 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
Dear Nadine page 3 | mary salome |
(
back to page 2)
|
|
|
|
|
Sometimes I wonder if it was my queerness that scared you away. My friends who met you and swear by their "gay-dar" insisted you were a lesbian underneath your declarations of asexuality. Was it your own queerness that scared you? Was it that you saw "gay" as a "White thing?" When I came out to you, you sent a long letter about the unnaturalness of it all, and you told me you were crying as you wrote, because you saw homosexuality as a sign of the problems in the world today. I had been ready to lose your friendship when I came out to you. Recovery brought honesty into my life in a way that made it impossible for me to lie by omission. But you stayed, and we talked, and I thought we would know each other for a long time. But while I had been able to make the big statements, I was unable to tell you the daily truths about my life, and I feel I put distance between us before you even moved back home. When you told me you were joining the Nation of Islam, I wrote to you with the same kind of confusion you had vented when I came out. You never wrote back. The biggest question for both of us, about all of it -- the state of the world today -- was "Why." I can be angry at you for never really knowing me, but I never really knew you, either. And we are both responsible for these losses. For not listening, for not seeing, for not speaking our minds. Maybe we should, on some level, forgive ourselves our silences, because we were never taught to speak, and generations of our people have had silence beaten into us. Black people. Lesbians. Women. Arabs. Irish. Mixed race people. Beaten. And neither one of us should be held responsible for the context of our relationship. A light-skinned Irish/Arab girl and a Jamaican girl of mixed African heritage have between them so many of the gulfs that society has created. The best of friendships have trouble in these waters.
Dear Nadine, I wish I had known more of you. Dear Nadine.
|
|
|
|
|