Someone Who Likes to Stare

I read this at Jennif(f)er Tamayo's multimedia poetry show, "In the Meadow of Y(our) Ancestors," on Sep. 7 at the Hyers Theatre in the Greensboro Cultural Center. The show was a “choreopoem - a dramatic poetry performance combining poetry, visual media, video and sound - that explored themes of home, decoloniality, revenge, queer love, Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty.” Very grateful to have been a part of it.

Do you know what I want more than anything? I’d like to go out to a coffee shop in the afternoon and eat a slice of cake and people watch. And I don’t mean people watch in the cutesy way that those TV show best friends do at brunch in Manhattan or what you do  over the top edges of a book on public transit or while sipping a latte and scrolling through your phone in a coffee shop. Not that way. What I mean is I want a chance to stare like I’m invisible or time has stopped and frozen everyone in place but me.

Once I was 12 and changing in the blue damp locker room at school for P.E. class. The locker room always made me self-conscious because I was aware of all the ways I didn’t measure up. I had no boobs for one. And I didn’t know how to take a razor to all of my armpit and leg hair. My hair was never trendy and neither were my clothes or my underwear or my bra. I also didn’t have a boyfriend. It hadn’t registered to me yet that I didn’t want one very much. And I was too quiet and too shy.

One day I was thinking about all these ways that I lacked when a girl at the corner of the locker room yelled, “Priya’s looking at my boobs!”

I spun around – half naked myself. My friend, Hannah, who was next to me pulling on our P.E. uniform, a navy blue t-shirt that hung to our knees and shorts?, froze. Some girls laughed nervously and stared at me.

I couldn’t speak. I stood there frozen and, now, I actually stared at her, incriminating myself further.

Another time, I was in seventh grade and sitting outside at a set of lunch tables with a group of friends underneath a pavilion. It was dress down day, and it became clear to me upon arriving at school that I had seriously misunderstood the assignment. My tweenhood was full of moments like this. Like someone had sent out a set of instructions to everyone but forgot me and only me. Every year our middle school held a Spirit Week where we would dress according to a different theme every day. This week was more stressful to my middle school self than any college finals week I can remember. On 70’s day, everyone dressed like hippies if hippies had shopped at the mall. Flowy skirts from Forever 21, flower crowns from Claire’s, and maybe a bangle or two. I, partially encouraged by my dad who loves disco, wore one of my mom’s shirts from the actual 70’s – a shiny polyester, purple button down with a technicolor flower print – slacks that stopped at an awkward length on my calves and a pair of Michael Jackson-esque loafers. My cheeks burned as I sat in class in my itchy overthought costume while kids snidely asked what had happened to my hair – which I had taken out of my braids and picked out into an afro.

But returning to the lunch table. Similarly to the 70’s day, I had not understood that the unspoken theme that day was nonchalance. What was called for was a pair of jeans and your second favorite t-shirt. Instead, I wore a sheer white collared shirt with a pink tank top underneath, a polka dot neck scarf, black slacks, and my thick rectangle-shaped black glasses. As we ate, I stared out at the life-sized chess board off to the side of the pavilion where we sometimes played four-square after lunch,  when my friend turned to me and told me that I looked “perverted.” Granted “perverted” was the word of the semester, we sprinkled it liberally on everything. (The next semester’s word was “gay” – needless to say I did not fare well this school year at all). But the frequency with which we used the word didn’t take away the pointed sting of it.

“Like a creepy librarian,” she added.

I remembered that particular addition because I was already self-conscious about my outfit that day. I had understood in the morning line to enter the school gate that I had once again got it wrong. I’ll concede partially, I probably did look like a small librarian – and preteens are universally ruthless in a way that is comically impersonal, and tend to repeat things they hear, without much attention to the contexts they are supposed to be in, but I still get a prickle of shame on the back of my neck just to think about it, and I can’t help but thinking that a few of my peers sensed in me a queerness I was not aware of yet and nudged at its difference.

A friend might spin around on me while we walked to class and ask why I was following her. If a girl cracked a joke in a group, I would never laugh too loudly – unless I wanted to get called out for being obsessed with her.

Looking back these experiences were painful but not unique. Most lesbians I know have a “predation” complex. A deep ingrained fear that we might be preying on the women we date in order to pleasure ourselves.

A one-way glass pane was being constructed. I felt observed but not that I was allowed to look at others safely - out of fear for being seen as a predator. I was a teenager and I not only felt the stares of girls at my school policing my sexuality, I also felt the pressures of men as they made me a sexual object that I was not prepared to be.

This was the hard seed of my confusion:  I wondered why my girl classmates could not see me as a girl child too – one that could be the victim of a creep rather than a creep herself. We had all after all climbed the same stairs on the train where men had hunched over to look up our skirts; and shamefaced in the streets when a man barked at us from a passing car; and at the pool and in math class and outside the pizza place and at the family function and in temple and mass and church when a man much too old made us uncomfortable with his staring.

Earlier this year I ran across a quote by Agnes Varda from 2002 on Pinterest. I will tell you the quote but first I want to tell you that, funnily enough, I read it while being haggled by a man outside of a coffee shop who asked for my number and who I politely told no, but who had pulled up a chair next to my table and continued to stare at me in what I can only imagine was a temper tantrum while I decided to play dead. And what I mean by play dead is I didn’t stare back. I drank my coffee. And I scrolled through my phone while my heart raced until he went away.  

A very angry year at the end of my teens, I watched men back when they watched me. I did it harder than they did too - with as much disgust and bitterness as I could muster. To watch back forcefully was a defensive strategy. But writing is my offensive strategy. It is what has begun to heal my relationship with perception itself.

I recently took a class on literary criticism. I felt conflicted about the genre and made it clear to my professor, often, with my questions. How do you really know if your critique of a book is valid? How do you know if you have authority to critique a book – or anything at all - in the first place?

 “You have to believe that what you see is true,” he told me.

And the key to that is that I have to let myself see things again. Writing has been a lot of things for me. A practice in validating myself. A method for me to look back at the world when I am feeling ashamed, and I want to play dead. A bridge to my self-possession. When it is too scary to believe that what I see is true for the sake of my wellbeing – I’ve found a way to do it for a story or essay.

The Agnes Varda quote goes:

The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they’re looking at me. But I’m looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.

I don’t know if looking out at the world will ever stop feeling both shameful and intensely liberating. Sometimes I feel like a cactus flower, or a mangy dog that bites when you go to pet it.

But I know now that this is my world too – you can’t make me play small, you can’t kick me out, you can’t mount my head on a wall to stare at unless you want my cool, marble eyes looking right back.