Owning My Body, Owning My Protest
I am a Black American singer/songwriter/poet all-around writer person based in Italy. Living in a society where you are often the only POC in the room can be tiresome at best, especially as I cannot keep my mouth shut, cannot let even a microaggression slide. At nine years old I organized my first protest; some forty years later I performed and spoke at my most recent for the Italian chapter of BLM.
In Boulder, Colorado around 1975 or 1976, a granola munching heyday of hippiedom, I saw a sight that lit a desire to give voice to my inner landscape and which has had a lasting effect on me. I was a skinny, scrawny, ashy knee beanpole of a girl newly arrived in my new adoptive family. Newly arrived in this town which was 2% “ethnic” — that is to say any ethnicity that wasn’t white. My hair was still natural — before we would special order straightener from the local beauty salon and before my attempts to tame my kinky hair into a silky, straight sheen resembling the tresses of my classmates.
In my short nine years, I had already lived enough to be tired. I had scars on my body and scars on my brain; I’d survived cigarette burns, beatings, and several placements but now after many visits, I was finally with my forever family. Mom and Dad were a study in contrasts. He was a black man and a sensible banker; she was a white, hippie-ish impulsive woman.
Tension was familiar, it was a part of every home I’d known until then. My body, I knew, was not my own. The physical abuse I suffered before being adopted, and after, left scars on my body that are still with me today. My mind was the only safe place, where no-one could enter. Which was partially why I loved books and songs so much. I was in love with words because it was my natural state. It was also comfort, escape, and affirmation that I was not alone and that the world was wide.
I always tell people that Boulder was the ideal town to raise children with an artistic bent. I got my first magical taste of the stage going to the Shakespeare Festival each summer at Colorado University. We’d sit on stone seats in the amphitheater and my butt would be asleep within 5 minutes. But I was entranced by the lights strung through the trees, real trees on stage. My heart jumped at a sudden yell from an actor. I was awed by the audience’s utter absorption and loud laughter. I wanted to be up there. I wanted the audience to fall in love with me.
One day, my new mother and I are walking on campus; my hand in hers, swinging arms, just us two. Suddenly, she stops dead on the street — mouth agape, eyes wide. I follow her gaze and — wait, WHAT? In front of us, enthusiastically running completely nude — nothing but sneakers on their feet — is a crowd of a million people. Well, it looked like a million but was probably only 10 or 12 people. I say “enthusiastically” because all I saw were body parts; tits and dicks and balls all bouncing in front of my astonished eyes.
Some may think this would be a traumatic event, but I had seen trauma already in my short life, and this didn’t resemble it in the least. This… this was joy. I had seen my mother’s book “The Joy of Sex” (and was already very curious). While my adoptive father was slightly more conservative, my mother certainly considered herself a free spirit. I had showered with her and seen both of their pudgy, parent bodies. But none of that prepared me for these glorious bodies. They were gods and goddesses. All of these people were laughing and calling out to each other and grinning at us as they flew past. I said to my mother, “What… what… what is this?” She plays it cool, “Aw, that’s called streaking. It’s probably a protest of some kind. Could be pacifists, or for the women’s rights movement. Maybe it’s about that nukes plant. That place is a serious threat to humanity.” I watched their very pale asses bob away until I could no longer see them, and then I made the first request that I had yet made of her. I said “me too! I want to protest!”
I should add that I was in the grip of my first heart-melting, incandescent crush with a friend of my parents; the sad-eyed, bear of a man with a full bushy, black beard who came to their parties and spoke passionately of women’s rights and the Civil Rights Movement. He’d given me this sunshine yellow, ridiculously soft, cotton t-shirt that I admired. It said on the front “Women belong in the House” and on the back “And in the Senate”. I didn’t understand why everyone thought it was so hilarious and when they explained it, I got it! It hung down past my knees and I wore it until it was threadbare, until it practically disintegrated.
I hadn’t yet had the n-word hurled at me — that was a few months away — but I knew there was something that set me apart from every other person I could see. I’d watch my mother’s face tighten when we met someone new and she introduced me as her daughter. They’d ask, “well where is she from?” while they patted my ‘fro saying, “Oh it’s so springy!” She told us, “You remember if anyone asks you about your real family, tell them that we are your real family.” All I wanted was to fit in and I realized that I looked like none of the girls in my class, or on the television, or in the magazines. I didn’t even see myself reflected in the toys I played with. But this talk of protests included talk of people who looked like me. So yeah, of course, I wanted to protest.
I risked my mother’s ire by whining, “Please, please, please mommy can I go streaking?” every day until, finally, she relented and said yes. “But Lisa, only on this street.” I organized my protest with other kids, but I never qualified to their parents why we were protesting. It seemed enough to at least say we were streaking. I wonder now if they allowed their kids to join because they thought it was a Civil Rights thing and didn’t want to be uncool. After all, it was Boulder in the seventies, and only there, only then could this ever have happened. I asked a couple of friends on my block and my brother to join me — though my brother has no memory of it, he was five at the time and always insists, “Streaking?! I must have been a completely different person.” But I remember him taking part.
My neighborhood gang met at our house. I had on my favorite, yellow protesting t-shirt with nothing else underneath. We had pieces of cardboard where we wrote NO NUKES to lay on the lawn, and then, after double knotting my sneakers, I was the first to rip off my shirt, yell, “NO NUKES!” and I went off, racing to the top of the street with my gang right behind. It was liberating. I was one of the glorious goddesses. I had made the decision what to do with this body. I was in possession of it. It was funny and silly, serious, scary, and rule-breaking all rolled up in one delicious moment that was entirely mine.
I’ve been a fan of protesting ever since. I spend my time writing and performing protest songs and poetry. I fight the powers that be in word and deed. I’d say the next best rally was the first Pride month parade ever held in Brescia, Italy, which I attended with my brother Miles and his husband Richard. And I am much inspired and delighted to be a part of the burgeoning efforts of the younger generation’s Black Lives Matter movement here in Italy and to speak and perform for it. They are killing it, but streaking, racing nude to the top of that street with my rebel yell remains the sweetest taste of defiance I’ve ever had.
