#racism micro-aggressions trauma self-love HampsteadLadiesPonds

[aroses]

Fuck You, Aga (sp?)

You are never safe if you live in a Black female body. Not in your home, not on the street, and not in the Kenwood Ladies’ Ponds on Hampstead Heath.

This evening, after a beautiful and blissful day, three friends and I went for a swim in the Ladies’ Pond and it ruined my day.

While we were splashing about, enjoying the sun and each other’s glorious company, reflecting on the joy and magic of being in a “safe”, women-only space, this lifeguard called Aga (sp?) decided that we, three Black people and one white person, were having much too much fun. Blowing her whistle, she shouted to us, identifying the three Black people in our group as “incompetent swimmers” and demanding that we prove our proficiency by performing breast stroke and front crawl for her. This was frustrating and humiliating, as all of us had demonstrated that we were perfectly capable of swimming when we first for into the pond and swam to the buoy where we were at that moment.

In an attempt to, at least for my part, both calm her supposed fears for our safety and leave this disturbing situation, we swam away from her further into the pond. This could have been the end of it. We had, once more, demonstrated, by swimming away, that we could swim. However, Aga (sp?) proceeded to don her cap and sunglasses, mount her raft and sail over to us, forcing us to tread water for five minutes while she continued to humiliate us, saying that she was “worried for our safety”, “just doing her job”, and that it was “hard to see us because the water was so dark”.

The encounter ended with one of my friends, who is, by the way, one of the strongest swimmers I know, swimming away crying, at which point we all swam away, leaving Aga (sp?) glaring at us tight-lipped from her canoe.

What happened was not in and of itself an extreme act of violence, and I am sure that many people, especially people who don’t experience racism and violation on a day-to-day basis, would have been able to shrug it off, but it had me totally shook.

When I got home, I had an experience of body dissociation. I took all my clothes off and looked at my body, not able to recognise my limbs as my own, numb to the touch of my hands on my skin. I began to cry as I ran to the mirror, not recognising my reflection as myself, a common experience I’ve had during the worst moments of the mania, depression and body dysmorphia that have been a part of my life.

What I find hard to articulate in any specific moment of racist aggression is the fact that none of these sorts of acts are isolated, and each one has the potential to trigger a re-traumatisation, a plummeting back to the girl I was not so many years ago who scrubbed her brown skin until it was red and raw because the felt that her Blackness needed to be washed off, to the girl who tried to superglue her nostrils down to make her nose thinner, starve herself of food in order to prevent the natural swell of her big Black ass from taking up too much space, lived a practice of self-hatred internalised from the constant violence and aggression of the world.

It is a reminder that my body, however much I try to love and protect it, is not a safe place to live.

It was a reminder that the people who are supposedly there to protect all of us, like LIFEGUARDS, are not interested in protecting us if we have Black bodies.

I have spent a lot of time learning to love and accept myself, and to unlearn the racism and misogyny of this world, and it’s a daily practice. Today began as a beautiful day, a rare one in which I was living joyfully in this body of mine, appreciating its capacity to swim and stretch and climb trees and eat and experience pleasure, but this one act sent me crashing back down to reality. These sorts of aggressions hurt me because they remind me that the voices inside my head that tell me I am not worthy, not deserving of happiness, that my body is not beautiful or capable, that I am not and will never be good enough, are reflected in the views of many of the people with whom I share this Earth. This shit is not trivial, and it’s a serious harm to my mental health. How am I supposed to love myself when the world shows me every day that it hates me?

Today I wanted to celebrate the fact that I got a first in my undergraduate degree, a big achievement that marks the end of five years of ups and downs, mania and depression, defeats and triumphs, but I was, instead reminded that racism trumps any achievement, any demonstration of my intelligence or beauty. I cannot, and don’t want to, escape my Blackness. That means that I can expect to still be talked down to when I get my PhD, and that Aga (sp?) would still think I couldn’t swim if I swam the channel. Kenwood Ladies’ Association can expect my letter of complaint shortly.