I carry my skin like an open book whose lines can only be read through screaming, and I am afraid the screaming will wear me out.

I carry it like an umbilical cord whose pain my mother still complains of to this day, a long cord stretching from my grandmothers to me. I want to cut it. I want to replace its knots of pain with knots of strength and small, accumulating victories.

Authority and the extended family have written stories of racism and exclusion across my skin. Since childhood, I have tried to erase them by screaming my words onto white paper. Today, my skin has become a cause I carry, exhausted, of course, but it is still my cause.

I remember that, from childhood, I was constantly defending the colour of my skin and defending my mother. There is one memory I have never been able to forget. I was playing with a girl from my family and some of her relatives when someone asked me why I was Black. I answered that God had created me this way, and that I looked like my mother.

They said:

“Your mother’s Black? Your mother’s a slave?”

As a child, I did not understand the full weight of that word, or the pain my ancestors had carried inside it. But I felt its heaviness. I felt the superiority of the person saying it to me. I knew it was an ugly word, even if I did not yet understand why.

I am the daughter of a woman I know little about, and who knows too little about me for that knowledge to ease the pain in her heart of having me forcibly taken away from her.

My mother is African, Sierra Leonean.

The man whose loins I came from is Lebanese. His mother, my grandmother, was born to a Lebanese father and a Black African Sierra Leonean mother.

Exactly like me.

From the moment I came into this world, family and authority placed the burden of racism and discrimination on me, and I was sentenced to scream.

I was three when the civil war in Sierra Leone intensified. Armed forces approached my grandfather’s house and we fled in haste. That day, we left the country without the man whose loins I came from, and without my mother.

Without my mother because I had been taken from her breast seven days after I was born. My grandmother, whose own mother was Black, feared that my mother might pass the colour of her skin to me through her white milk!

Do not blame my grandmother.

I will tell you what the “white master” did to her too.

She was a victim as well. Do not blame her. She was the victim of a racism that pushed her, unintentionally, to practise racism against my mother, believing she was protecting me from the judgement of a society that saw Black people, people of her own skin, as worth less than people with white skin.

Until the end of her life, my grandmother pleaded with God, her creator, to look upon her with mercy. She believed that Black people were the firewood of hell, and that people with white skin were closer to God than she was, and closer than her ancestors were.

She would even object when I joked that some say Adam and his descendants were originally Black. She would ask God’s forgiveness for the enormity of what I had just said.

That is what a white society planted inside her, in a country colonised by white people.

And so racism is passed on, until even its victims begin to practise it.

They brought me to Lebanon.

I grew up here among a society of people with white skin who saw Black people as “slaves”, and who saw me as a Black child with the “privilege” of white blood.

But it was never a complete privilege.

It was foreign, borrowed, never entirely mine.

Whatever happened, that child would always remain the daughter of a Black woman.

To preserve that privilege, I had to master Arabic.

My grandmother, who could not speak it at all, made every effort to push me towards the neighbourhood children so I could learn it. At first, she also insisted on erasing the language spoken in Sierra Leone from my head.

In her simplicity, she was proud of this. It was as though she were proving to society that her granddaughter belonged to them, that she could wash away the shame of her son having a child with a Black woman by making his daughter speak the language of the Qur’an.

Had her white sister not intervened, I would have forgotten my mother’s language.

Today, meeting anyone who speaks it fills me with an immense joy. Through them, I recover something of my second identity.

Or perhaps my first.

As a child, I spoke five languages.

The first was hitting back at peers who allowed their words to leave scars on my skin and on the wall of my heart.

The second was writing whenever I was in pain. I began writing my thoughts from a young age.

The third was crying.

The fourth was complaining to my grandfather so he would defend me.

But my grandfather used that word too.

He would say, “the slaves in Africa.”

Or, “We had a slave boy. We took him in and raised him.”

And yet, he was the person who stood beside me against anyone who dared treat me with racism.

My grandfather was not a racist in every sense of the word.

That is not an excuse.

My grandfather was an ignorant white man who had inherited the idea of slavery, the belief that a white person had the right to own slaves.

He constantly repeated that “there is no difference between an Arab and a non-Arab except through piety,” and that we were all servants of God.

Yet he was disturbed by how often I sat with the Ethiopian domestic worker at a relative’s house. He disapproved of it.

Perhaps he was afraid his attempts at “Lebanising” me, making me Lebanese enough to fit into the extended family, would fail.

He had lived in a country colonised by the British. He saw the people of the land placed at the bottom of the social order while the coloniser controlled the country’s wealth and diamonds. He repeated what he had inherited from his own family and from the Lebanese community there, a community that also lived from the wealth of that country while seeing its people as beneath them because they belonged to a poorer social class.

Colour and class became the measure of who was a “slave” and who was a “master”.

Over time, the extended family, and the shame attached to a girl hitting boys, stole my first language from me.

As I grew older, my grandfather became harder on me. He wanted to make me strong enough to withstand life if he were to leave this world.

He hated it when I cried.

But I am a creature that cries.

I cry a lot.

I cry when I am happy, when I am disappointed, and when I am in pain.

Eventually, I lost the language of complaining to my grandfather. I began crying only when I was alone, far from him.

Then my fifth language was born:

silence.

