Ashes Turn To Gold - A Poem and Reflection On Colorism
Blue moonlight glow and the blurred film tapestry
romanticize the years of internalized apathy.
Scenes of melancholy sighs filter your thoughts.
When will you self actualize the love you sought.
You ponder, when will I love? When will I accept?
An all too familiar internal dilemma creeps and intercepts.
The pigment in thine eyes the pigment in thine skin,
the unwritten history you unveil within.
You remember you’re the forgotten you’re society’s untold.
Until you hear the yearning hymn of melanin “ashes turn to gold.”
Author’s Note:
Mainstream media has often discounted our stories because it doesn’t fit their eurocentric narrative. The hostility of colorism is that it is both an internalized and externalized problem within many communities. As I know from personal experience, the Indian community has enabled internalized colorism. It’s an ongoing problem that profits off a false assertion that fair skin is more beautiful.
My poem “Ashes Turn to Gold” attempts to reverse the colorist assertion that fair skin is the only acceptable form of beauty. The opening line of the poem is an allusion to the quote “in moonlight black boys look blue” from the movie Moonlight directed by Barry Jenkins. In my perspective, the defining glow of melanated skin in the dark reconstructs the definition of darkness itself. Jenkins’s quote argues that darkness is not the mystery and evilness society often connotes it to be. By contrast, Jenkins asserts the blue hue given off from the moon gives a sense of beauty and peace. In the same line, I emphasized the racial bias in the film industry from a technological standpoint. Even though we live in an ethnically diverse world, dark skin color is difficult to capture with a camera because of how most of them are better equipped for capturing light skin. As Frederick Douglas once said, “being seen accurately by the camera was a key to representational justice,” something our media is still trying to achieve.