After Fanon: A Poem of Bodies and Desire

Out of the blackest part of my soul, across the zebra striping of my mind, surges this desire to be suddenly white.
I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white.
Now – and this is a form of recognition that Hegel had not envisaged – who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man.
I am a white man.
Her love takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization...
I marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness.
When my restless hands caress those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine. I am full for the moment.
For the moment, I am realized.
But then the moment passes. And all that was white and held its head high with unsmudged linen becomes as Harun al-Rashid, the caliph who had it all, embodiment of perfection, who wanted more. He wanted experience of the Other. He wanted the richness of psychosomatic memories. To touch and to have been touched in return by that which he wanted to touch.
Suddenly I am a vehicle, an exotic thrill for she who owns those same white breasts that I have caressed, thinking it was I who was caressing them, when in fact they hung plump as bait for my fingers, to lure my body into her body for to fill her with that richness of memory, those mental lines that must persist long after my flesh has fallen away.
I think I have attained but I have not attained.
Like the young virgin who pays the woman of the night to teach him about love and she, obliging, lightens much his wallet, and returns him to the street empty-handed. No longer with love to hold or to hang on to, quietly, alone, he journeys home.
And meanwhile my white woman has moved along, with stories to tell and richness in pose to expose out to a world of the elite. That world, I, hoping to touch, entered just long enough to elicit the little death, and thereafter died, or returned to that same shame that inspired the desire to make myself white to begin with.