To The Dark Skinned Girl
By Maayaa Dixit
To the dark skinned girl:
I apologize that you
Have been made to feel bad.
Very bad.
For turning you so self conscious
That you lost all sense of yourself.
For avoiding mirrors because you couldn’t stand the excessive melanin mock at you from the other side.
For a pillow soaked wet every other night with your colorless tears. Tears are great levelers.
For the endless subscriptions of beauty magazines you devoured back to back in the hope of finding a way to bleach your skin raw so the pink underneath might show and pass off for a new found lightness that might grant you acceptance into the stifling, atavistic, custom-endorsed societal approval that trades self worth for skin pigmentation.
I apologize.
For the subversion of your innocence, your beauty;
Pronounced guilty for being a multi-dimensional person existing inside a single dimensional aspect
Of Biology that has been purposefully misunderstood.
And singled out, targeted
And stigmatized by fascist beauty
Standards befitting the irony:
That beauty, truly
Is only skin deep
And no more.
To the dark skinned girl:
When I see you I think
Of the pitch gloss
Of a velvet black sky
Unutterably irresistible;
Galaxies tucked under
The flawless stretch
Of your epidermis.
When I see you I think
Of golden warm honey,
Dark molasses, delightfully
Provocative;
When I see you I think
Of the rich brown earth
Proud, bold and rakish.
I think of the lustre
Of Venetian red, demure sepia
Glazed chestnut, polished mahogany
The effortless grace of
Rich rosewood; when I
See you I think of dark chocolate,
Not seductive, but seduction itself.
I think of the splendor of your granite will and the quartz of your endurance; I think of dark things.
Their belly lit up with arresting
Spells that only dark things can cast.
To the dark skinned girl:
When I see you I think of magic
And magic is neither white nor fair
It’s at its best when it’s dark.
When I see you,
I think of gorgeous shadows, silhouettes
Shifting forms, shapes:
Giving ‘light’, meaning.
So girl, who wears obsidian
For a skin, my bristling black volcanic glass
The blood racing under your skin
Is less corpuscles, more lava;
So how about
You throw out the bleach,
The need,
To comply with standards
Too ugly to know
How to treat beauty right;
Your skin isn’t
An Ill-fitting dress
That you feel like
You need to discard;
There’s a genetic memory
Coded in your melanin
Every single cell in your body
Aches,
To let you know:
Fair isn’t just a skin color type.
Fairness is more than paleness.
Please don’t let their darkness
Stamp out the iridescence,
Your essence;
Drown out their
White – noise, nuisance.
Blazing, burnished, brown
Golden girl,
You’re an act of God;
And I think
You’re indescribably beautiful,
Just the way you are.