I always wanted to be brown

I always wanted to be brown. I wanted my skin to shine the brilliance of nectar, to shimmer like twilight time and to ooze the sweetness of honey. My desire was less about the superficial qualities of external beauty that brown skin might endow upon me, and more about the inner.

Being brown meant connection, tribal identity, the ability to say, ‘I am…’, and speak of a cultural, ethnic belonging to place, to language, to ancestry, and to multi-hued quilts of craft and tradition.

I thought that being brown would allow me to be justified in claiming my deep resonance to Mother Earth. As if being brown might allow my entwinement with her to be real, as if the color of my skin would make it natural to feel that my pulse is her pulse; and that I could sing, drum, and dance her into being, without having to be taught by an African Mama dressed in billowing sheets of color or a Polynesian goddess swaying her hips in leaves of grass. I thought that brown skin might finally allow my blood to be Earth’s blood, coursing through her rivers as deeply as if bringing life to my own veins. If my skin were darker, I could adorn myself in ways that felt so familiar across distant time, without being accused of what they call cultural appropriation. I could finally be Indigenous to the only place I know as home, no longer assumed to originate from the colonizers, the ones who knew nothing of ritual and whose hearts were too hardened by privilege to hear the Earth’s pulse inside of them. For years, I tried to coax the sun into turning me brown, as my mother’s voice echoed warnings of cancer through the ray’s warmth. I became as dark as I could but winter always faded a sickly pallor beneath the transient honey mask. I fought my own skin until the day I realized that all I ever wanted was connection, belonging, community, and all the feelings that can only come from inside of me, un-pigmented and pure, universal and human.

Human

White, Brown, Yellow, Red, Black

Human

Earth, plant, animal, mineral

Life

Just life

Naked in all her colors