But I kept growing, and the weight of society and its judgements on my back kept growing with me.

In the end, all I had left were the languages of crying, writing, and silence.

The attempts to “Lebanise” me did not stop with learning Arabic and the Lebanese dialect. They extended to making my appearance fit society too.

My grandmother tried to suppress my curly hair, constantly combing and tying it back, using straightening products so I would look “neat”.

Meanwhile, I was enchanted by her silver curls.

And, by my “good fortune”, the girls my age in the family were white-skinned and blonde.

Naturally, the compliments about beauty belonged to them.

So I grew up carrying resentment and shame about the colour of my skin, angry at comparisons made with complete disregard for the feelings of a Black child in a society steeped in white superiority.

I will not go too deeply into my childhood.

The short version is that I came out of it with wounds.

My shame about my own beauty intensified during adolescence, until I found myself asking:

Why is love only for blondes and white women?

And so I entered another battle to “Lebanise” my appearance.

To whiten it.

During my teenage years, I heard many sayings that I repeated and forced myself to believe, even though something inside me rejected them.

One relative used to tell me:

“Dress a dark-skinned person in red, white or yellow, then laugh at them.”

The point was that these colours did not suit Black skin.

So I stayed away from them, even though, deep down, I thought they looked good on me.

This was how I lived through adolescence, still asking why love belonged to blondes.

A whole patriarchal system had produced this. It created standards of beauty and placed women at their mercy, making them spend more and more in order to fit them.

What, then, if the woman is Black?

The effort doubles.

Then something happened that took me towards a different set of questions and gave me a new anger about the way my skin was tied to sex.

I was in a taxi with my neighbour. The driver kept looking at me through the mirror while I avoided his eyes.

He asked her whether I was related to her.

She said no.

He replied:

“These ones are good.”

It was sexual harassment.

I did not know the word for it then, but I felt it.

My neighbour said nothing.

She smiled and stayed silent.

One question remained in my mind:

If he had said this about her daughter, who was my friend, would she have stayed silent?

That day, I came to the conclusion that white-skinned people, men and women alike, could be hateful and racist. And I understood that the expression the driver had used meant that my colour and my body were associated with one thing only:

sex.

He was not the only Lebanese man I heard use that expression.

I heard it from Lebanese men living in Africa who described Black women as “good” and “hot”.

And a woman described in those terms, naturally, was not fit for the status of wife in their eyes.

That was the category I had been placed in:

the woman fit for sex but not for love.

My body was desirable even though it possessed none of the beauty standards these men themselves had imposed and claimed to seek.

But in their eyes, I was “exotic”.

My body was a machine for sex and pleasure.

The rest of me was none of their concern.

Society places us, Black women, permanently beneath a microscope, comparing us with white women until even our vulvas are compared.

Yes, even the colour of the vulva.

I remember seeing an image on Instagram comparing a white vulva with a Black one. The Black one was described as a piece of grilled meat, while the white, or pink, one was compared to a strawberry.

This is how our bodies were demonised and pushed into sexual moulds designed around their desires.

Beauty standards were created that could leave scars across our skin and our hearts, scars we might carry with us even into bed with our partners.

Until that day came.

In 2019, Beyoncé released “Brown Skin Girl”.

A few days after the song came out, I was standing in front of my mirror with my Black curly hair.

Then that moment came.

A moment I still struggle to describe, although it was almost laughably simple.

Suddenly, I saw my own radiance.

Yes.

Suddenly, I realised I was very beautiful.

I put on the same red lipstick I had heard again and again did not suit me.

The same colour shops themselves had convinced me did not suit my dark skin.

Red.

That day, I cried because I realised I was beautiful.

It had taken a long journey of pain, inferiority, inadequacy, constant defence and justification, and shame about the melanin in my body.

Finally, I understood.

Finally, I believed those few people who had stepped outside the mould and told me, when I was a child and a teenager, that I was beautiful.

Finally, I believed myself.

My friend, my relative living abroad, and I shared the song with one another.

Three Black women singing about the blessing of their bodies, drifting for a moment into themselves.

A moment in which the white man did not exist.

A song, heard when I was twenty-six, carried me back to the fierceness of my childhood.

And I recovered my languages.

I recovered my first language.

I chose to rebel.

To write.

To publish.

To dream of a day when I return to Sierra Leone and take revenge on a state system that allowed its women citizens to be wronged and made vulnerable when it allowed the white man to deprive them of their children.

To take revenge on an entire system that mocked my large lips, only to turn to cosmetic procedures to acquire them.

To take revenge on a homeland that still asks me, every single day, whether I am really Lebanese because:

“I don’t look Lebanese.”

I am not writing this text for the man who left a scar of disappointment on my skin.

I am writing it for the women of my skin.

For those who carry the weight of melanin and the magic of its strength.

For those who have peeled away a skin made of insults, criticism, comparisons, and injustice, and allowed the sun to touch a skin made of freedom.

I write because writing has always been the beginning of my struggle.

I write because I want to gather a circle of women around me, women of my own skin, whose screams and whispers rise in the face of all this injustice.

I write for myself.

For my mother.

For my grandmother.

For every migrant worker in this country.

And for every woman who carries beneath her Black skin another skin made of strength and beauty.