writing from weakness

I find myself in class again, seated adjacent to Alhena, a few other colleagues separate us, including her friend, a Moroccan woman, Hafeza, and my white female colleague and close friend, Anna Maria. The woman leading class today asks us to do an exercise inspired in part by the book that we are reading, Aimee Carrillo Rowe’s, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances. She lights candles and turns off the fluorescent lights in a supposed attempt to create intimacy, although I am not at all convinced. In a room full of hostility I do not think candles, and dim lighting are going to bring us all closer together. She then asks us to place the sacred object we brought to class with us on the table in the center of the room and take someone else’s object.

I walk towards the table and immediately am drawn to the ring that sits among the small statues of Buddha, photos, and other trinkets. I personally have forgotten to bring an object—so in a desperate attempt to produce something, I grab my laptop and put it onto the table and take the ring. It is small in my hands, a tarnished metal with a small diamond set into it. I hate rings. They scare me on all fronts. Rings not only symbolize commitment, but ownership, and loss of one’s agency. I am drawn to this object because of the repulsion it stirs up in my soul—my lack of desire to ever be possessed by such an object. And I am wondering who is compelled to hold an item with such high regard that they would place it on the table as a sacred object.

We have made it through the entire circle and Alhena and I are the only ones with objects left, it becomes completely clear to me that we are in possession of one another’s objects. The entire time I feel Alhena’s eyes on her ring, never letting it out of her sight. I feel her connection to it as though there is an imaginary, but all too real, string between it and where it once lived on her finger. I do not want to touch it for fear that either she or the metal of the ring itself will burn my skin for transmitting my energy upon it. Although the flesh is removed from this ring, I can feel it imprinted on my body. I take a deep breath, as it becomes my turn to speak. Quickly, I blurt out, “Rings are really scary to me but I am interested to know its significance to someone else.”

Alhena’s dark eyes appearing ferocious focus on her ring. I shift uncomfortably, maybe because she does not even recognize my physical body as present in this space. The intensity of this moment is palpable to my skin, I feel it pulsing through my veins, and I turn away. The ring becomes the object that draws us together—the string is now tied to the ring on my desk—to me. She never looks at my face, yet she speaks to address my question, “The ring was my mother’s. Fitting that you are the one to get it,” she says with a slight smile, “because it’s the only part of me that I consider to be white.” I do not understand what she means but I know that Alhena is accentuating that she has not forgotten my past actions, nor has she forgotten the past of her mixed race body—Arab and white. She knows. Her present and past are interwoven because of this ring and they have been extended to me so that I too become intertwined with it. He face shows that she senses and is equally disgusted by this.

Alhena wants to make sure I know that my performance of whiteness does not go unmarked. If anyone sees me—Alhena does. She has been attentively watching, waiting for the right moment, the opening for her to let me know that what I had done was as offensive to her. I don’t really understand what she means by calling the ring “white”—I don’t even think it is what she has said anymore that matters. It is the fact that she made a point to say it—to perform it publically—and to make sure I know that my actions do not— and will not go unchallenged in the future. I am left to read my own meaning into the incident—a strategic move on her part. My mind is racing to deduce her meaning and my body feels fully implicated in this moment. My whiteness cannot hide me. I do not speak, although maybe I should have been more inquisitive as to her purpose for this public calling attention to. But I don’t speak, this is her moment to assure both of us that she has agency to assert her body’s authority over mine. And I let her. She is deserving of this moment and I recognize this. Alhena turns to my object, my laptop, “I chose this because it was the last thing left,” she says, nonchalantly. She turns it ever so slightly in her hands examining the places in the metal that have been dented, scratched, dirtied by my fingers touching it.

I am hurt, but I get it. How can something so technical be so sacred? I don’t want to explain the trials and tribulations this machine has put me through, showing the impressions we have made on one another. Nor do I want to confess that it was indeed a last minute effort. I don’t feel that she, or anyone deserves the explanation from me. I move on, giving a half-hearted description of why the computer is my sacred thing. I feel dismissed anyway, it doesn’t matter what else I have to say. At the end of the class Alhena runs to my desk and grabs her ring, ripping the string that connects us. She tells Hafeza, she is glad to have the ring back that she had a really hard time letting it go. “I am so glad she didn’t handle it too much, that could really have destroyed its psychic powers.” Hafeza looks very seriously at her and they nod intently. They walk out of the room whispering prayers ever so quietly.