Black Barbie
Oct 2022
Belise Nishimwe
I.
My lips are perfect crescent moons that spew words that burn the tips of my tongue. I hate you, I tell the white dolls that are mounted onto my cabinet drawers. Their pearl-like skin is a fresh dew that cooks in the sun ready to be consumed. Their hair, the perfect paint strokes from the richest soil He used to construct their innocent form. Their eyes like keys to entrance doors into any world they so imagine. And I in contrast, without form and made of coils from the excess clay He used to create the indents of their cheeks. I hate you, I say until the words return into the hot depths of my galaxy.
II. I liked a boy. In middle school. His hair was a dark brown hue that matched my dark complexion. His hair reached the nape of his neck, one of his many obstructions to our Catholic school rules. His eyelashes extended into a curl that highlighted his hazel eyes which matched my own. He had been friends with me for longer than all our classmates and thus a natural closeness formed between us. And when conversations turned into moments of truth my lips clamped shut. There was always a white doll, a light skin doll that erased my image. What is it like I wonder to have boys blush over the way your hands glide as you open a notebook/How your laugh that sounds like a penguin’s cry, to them, is the crashing sound of waves across the ocean. And no matter how soft the impressions I make into their — his chest, I forever live within the confines of the untold rule: No one dates the dark skin Black girl.
III.
Forming an arch with my neck, my mother and I perform a tug of war on my thick branches she mistakes for weeds. It smells of African potions: coconut oil, leave-in conditioner, and the smoke from branding irons revealing their collection of my burnt flesh. And within the cracks of our home are buried secrets of Black sitcoms where the oblivious negro is the butt end of their own joke. She taught me how to caress my hair until it laid straight down disassociated from itself. I became her puppet bleached into mixed girls — white girls, anything but the image of her I was so fond of. My nostrils worked like upside-down chimneys releasing grey clouds that polluted my cells obscuring the cracked glass on my pavement floors. And as her lips fill me with hateful jealousy of those white dolls my eyes excrete a dark sable coating that stains my white jeans. Sitting between the meat of her thighs, I am squeezed dry of all remnants of Numen’s beauty.
Belise Nishimwe is from Portland, OR and studies in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.