When the George Zimmerman verdict was announced, I only had a short time left in Tokyo and my sadness clouded my enjoyment of these last few days. Whenever I boarded the train on the Saikyō Line, I was more aware of how Japanese people are not comfortable with making eye contact with gaijin. Whenever my eyes connected with a Japanese person’s, their eyes would drop to the floor, and that aversion began to shred me like cheese against a grater. Could they not see me? Of course they could, because looking away meant that they knew that I was an outsider. But I wasn’t just an outsider. I was a black outsider, and I was also a woman. They had to realize this. I stood out among the white expats, who were mostly young white men who loved anime and fetishized Japanese women and white women who could easily seduce a wide array of Japanese men. They had to know. I wanted them to, because not acknowledging me was a dismissal of the body in which I lived. Then again, wasn’t this what I’d wanted, to flee to Japan to become merely a foreigner? Wasn’t this the whole purpose of my relationship with Japan, for it to wrap me around its cherry blossom trees, stretch me far across its expansive mountain ranges, and then squash me into a two-dimensional image that could be splashed across the television screens of Shibuya Crossing? Isn’t this what I’d wanted?
Everything became distorted. I walked around Shinjuku and sneered at people taking selfies while making the peace sign with their fingers. How dare they be happy when a black child met his untimely death and his killer went unpunished? How dare they be happy while I was sinking? There were Nigerian men who hung around Shinjuku, and I had been told that they were notorious for scamming, robbing, and drugging naive tourists. I’d ignored their gaze until now, but after the verdict all I wanted was to get drunk off plum wine, hobble over to one of them with teary eyes, and beg them to hold me—whether in public or a nearby hostel—for a few hours. I wanted to press my black skin against another black person’s black skin, breathe in synchronicity, and remember that we were alive and that this was resistance in and of itself. Each Japanese word I uttered felt like a spritz of salt and lemon juice on my tongue. I was a fraud, pretending that my education and multilingualism would somehow protect me from the ever-revolving cycle of black death. I should have seen all of this coming.
I could not sleep. Each time I laid my head upon my pillow, I imagined that Trayvon Martin was hiding in the corner and that he would emerge—with blood pouring out of his fatal wounds—to stand before me with a look of sheer disappointment. How dare you sleep? You have several hours while I have eternity. It was not my time to go. When I closed my eyes, I saw George Zimmerman’s smiling face—only this time he was facing me and not the judge. In his pupils I could see the reflection of Trayvon’s cold corpse lying on the pavement, a body transfixed on the Floridian ground by bullets, a body en route to see his Father. And in Zimmerman’s smile, I would see that I was next, that the destruction had already begun. I had to sleep with the lights on, and with a movie playing on my laptop, to get any semblance of rest. I didn’t tell any of my friends on the program. I feared that they would think that I was losing my mind and would perhaps report me to our supervisor. Besides, I would be back on American soil soon enough.
When I returned to New Jersey, nationwide protests were under way. I saw black people my age standing outside in the sweltering heat for hours with signs, refusing to lower their eyes whenever a police officer surveyed their mobilization. I didn’t go to any protests that year, although I would in late 2014, months after Eric Garner died. That is how grief and resistance works. It is a cycle, and a revolution never ceases for a black person, no matter where we are or which languages we speak.
After that lunch at Augustyna’s house, I began to reassess the many different settings in which I was one of the only black people, if not the only black person, in a room. Are white people only able to talk to me if they’ve trained their minds not to see me as black? Is the only path to acceptance not breaking the fantasy that white people have of everyone’s equality? I’ve never thought I was anything but human. My black womanhood does not cancel out my humanity. These are not facts that repel each other.
Physiologically, of course, we are all human. Socially, we dehumanize people of color daily. We judge their clothes, speech, hair, and education level as criteria for whether they have earned the right to be treated with common decency. We use these same criteria to judge if they deserve to die at the hands of law enforcement, or men like George Zimmerman. Because the question that white people are asking is not Why can’t we all be human?, but Why can’t you be like us?
Before Harlem, I had never experienced a space where blackness was so real that I could taste it—the consistency of baked macaroni and cheese, the sweetness of yams, the smoothness of the surface of fresh corn bread. It fills me up and comforts me, but I understand that our relationship cannot be one-sided. I have started to go to block association meetings, to explore more parts of Harlem, to pay more attention to the politics surrounding me. Blackness is like an engine that needs constant oiling.
My judgment of the black people I saw on the train—the woman I thought was crazy for speaking about the Lord to a white man, the man who spoke of the book of Deuteronomy to all those who boarded at 125th and Lenox, the men who rapped aloud, the black youths who played music without headphones—was made inside the context of a white world, a world that is measured by reason and protocol according to white people at the expense of people of color. I did not know why black people couldn’t keep to themselves, why they could not remain invisible, why they couldn’t shut up, why they couldn’t stop trying to bring others into their spaces. Harlem is not a white space, and so black people do not need to behave in a way white people find respectable. We cannot, and should not, have to live our lives according to traditions of Western European civilizations because they are not natural to us. We are intensely spiritual and communal. We are a feeling kind of people. We can drop into a song at any time—the right time—and be on beat. We use our whole bodies to convey feeling. No parts of ourselves are closed off to others, and especially not to the environment; our black spaces reaffirm our connection to nature, our reality.
I still dream of Japan. Whenever I see a Japanese restaurant, whenever my teeth sink into onigiri, whenever I see paper lanterns, I yearn for it like a long-distance lover. But the truth is, it’s not that simple. Japan hasn’t come around to accepting Ariana Miyamoto, a half-black, half-Japanese woman, as Miss Japan—because I suppose her brownness nullifies her nationality. I often wonder if this love affair will be different the third time around, if my newfound comfort in my own skin and ability to question all I see will make me privy to all the things that I did not want to see before. What then?
I call myself black because that is who I am. Blackness is a label that I do not have a choice in rejecting as long as systemic barriers exist in this country. But also, my blackness is an honor, and as long as I continue to live, I will always esteem it as such.
8
Who Will Write Us?