signs & symbols

11 Dec 2010 news 0 Comments

I found another cowrie shell today—once again, less than a block away from my front door.  Is it a sign?  I think so (of course).  I’m always trying to read the signs, to make sense of my preferences…last night as Rosa and I watched the Mark Morris Dance Group’s The Hard Nut, I frowned through the scene where a veiled (white) woman did some sort of pseudo-belly dance while her four turbaned body guards bowed before her; she was bedecked in bells and glittering gold coins, and around her swirled sheer, flowing fabrics—the kind that would have caught my eye in a fabric store.  I watched that scene and wondered, not for the first time, whether my love of glittering things is some form of Orientalism.  I grew up in a “former” British colony; I read Kipling and a slew of Victorian novels that figured “the Far East” as the site of jewels and magic and fantastic tales.  Maybe that’s why I was drawn to these sheets of handmade paper, which will appear shortly in my dreambook.  I don’t know; they are beautiful, but they’re also “ethnic” in a way that makes me self-conscious.  And maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe my attraction to them isn’t as problematic as being oblivious.  I don’t know.  I went from the paper store to the post office and the white-haired black woman there called me “punkin” as she handed me my change.  I was grinning for blocks…