you dig, you discover

Tricia Rose was my advisor in graduate school, and she once gave me some advice that has made more and more sense as I’ve continued to age.  “If you look back at your life,” she said, “you’ll find that you’ve always been drawn to the same things–the same themes, even the same colors.”  At the time, I was in my 20s and I could see a slight pattern but now, as I near forty, it’s very apparent that I’ve been loving the same things all my life.  Yesterday I went with a friend to see the King Tut exhibit in Times Square.  I *loathe* Times Square, but Rosa got us special discounted tickets and we didn’t have to view the exhibit with a horde of tourists.  I was 7 when King Tut’s treasures first came to Toronto; in my memory, my older sister was taken on a school trip to see the exhibit and she came home with a calendar and coloring book and scarab jewelry.  Earlier this year, my sister insisted that wasn’t true—she, too, had missed the first exhibit and so went by herself to see the current exhibit touring North America.  It was a bit of a let down, she said, and many of the artifacts didn’t actually belong to Tutankhamun.  She’s right—the exhibit is small, but the pieces on display are still stunning and for me, that was just the right amount of objects to consider at one time.  I go into overload-mode pretty easily, and in a way, I’ve been looking at Tut’s treasures all my life.  Poor Rosa—she had to listen to me rambling on and on about the *three* ancient Egypt specials I’ve watched on PBS in the past few weeks.  I remember moving into my current apartment three years ago and painting the living room only during commercials because I didn’t want to miss the Discovery Channel special on Queen Hatshepsut.  Would I say I’m obsessed?  Perhaps.  Fascinated, for sure.  When I think of my interest in history, architecture, and archaeology—the drama of all three—I trace that back to Tut.  I gazed at that Klimt painting for quite a long while, and what impressed me most was how he depicted the sitter’s jewelry—an ornate silver choker dotted with jewels.  Her gown was a mass of gold symbols, which I’m now trying to replicate.  The first symbols I ever studied? Hieroglyphs.  I’m drawn to anything gold and glittering; I love mosaics, stained glass, sequins.  And all of that started when I was seven.  Back then I didn’t know Egypt was part of Africa; I was on my way to graduate school before I found out about Cheikh Anta Diop and the efforts of African scholars to reclaim Ancient Egypt and prove its link to Nubian civilization.  Yesterday Rosa and I were able to scoff at the curator’s remark that brown was “the traditional color for males”—not their *actual* color, of course, just the color they picked out of the sky to represent themselves.  We watched the rather silly 3-D film at the end, and noted that everyone building the pyramids was brown-skinned but Ramses himself was mighty white.  I won’t lie—I watch those Brendan Fraser Mummy films when they come on TV.  And I grew up loving Indiana Jones films, too.  It never occurred to me then that there was a problem with some white guy going into other people’s sacred spaces and pilfering the treasures he found there.  I’m not “Afrikan-centered;” I won’t name my child Ptah.  But Cleopatra did *not* look like Elizabeth Taylor, and I’m sure my seven-year-old self appreciated seeing beautiful, brown-skinned people swathed in gold and admired by all.  I’m glad that I now have this awareness of the impact King Tut had on my life, the strange debt I owe to a handful of white male adventurers who thought all the glory was theirs alone.