My vagina isn’t and was never a “flower.” My vagina was a labyrinth. I had to strategize and maneuver, pushing excess flesh around, to see all that I contained. I would watch episodes of Baywatch, Sex and the City, Girls, and Degrassi, and wonder why no one ever talked about vaginas unless it was in relation to birth or periods. What about oversized labia? What about their pain? What about our pain? I wrote a much shorter essay about my labiaplasty for Fusion, an assignment that my mother warned me against out of fear that I would turn off potential suitors. I didn’t tell my father until several months after my procedure. I don’t know if he even remembers me telling him. My friends found out about a month post-op; I didn’t tell them beforehand because I was ashamed. I felt like I was breaking some ancient feminist creed that maintains that we have the bodies we have, and if we manipulate them, the patriarchy is destroying us. I didn’t tell them because much of my femininity had been wrapped in secrecy and pain, and the further pain born of secrecy.
I do not regret my surgery. I do not praise it either. My pain is gone. When I part my legs now, I have to remind myself of what used to unfurl. However, there are some spots that are still sensitive, spots where I am not entirely certain that the stitches have disintegrated. I do not know if this is a psychosomatic response, some remnants of my feverish dreams perhaps, but I don’t need to know. I am content, and that is all I need.
7
Human, Not Black
There was chaos at home and in my heart as my stepfather’s health declined, but I found solace in the dizzying prose of Dostoyevsky, in the way he made madness seem almost normal, even attractive. I read his novella The Double, in which a man is convinced he has a doppelg?nger, then Crime and Punishment, in which a man kills an old pawnbroker and believes himself to be superior to anyone else. I regaled myself with the long, drawn-out psychological conversations in The Brothers Karamazov. In a matter of months I became a fanatic, and I decided to learn the language—I wanted to know what lay beyond the barrier of translation, to discover the untranslatable intricacies of Dostoyevsky’s work. As a comparative literature major, I had to learn at least two foreign languages to graduate. I’d already chosen Japanese, and I’d been flirting with the idea of French because I loved Madame Bovary. But Russian seemed more daring. It turned out to be a much harder conquest than Japanese: the verb conjugations seemed contradictory, the linguistic logic impenetrable, the pronunciation coarse. However, after hard work, I was accepted into an intermediate Russian course at the Nevsky Institute in St. Petersburg held during the summer following my sophomore year.
After I got in, I was told by both the program’s director and my introductory Russian teacher that there had been a rise in hate crimes there over the past few years, and if I had any reservations about going, they would understand. I wondered if they told this to my peers. I was not the only person of color—there was Jacqueline, a Singaporean woman, and Daniel, a Mexican-American guy—but I was the only black person. Ultimately, I decided to go anyway; immersing myself in the culture, I thought, and hearing the language buzzing in my ears all summer was the only way to truly learn.
I arrived in St. Petersburg on my twentieth birthday. After I landed, a Nevsky Institute representative took me to my host family’s apartment on Krasnogo Kursanta (“Red Cadet”) Street in the Petrogradskaya District. Their building was next to a courtyard, but on the inside it felt abnormally dark. I would be rooming with Jacqueline, an arrangement I assumed was intentional because we were both women of color. Our host mother was a part-time singer who regularly had international guests, from American to Indonesian, shuffling in and out of her apartment. She had two children, a son and daughter—I believe their names were Misha and Sasha—and I could count on my fingers how many times I actually saw them. I’d hear their voices, but I never bumped into them while passing through the corridor. They could have been apparitions for all I knew. Jacqueline and I would eat together at the dining table—we never shared meals with the family. We would never be integrated into this family because our being there was strictly business.
I took the room closest to the front door. A portrait of Alexander Pushkin hung on the wall outside my bedroom. Because Russians pride themselves on their literature perhaps more so than any other facet of their culture, Pushkin is held in the same esteem as Americans hold Elvis Presley, or the English the Beatles. You can probably stop a Russian child on the street and ask him or her to perfectly recite one of Pushkin’s poems. I found it interesting that this man, whose African heritage I could detect in his nose and around his jawline, was so revered here and yet black people like myself were not.
To be fair, my treatment in St. Petersburg was far milder than that experienced by other black people. I’ve heard stories of people having things thrown at them, being harassed on the metro, having children point at them as if they were carnival freak show exhibits. However, the threat of danger was everywhere. In Russia, if you are a foreigner, you will be stared at unblinkingly for close to a minute with an intensity I will never forget. I remember countless moments when I was on the escalator at Chkalovskaya station while a Russian—most times, a man—was unable to take his eyes off of me. In my prior experience, a held gaze meant attraction, but this was different. His entire face would be stoic and his eyes would be unyielding even after he knew that I knew that he was watching me. I would look down at my copy of The Master and Margarita, look up, and he would be staring at me. I would scrape out the dirt from under my fingernails, look up, and he would be staring at me. I would check my cell phone for any messages from my classmates, look up, and he would still be staring at me. I couldn’t tell him how rude it was to stare because my vocabulary was limited. I would stutter, and he would know that he had the upper hand in more ways than one. So I remained dejected and uncomfortable, under surveillance all the time.
It took about two to three weeks for me to be okay with riding the metro by myself. I expressed my anxiety to grad students who accompanied us on the trip. They were sympathetic, but they didn’t really get it; it wasn’t their experience. Unlike me, they could roam around freely. One time I did take the metro downtown alone, to meet a Russian “friend” assigned by the institute to help me acclimate to St. Petersburg, and a man said hello to me in Russian as I was gathering tokens for the ride. I did not like his tone. His voice was low and his face cold, like the others’, yet he seemed hungry for something. He stood a few steps behind me on the escalator, and I pretended to occupy myself with games on my phone. Once the train arrived, I hopped on and he got into the same car. Something wasn’t right, and I could feel it. A blond-haired man sitting on the opposite side of the car leaned forward and stared at me, and I began to feel like they were in it together, that finally all of this staring would come to a head. Two large men were gathering their suitcases to get off at Admiralteyskaya, my stop, so I slipped in between them. Unfortunately, the man who had been following me did a double take and slipped out before the doors closed. I began to walk briskly. I had to make it to the station entrance, where there would be the safety of hundreds of people around. Then again, how would he lose me? I was black. I couldn’t find a police officer because I didn’t have the vocabulary to properly articulate my concern, and even if I did, would the officer care?