Speaking with the Pariah
Cristina Correa
After Marcos Dimas’s Pariah, 1971-72, oil on canvas
She laughed and said: “If I were to beat the sacred drum, and march through the city, not one, from the Emperor downwards, but would humbly follow me.”
—Spenser St. John, Hayti, or, The Black Republic
Sharkbait, I’m hidden with you on these brazen walls, hanging in the frame. Tourists chomp around us, fascinated by their airy slavery to knowledge. Rage squirms tightly the muscles between my ribs, and your eyes say: release them, they are nothing, drops of water that dry. Wading strong-thighed into a history of green sea and red earth—I wait for them to leave and for time to be returned. What can we be? What happens before nothing at all, before flesh or bone or skin disappears and finds a new light to own? Where? I’ve come to ask why they only see us when we’re savaged and ruptured by years of glare, pointed at and suspected of dimming. The grasshopper’s rubbed haunches and the sun’s grainy cutout above—gods and colors in this patchwork place loved and dismantled alike. What happens when you’re more dust than paint? What do you become? The anchor in your throat pulls me to the careful ditches around my own eyes. See what I’ve been afraid to: the vines of your hair are the vines of my hair. The night sky’s violin plays bloody notes, dripping black like seaweed into the water as hot fishes float past. This is a new world. The air is gunsmoke and we’re all burning. Everywhere these specks, even the white ones, escape like castaways or words. Like I will, too, when the page is turned and the room is dimmed, and you are left hanging. Skin drum-tight, your forehead basslines an entire planet. Your eyes, different sizes, see distinctly, accosting two- faces: human, bird, palette, and yourself, always exposed.