I blame Beyoncé, tbh
After a lifetime of never being homesick, I have become helplessly, aggressively homesick.
I walked on a sunny street in Manhattan a couple weeks back, the heat rising from the asphalt to greet my legs. And a small part of me wished for the 'light jacket weather' of London. I missed the familiarity I have with my city, a comfort that reduces my fear of navigating it at night by a smooth 85%. I missed the familiar accents of my natural postcodes. I missed Hackney Town Hall and Hackney Central Library, and I missed cornershop newsagents. I missed hearing Yoruba on the street every damn day (here I hear it every few weeks, and my heart speeds up (and once, tears pricked behind my eyelids). I think I even miss the Central Line. Wait, no. Not that. But I do find myself thinking about the Overground with a soft, simple smile on my face. I miss the very humans who make up London, even if privately I often think they're a shower of cunts. I miss the ease with which I could order Nigerian food in east London, and I miss my mum's cooking. I think the strangest thing of all is that I miss the smell of London.
New York in the summer smells like wet gangrene.
Don't @ me. It's the damn truth, and we all know it.
I went to Afropunk Festival in Brooklyn last weekend, and applied eyeliner in a fancy (for me) wing, before obscuring all my hard work with my spectacles. I liked my dress, which was a Forever 21 sale item.
I had fun. I had my very first experience of witnessing a large group of black Americans dance to "Knuck If You Buck" and in the moment the opening bars started up I think I saw the many-faced Diaspora God flash before my eyes (#emotional). I attempted a feeble twerk every now again (I am, after all, Nigerian, and a lack of technical skill never fazed us). I laughed a lot, and gawked a lot: Afropunk is basically an "owambe" party, is it not? Beautiful black people, dressed to the nines (even the people who "don't care" actually care), and happy to twirl for you if you ask nicely. If you came to Afropunk to get laid, you may have been disappointed. That seemed to be the secondary preoccupation of festival-goers; the purpose here was to see and be seen. It's an elongated passeggiata – a walk in ever tighter loops, designed to pique interest, spark conversation, showcase artistic expression, and maybe get snapped for a style blog or two. Perhaps after you have explained the precise origin of your headwrap, or the placement of the baby's breath in your hair, you may consider fucking someone. But probably only if they don't mess up your Look™.
I noticed the people with white face paint and markings as soon as I arrived. They were everywhere, rocking delicate dots and slashes above their eyebrows, dots dissecting their faces down the bridges of their noses, small dashes of white paint drawn on the bags beneath their eyes. Some people had half of their faces covered in maze-like designs; others went full throttle and did their entire faces. I had observed only black people doing it, and then I saw my first white person with the stripes and dots. And once that seal was broken, I saw it everywhere. Finally, when I saw two young women with the markings, I went up and asked what the dots meant to them. In halting English, these Japanese women told me it was pretty, and that there was a stall close by that was "painting faces". It made me start.
Listen. Self-expression is a beautiful thing, and to be encouraged. As an African, specifically a Nigerian of a certain age, my feeling on painting your face with white powder is steeped in the tea of years of stories. I grew up in a society that took the application of white powder to your face and body as a deeply spiritual (for good or ill) statement. It was something animists (among other groups) did – less a simple beauty choice, and more a deep recognition of a life governed and dictated by certain choices. On television, it was deployed as a shorthand to tell the viewer we were in the presence of the supernatural, the otherworldly. When we staged Ola Rotimi's The Gods Are Not To Blame in SS2 (Year 10) at school, the girl who played the Ogun priest was painted with white powder to connote importance and power. And sometimes, when we performed traditional dances from various parts of the country, we dotted our skin with the powder paste, carefully washing it off when the performance was over.
Years of Tumblr-scrolling means that I have seen a thousand (black) people with these assorted dots and stripes. Sometimes they are wearing African fabric—kente or ankara or adire—or an approximation of it; think those thin-looking "dashiki" fabrics. Sometimes they are wearing denim or chambray or silk or lace or cotton. It doesn't really matter. My gut feeling, right or wrong, is almost always a gentle lol, a murmured what are you doing, my love a la Lemonade-era Beyoncé.
On the one hand, I do feel a type of way. How could I not? What, after all, do these people know of what they are painting on their faces? Furthermore, what gives you the right to wear what many find sacred as a "fun weekend festival look"? On the other hand, let me ask myself the same question: what do I know about what these people are painting on their faces? First up: am I just being a smug African? If I can trace my lineage back 15 generations at least (and find it land squarely in Oyo), what of the African American person who cannot? Perhaps those white dots and slashes that I find a little annoying are actually a bridge to a known-but-unknown place. Maybe this is a hand reaching out to a motherland, a place where family trees do not stop abruptly in the pages of a plantation ledger. So fucking what if it feels (to me) like a shortcut with no depth? This was Afropunk! Not a seminar on 'The Part-Time Benign Condescension of African Americans To Africans". And anyway, isn't this terribly narrow thinking from me? Like, there are probably thousands of African cultures where painting intricate designs onto the skin with white paint is an act of simple and pure beautification. Maybe I'm being sensitive. Or maybe I'm not. I don't even know any more.
The person who did the faces and bodies of the dancers in Lemonade is Nigerian visual artist Laolu Senbanjo. He calls his project, Sacred Art of the Ori, a "spiritually intimate experience". I never did make it over to the booth to see if it was he making these markings on the people I saw.
TL;DR: this was an old school thought ramble. I blame Beyoncé. For everything.
God bless Trader Joe's soft and juicy mango, man.