Sarah Bartman's body was returned to South Africa--maimed, pickled, and over 300 years late thought it be--as a symbolic permission to let her spirit rest.
She'd been the bare breasted, posterior proficient attraction with a labia size Europeans loved to gawk, poke, and prod at, and eventually would sever after her death.
Her body was left a literal spectacle--reinscribed with "exotic" otherness (that the West would die to emulate through their, ironically Victorian fashion), and regarded as duplicitous scientific proof of African sexual inferiority--and off the record--a political body site inviting desecration and sexual pollution by the so-called sexually pure.
Funny thing is, I'm watching Larry King Live, and Michael Jackson's dermatologist has "broken the silence" about Michael Jackson's...everything.
And without any formal training in public or, more importantly, private health, I wonder where is Michael Jackson's HIPAA protection now?
Why not excavate his body and make sure he didn't get a sex change too while we're at it? But lest you think I'm so good to decode the error without indulging in the same, I started writing when I heard myself actually engage the headlines:
"Michael Jackson had vitiligo--had speckled look all over body"
"Dermatologist wanted Michael to stop the plastic surgeries"
"Michael believed his face was a work of art"
"Michael was losing his hair"
After so many rotations of the aforementioned for no less than 30 minutes, I realized our verbal recasting of Michael Jackson as our resident freak show, our pop culture Sarah Bartman, has us happy to talk under his clothes to reify our preconceptions of him and soothe our own nonsense.
Nobody wants to be him, but everybody wants to be him (to channel Paul Mooney).
I'll only get so melodramatic, but it's something I stopped myself to think about.
