White Lies

    by Stanley Motjuwadi


Humming Maggie.
Hit by a virus,
the Caucasian Craze,
sees horror in the mirror
Frantic and dutifully
she corrodes a sooty face,
braves a hot iron comb
on a shrubby scalp;
I look on.


I know pure white,
a white heart,
white, peace, ultimate virtue.
Angels are white
angels are good.
Me I'm black,
black as sin stuffed in a snuff-tin.
Lord, I've been brainwhitewashed.


But for Heaven's sake God,
just let me be,
Under cover of my darkness
let me crusade.
On a canvas stretching from here
to Dallas, Memphis, Belsen, Golgotha,
I'll daub a white devil.
Let me teach black truth.
That dark clouds aren't a sign of doom,
but hope.  Rain.  Life.
Let me unleash a volty bolt of black,
so all around may know right.
________


Upon reading this piece line for line it's easy to detect the essence of what the writer is conveying.  Simply put: that he wants to re-teach the old stereotype that has been ingrained in our minds and hearts that white is pure and black represents everything that is not.  Lies poignantly built up to the crescendo of declaration of truth in the last stanza.
He entices us with a story-telling verse in the first stanza, of Maggie.  We all know Maggie.  She's the woman who has taken to assimilating to the white aesthetic that has become the universal imprint for what belies beauty.  Maggie doesn't enjoy her own image, as she sits before the mirror - she prods and adds to her to change that image, to look more (white) beautiful.  Stanley does little as this is played out before him, except look on in disdain and perhaps, overcome with an unplaced sadness that will not allow him to say anything.
Stanley speaks for every one who is cast under this shadow of their blackness being ill-defined; who wishes to restore the dignity of a self that fights the daily battles of notions that are hard to die, to re-establish all of that and for the world to see the beauty that lies in darkness too.  To tame, re-take, and to reclaim it all.  
F. Fanon makes mention of this conditioned evil too, in Black Skin, White Masks (I mention this book a wholly lot, because it is the truth) - it's that inherent burden that every black-wearing skinned person wants to shed.  Trayvon Martin took this burden to his grave with a shot to the chest, only because he was wearing black skin.  So, maybe we should add Florida to Stanley's line of, "On a canvas stretching from here to Dallas, Memphis, Belsen, Golgotha, I'll daub a white devil."  And, some would argue Spar too, in the light of Jessica Leandra's racial slurs spewed at a black-skinned man who might not have been "a sign of doom" as she had feared.


This is a brief, surface interpretation of this text and I'm hoping that with the traces I've just laid out you will re-read the poem and make your own findings and draw ideological nuances from it - and perhaps, share them with me.