Nothing can hold me from my good.

“I wanted his hands on me. I didn’t mind the cracked, chewed skin, the broken fingernails with flecks of dirt along the ridge. I wanted those hands on me, the blunt knuckles, the wrinkled skin, the bony joints, the tiny hair sprouts curling out. I wanted his hands on me. And wherever those hands led, I’d follow. I’d ride the tracks of his feet and the rough guardrails of those hands. Five fingers and five more. I wanted the electricity of his touch, his hands on me. How many times did I tell him, “Just touch me. Dance your fingers on my chest, my thighs. Press my flesh. Take off my clothes real slow.” But when he touched me, my excitement dwindled into fear. His hands fluttered, suddenly unsure of themselves, of where they would land and do their marvelous work. I bent low and let his fingers drum on my belly. Then calmly they stroked where my secret skin was softest. He lifted away his hands and hid them. His lips found the tender places left aching by his touch. And when my hands kneaded him in return―everywhere―nothing afterwards felt the same.”

Let me express myself. I was saying that they were not opposed to the West Indian culture. What they were opposed to was the domination of European culture. And they were rejecting that by going toward Africa. But, unfortunately, the grasping and understanding of African culture is not a simple business to a man brought up in Western civilization. And they put on some jacket and all sorts of African robes and that was the end of their getting hold of African culture. So, they were rejecting European culture, which they were objecting to because it dominated them, but they weren’t making any serious attempt to penetrate into African culture. They were losing both sides. […] I don’t know that people should go into African culture with the idea of bringing elements of the African culture to the West Indies and America. First of all, the West Indies and America are two very different places. America has a culture of its own. It has an attitude to the world - social, political, and otherwise. To bring African culture to that is quite a problem. I don’t see it as something realistic. But you go to study the African culture because, first of all, there is an immense number of people who are very sick of the state of European culture. They feel that it has reached a stage of degradation. And the man of African descent can go toward Africa, looking for African culture in the sense that he can find something to which he is organically connected, but which is offering him something which European culture is not offering anymore. That he can do. But I don’t know that he is going there to bring something back to affect the American culture. That is not the view that I have of why these people act.

“Early in Western discourse, a binary opposition between body and mind emerged. The much-vaunted Cartesian dualism was only an affirmation of a tradition in which the body was seen as a trap from which any rational person had to escape. Ironically, even as the body remained at the center of both sociopolitical categories and discourse, many thinkers denied its existence form certain categories of people, most notably themselves. “Bodylessness” has been a precondition of rational thought. Women, primitives, Jews, Africans, the poor, and all those who qualified for the label “different” in varying historical epochs have been considered to be embodied, dominated therefore by instinct and affect, reason being beyond them. They are the Other, and the Other is a body.”