DON’T PLAY IN THE SUN

by ene ijato - June 28, 2018

CULTURE

When you kiss my skin, it lights up in delight, it becomes bronze in your hands.

As a child I can’t think of a single moment when I was bothered about the sun touching my skin, I was the kind of child who’d walk barefoot under a scorching Northern sun, playing with the neighbours and laughing to my mind’s content. I didn’t care about the sun, never acknowledged its presence or absence based on the condition of my skin. Because I did not know then, that in order for the vast majority of the world to see me as ideally beautiful, my skin needed to be shielded from the sun. But then in my fifth year in secondary school, I started to know. I started to notice the darkness of my hands, feet, and face compared to my chest, my belly and my thighs. I started to notice that the lighter skinned girls got the first glance, the fonder smiles, and I naively started to believe that the sun had ruined me.

So I loved the parts of my skin that the sun had not touched, and I wanted more than anything, the sun to untouch me.

I remember walking into a cosmetic store and fidgeting with the words I did not understand how to phrase. The yellow skinned Ibo salesman Emeka, staring at me with his playful grin. I asked him for a cream that would efficiently get rid of dark spots, and he regarded me suspiciously, scanning my body for dark spots I suppose. As if acknowledging the fact that although I did not want to say it and he did not see a need to call me out on it, we both shared a knowing. Turning to the shelves, he produced a box with the picture of a woman with a before and after spot-covered to spotless face photo and handed it to me. This would be the beginning of my journey with colourism.

It got more and more obvious to me from the fashion magazines flaunting olive skinned models, with Eurocentric features and straight glistening hair, to iconic musicians and movie stars that beauty and success came wrapped in skin that was lighter than a brown paper bag, with hair that didn’t shrink in the sun and this was at once disconcerting and toxic. It didn’t matter to me that the boys I had subtle crushes on (and didn’t), liked me with the tan of my skin, because it really wasn’t about the boys or the girls, it was about society.

So I avoided the sun like a plague, hid underneath milky white SPFs 40+ and grew agitated at any signs of a face relatively darker than a thigh or a belly. But the sun would always find me wherever I went because in Northern Nigeria, it was its job.

I perhaps started to question this cat and mouse game with the sun when I started to question the perceptions of beauty and how I had allowed it to affect me. If beauty was colour, the swell of a lip or the lines and bends of a nose. If beauty was a thing I could justifiably identify without the ingrained standards I’d been taught by, and I realized that the beauty I knew was a thing I needed to unlearn.

I wish I could pinpoint the exact moment I realized that I did not need to be untouched by the sun to be beautiful, I wish I could honestly tell you that when I look at a person I do not notice where the sun had thoroughly kissed them and left its mark. But I can tell you that I no longer tell them that their tan needs untanning, I no longer hide myself from the gentle rays of the sun, I no longer try to have it unkiss me. I am back to being that child who played in the sun, who absorbed all that shine with a laughing teeth, and a beautiful blend of insouciance and joy. One who let the sun kiss her because she wanted to be kissed by it.

Hey! So I’m going to vehemently state that yes, dark skinned people get tanned and sunburnt which are both two different things. Tanning isn’t painful and discomforting, sunburns are. If you feel the sun painfully scorching your skin, please shield yourself as best as you can! That’s a sunburn knocking. And tanning is a choice to avoid or not to, so please stop telling people they’ve gotten darker like it’s some sad repulsive thing that needs to be undone. Stop evaluating beauty based on the Eurocentric standards that have colonized us for far too long. See beyond this vicious cycle of prejudice and realize that a person is a person not because they are considered beautiful, but because they are human beings who deserve to be treated equally.

This would lead me to the on-going onslaughts in various parts of Nigeria and various countries of the world. It would seem as though prejudice and hatred were a thing naturally absorbed by humans, willfully burning like wildfire. Is love for a stranger such an unspeakable thing? this need to identify what is familiar and claim as our own continues to tear us further apart, creating hatred in places it does not need to exist.

As always, thank you for stopping by.

A hi nya, with love, x E

Photography || Ene Ijato assisted by Titus Zhiri

Creative directing || Ene Ijato

Styling || Ene Ijato