Black Myopia

Abstract

A few years ago, I had the privilege of getting a tattoo from the performance artist & sculptor Doreen Garner, also known as KING COBRA. And when I arrived in New York City for this sole reason, to get tatted by a black person who might actually show my skin on their Instagram in the end, all I had was an idea.“There’s this book,” I told her, and “there’s this line.” I tried to explain how the book comforted & terrified me, and how one line in particular would come to me at odd hours. In the line at CVS, waiting for the light to turn, waiting to turn over in bed.On page 89 of “A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging,” Dionne Brand writes, “The door is not a map. The door is on my retina.”I don’t remember Doreen’s response, and I don’t remember if she’d read A Map before, but remember she took some time to think, time to sketch. I am not a visual person, and my original idea—an eye, and in the iris, a door—proved insufficient for what we needed to do together. After some time Doreen reappeared excited and proposed: “Why not put Africa there?” she asked. “Let’s put Africa in the eye.”While I didn’t think my idea was the sexiest by any means, fitting the continent into a visual space the size of a quarter sounded impossible to me. But that’s exactly what Doreen did, and maybe this is what Dionne Brand had done, too: moved the continent into the eye.As Garner gunned the ink into my chest, her decision and Brand’s words drowned out the buzz and the blistering pain.Why not show what made the door? Why not say what I really mean?