Like every girl, I only need to look up and a little to the right of me to see the hysteria that belongs to me, the one that hangs om a hook like an empty jacket and flutters with disappointment that I cannot wear her all the time. I call her my hysteric, and this personal hysteric of mine is designer made (though I'm not sure who made her), flattering and comfortable, attractive even, if you're around people who like that sort of thing. She is not anyone, my hysteric; she is blank, electricity dancing around a filament, singing to kill.
Helen OyeyemiIf you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.
Helen OyeyemiWhen the hysteric saw what the suffragists had done--the way that en masse they'd turned starvation onto its side--she must have been suprised. Her shock must have brought her close to speech.
Helen OyeyemiWho's there?
Something old? Someone holy...?
On a dais in a London church, the Virgin Mary sits suprised by a rough crest of candlelight. The discomforture isn't in her expression but in the fluid form her carving takes, the way peaceful eyes rest in sockets that threaten to release them. Either the wood is eccentrically soft, or this sculpture remains a tree, alert
(despite careful varnishing and a wide, warning ring of sacred space around it)
to a propensity to burn.
How can you know me and want to die?
Helen OyeyemiShe isn't a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anyone whose life and death makes noise. The problem is words. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells taht make your skin real. It's too late now--even if we could say "Shut up" or "Where's my dinner?" in the first language, the real language, the words weren't born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really "stay" are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough.
Helen OyeyemiThe Soul Selects Her Own Society (Chapter 12 title)
Helen OyeyemiMami answers and her voice is hoarse and thin, and i think fight me better than this.
Helen OyeyemiOnce you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons.
Helen OyeyemiPage 1 of 7.
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