Desire as a colonial historical legacy 

The joy could be read on my grandmother’s face when my mother married a white man, a Swiss. Within my family already, it was reflected to me that being with a white man, was something to be desired. For my grandmother, who came from a small village in Brazil, such a marriage represented a path to a “better life.” At least that’s how she tells her own story – she was the one who made it out, who made it to Europe, the one with the “good life,” though as I listened I often wondered what exactly she meant by that. It cannot be denied that our material quality of life improved through my mother’s marriage. However, we never lived up to the expectations of her partner, who sought a “proper “structured Swiss family whatever that meant. We had lived a life marked by a different dynamic, with its instabilities and its own forms of security. It is significant that my grandmother, my mother, and finally I — all three Black women — had structurally learned to desire our own rejection — a colonial historical legacy. In her 2021 book The Right to Sex, philosopher Amia Srinivasan explores whether our desires should be the subject of political discourse and critique. For Srinivasan, it is not up for debate that our desires are permeated with socially ingrained prejudices and distortions, such as ableist notions, racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination. The disclosure of these entanglements is not intended to make moral claims; rather, it raises the question of how self-determined and free our desires truly are. What nourishes our desires? What sustains them? The question of who desires whom and why, and how desire manifests, is political; our desire carries a political dimension. In her text “Becoming Milli: A Plea for the Decolonization of Black Sexuality,” Achan Malonda explores similar questions. Malonda works with the image of “Sleeping Milli”, a Black woman depicted by the artist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in 1911. In her text, Malonda begins by describing the racialization, sexualization, and dehumanization of Black bodies from a decolonial and historical perspective, along with the construction of a white, binary (cis) heteronormativity designed to secure the “hegemony and economic interests of white men”. She also addresses Kirchner’s “colonial gaze” on Milli, about whom we have no further information except her exoticized and eroticized sleeping depiction — she is the object of desire. The question of whom, what, or how Milli desires is not posed. 

Freed Desire

Even more so the question how, whom and what Black, queer women* desires has not been at the forefront from a historical or colonial perspective for a long time. It doesn’t surprise that Malonda then writes in her text: “For a long time, I even thought I wasn’t ‘truly’ bisexual because I wasn’t aware of its historical and structural implications. Nor did I understand the role of race in it. At this point, I am still searching and have no answers” [my translation from German]. Black and queer women’s* desire is systematically concealed by cultural and institutional mechanisms of oppression that racialise, marginalise and dehumanise them, thereby preventing self-affirming experiences. Audre Lorde, an US-afroamerican poet and activist, already understood in her text the Uses of the Erotic as an intrinsic creative life force of self-determination and opposed this to a limited understanding of desire as merely sexual or romantic: “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. (…) I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (Lorde 1978: 88; 89). 

As a Black cis woman in a racist social order, I have never been part of a white cis-heterosexual normality. Therefore, I have tried even harder in the past to conform to the heterosexual white norm. I fell for the boys that everyone liked, who of course never reciprocated my feelings — I knew that intuitively. This configuration of desire, though very unsatisfying, felt “normal”. Malonda describes the fact that she has predominantly been in romantic relationships with white cis men as not accidental but connected to individual and collective traumas, internalized racism and homophobia, as well as promises of a supposedly better life. How to recognize what you desire within this disproportionate relationship within white cis heteronormativity?

In heterosexual constellations, in my experience, it is often the cis male counterpart who takes on the active role in flirting, or at least has learned to do so. This common notion has led me to never truly question my own lack of proactivity in pursuing romantic or sexual connections. Queer dating constellations challenge me to perceive my desire apart from the concessions of a heterosexual cis male counterpart, thus highlighting a certain dependence to me in the constitution of female desire in heterosexual contexts. I have learned to desire when I am desired.  So it’s not surprising that I often find myself facing FLINTA* (WomenLesbiansIntersexNon-binaryTransAgenderandbeyond) individuals and not knowing what I want, let alone how to act. Heterosexuality feels inviting and easy in these moments because  there are usually socially encoded behaviours, answers, and explanations that categorise them, while such normative frameworks are more questioned in queer constellations. This dynamic was almost caricatured at the festival WHOLE 2022. The crickets chirped away in the kinky FLINTA* tent, while gay cis men were having sex almost everywhere. The lack of sexual inhibitions were on full display: on their way from one dance floor to another, in the surrounding bushes, or simply casually naked with their hand covering their intimate area while approaching someone on the camping site to ask for lubricant. But just because sex is pursued uninhibited, without restrictions and everywhere, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is freer, right? In Whose freedom’, Judith Butler, a philosopher and gender theorist, asks which concept of freedom underlies this sort of question. She points out that the focus on individual activities is characteristic of a white and bourgeois morality whose ideological function is to divert attention from larger systemic injustices instead to think about collective forms of freedom. Malonda describes how she understands her own body as a continuum of Milli’s body. I too understand the actions of my grandmother and my mother as a longing for self-determination and autonomy and see my body as a continuum to theirs. Different constituent temporalities come to light here. Their movements and efforts are somehow related to the fact that a year later I am standing in front of the FLINTA kinky tent at the Whole Festival again, wondering whether I would like to take part in the workshop “Ass worship” or “Darkroom for Beginners”. This time people were even queuing outside the tent. I didn’t end up participating, but it gave me hope that these playful formats, which invite freer and collective forms of self-expression, are a little part of a transgenerational movement towards more liberated forms of desire.

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About the Black Voices Matter series
Black liberation is both beautiful and inspiring. It is equally noisy, infused with the hubbub of online discussions, hashtags and commentaries from the media, institutions and those economic and political leaders who have, until now, paid very little attention to the well-being of Black lives. In this context, ERIF has chosen to continue—now more than ever—to care for and cultivate the multilingual and diasporic frequencies of Black voices. #BlackVoicesMatter