Self Portrait as a Degas Dancer

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Self Portrait as a Degas Dancer
Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Garden talks about the will to create in black women’s lives as being linked to their will to survive because for centuries their voices and bodies had been suppressed, ignored, or forgotten like exquisite butterflies trapped in evil honey.  I have always loved this metaphor because it speaks to my soul. The wings of a butterfly are fragile and even the act of trying to remove honey would destroy them. Honey as a metaphor of sweetness also resonates with my Mormon upbringing that women are to stay sweet and silent.

One day as I was working in my kitchen…I was carried away into a Degas painting. I had always loved the impressionist paintings whether Monet or Degas or Cezanne. The way the artist captures presence and movement in light and color. It was as if I could blur my eyes and imagine I was the dancer…fully present in my body’s movements of grace and balance. The distance between my reality as a Mormon mother trapped in a pink veil of religious honey and the fluidity of the Degas dancer’s ability to defy gravity and fly like an exquisite butterfly overwhelmed me. I had experienced a lifetime of body denying control trapped in a cult of virginity. I had a soul’s need to experience my own body…to be held in an embrace that gives…yet all I had experiences was a patria that told me I must transcend my body because it was evil and fallen and yet the same patria continued to deliver a touch that deceived, hurt, demanded, and denied my immanence.

I have moved very far away from the evil honey of my faith tradition, yet the body memories of trauma still linger. I live with the core fear that although my spirit longs for the grace and movement of a Degas dancer, my body betrays me in touch.  I used to feel that although God had denied me my place in intimacy, he granted my spirit the respite of art…I could create the illusion in pen…now that is not enough, I want real spiritual intimacy, embodied, messy, and fully present.

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