, brother, and sister, my father, also, was brown. This
marker created a special bond between us, one that had overtones of
the perverse, the unspoken. I was his companion, his confidante. We
went together to sports events and on mock dates to exclusive
restaurants in Cherry Hill, NJ and New York City. He removed ugly
(imperfect) frames of me from home movies, splicing the film and
repurposing “reality” for future reference. This splicing was a
form of selective memory, making life more acceptable to the naked
eye, the vulnerable spirit, the little girl whose father covered her
face with a pillow over and over again until she thought she would
suffocate, the pillow a sexual metaphor of possession and conquest
which Sigmund Freud would recognize. Did this conditioning during
the anal stage determine my future “breakdowns” or even play a
part? Is the biochemical root of bipolar disorder some complex of
traumas consolidated into synapses (shades of Hebb), erupting into
adult illness one evening in summer during my own family’s outing
in upstate New York many years later?
No comments:
Post a Comment