The Un-pleasure of Blackness
an essay by Marbelite
11/08/24
The moment I come into this world as flesh, wrapped delicately in brown skin, still attached to mother via umbilical cord, my flesh is a political object. I’m born innocent into a world that will very soon strip this innocence away from me. I will grow up as a boy — a Black boy — and I will be punished because of it. I will grow up in the church, and I will pray to God, asking him why I didn’t get to come into this world with white flesh instead. I will look at my image and not see a human, but a disappointment.
Because I am a Black boy, my flesh will accumulate scars, and my psyche will be further programmed to seek safety in a God who is represented in white flesh. I will continue to mature, and with maturity I will act on desires inspired by imagery that objectifies Black flesh. I will be punished for my lavaciousness, and shame will encase not only my flesh but now, my desires. Less than a decade after birth into this world as an innocent Black fleshed human, I will come to see my skin as my biggest misfortune.
I was never not a political object. I was born into a world where my birth was a statistic. The moment my mother saw me, images of police cars, funerals for family members, and violent men flashed into her mind: The non-innocence of my birth. The misfortune of birth. And I grew up in a world where statistics followed me. Statistics harmed me, they harmed me in the name of protecting my innocence. From the moment I was born I was no longer innocent, it was already too late. My earliest memories contain violence.
From a young age, I’ve perpetually mourned and grieved my body. I take as much from my body as the world does. I’m flesh fit for my own consumption. This is the poetry of me. I try to make sense of it, the suffering my body has endured. I think of my suffering as a portal, connecting me to my enslaved ancestors across generations. On a cellular level, I feel their stress and pain deep in my body, and I know the pain they experienced has been passed down throughout the generations.
I remember my childhood becoming an evolution of different forms of abuse, first the heavy wood plank, then the belt, then the switch, then the extension cord. Then the slaps, then the fists. Slaves experienced many evolutions of physical suffering, as each generation of slavery introduced new and improved forms of torture. I’ve experienced torture too. What else would you call an hour-long session of getting whipped on your back with a rubber belt? Rubber leaves no scars, I was often reminded by my abuser. Torture is premeditated and intentional. I’m able to communicate with the past through suffering.
I often wonder if any of this is worth it. Why do I spend so much time intellectualizing my pain? The more I think about it, the less healed I feel. When I’m trying to enjoy intimacy, face down in a pillow, it feels like a universe parallel to my childhood. I’m supposed to be experiencing pleasure, in fact, I’m supposed to be totally engulfed in the moment. But my body remembers this position. Bent over and being whipped with no way out. Simply accepting that I was going to endure the pain and when it was all over, I would read and imagine myself in another world. I think so much during sex. I was never molested, but the act of sex feels so similar to the memories of abuse. I had so much time to think during my lashings. I would think about the position I was in, I would envision myself as a white child. I would think about how happy they looked with their families.
This was my introduction to the unpleasure of Blackness. I learned to pay attention to white people in media. In porn, in music, in everything. They always orgasmed. They always finished. They never had problems staying hard. This damaged me. I became obsessed with their pleasure. I never watched men who looked like me in porn. They never finished like the whites. They had a problem staying hard. Their porn wasn’t as pretty as the other ones. They didn’t get to have pleasure. I projected these ideas onto myself. I began to associate my body with unpleasure. I loved white pleasure because I didn’t know what Black pleasure was. You could say I learned Black pleasure simply by proxy of un-pleasure.
I think of this while engaging in the act of sex work. My body used to represent a lack of worth to me through the media programming that taught me to desire white flesh. The difference between my pleasure and white pleasure is the price of a body. What does it mean to be seen as valuable to the white gaze? My younger self attached worth to how much a white man wanted to pleasure himself with me. White pleasure depends on the Black body for the white body to achieve value. This is the lesson I’ve learned. I have spent much time pondering this reality, assaulted by this realization even while in the act of Sex Work. I still think during sex, I observe the context and position of my body, and I intellectualize these stimuli.
I have learned that the solution to the unpleasure of Blackness is love. Black love that defies the patriarchal . Love that can correct the tangled and twisted wiring that the world has fixed into my brain. What I learned about white pleasure is that it is not love, it is ownership. I remember my clients who tell me they love me. Why? Because you owned my body for one hour? Did you love me when you demanded I lower my price from $150 to $100? Your ability to love me depended on how low my worth is. white pleasure is a form of extraction.
In this way, the framework I used to look at my body was one of extraction. The statistics that I ran away from – they gave a valuation of my personhood based on how much could be extracted from me. My abuse, pain, my torture, my intellectualization, all of these experiences represent varying degrees of extraction. This is the Unpleasure of Blackness. A story of valuation and extraction, all which come at the cost of Black pleasure, Black peace, Black liberation. This is why I will love myself. This is why I will Love my Blackness. This is why I will choose to give love to Black bodies. We have so much collective pain and trauma to heal from.
I end with this: as I wind down this road called life, intellectualizing my pain, analyzing my sexual experiences, tending my scars and rebirthing my spirit, I will endure torrents of unpleasure. I will still extract from my body, I have to, or else my body will not survive this world of extraction. I know I will never let this world extract from my soul again. As I stumble down this path, I will seek love. I will seek the pleasure of Blackness.
Marbelite is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Berlin, Germany. His artist practice is embedded in the reality of being marginalized as a queer Black man of African descent. Originally from Kansas, Marbelite has experienced many nuanced realities that have influenced his writings, music, and photographic work. Whether it be through the “AfroWhimsical” style of music that marbelite has coined, or the “Un-pleasure of Blackness”, Marb has made it his life mission to find ways of expressing and exploring the condition of Blackness in a world that is burning.
