Who Want Me: Critical Annotations on Undesirability

Abstract

Who want me? I go to write and no matter what I try to say it looks and sounds like who want me. In my life I move in Blackness, in fatness and their specific kind of womanhood, gathering what the world has to give me, and I’m left feeling unchecked for. So all over the page I write why y’all not checking for me? and I swear the page writes back you know why. But I don’t know. My voice is sexy, I’m smart, and I make my shit look pretty so no, I don’t know. I look it up on Google. why-they-don’t-want-me-enter. All these books come up: voices contemporary and canonical writing about social precarities (presumed, even though the consequences are very real) like Blackness, fatness, and un/desirability. Of course I need them all–my literary cousins and ancestors. Maybe it was them writing back to me. I need to sit with how other writers are talking about race, gender, bodies, and ugliness. I need to sit with them as I think about my own work around love and desire, as I figure out where I can cite them in my life. I will make a bibliography of annotations for myself, using the research form and making it personal. I hope to map a small piece of the landscape of writers creating Black theory and writing, fat theory and writing, and personal essays from the margins to find my place in it. Is it time I stop chasing those who don’t want me?