Of Nudity & Writing. Happy International Women’s Day
One of the critical and most celebrated books on nudity or disrobing as a form of defiance is Naked Agency, written by the erudite scholar Professor Naminata Diabate. In a simplistic rendition of the text’s complex and core idea, the book interrogates women’s choice to use their bodies to challenge systemic abuse and leadership ineptitude and to register grievances. While the professor’s book and other similar thesis speak to bodily disrobing, this post sheds light on writing as a form of nudity. A few years into my four decades of being on this earth, disrobing seems essential in some writing. Paulo Coelho is accredited as saying, “Writing is a socially acceptable form of getting naked in public.”
Yet I understand that despite the transformational power of transparency in writing, writing has been used to malign, manipulate, and for other cruel intentions. Nonetheless, I value its vulnerability or unclad strength for multiple reasons, especially for future generations. Some of us will not have come this far but for the nude writing or life of other women. women who pen with their soul, using their blood as ink to share how they survive with other life travelers.
Suppose writing is a form of public disrobing and one of the few acceptable ways. In that case, if my public writing seeks to do anything, it is to invite you most of the time into the chambers of my mind (my privacy) to contemplate any subject with me. My PoP once said, “Thoughts are the final frontier of privacy. If we always speak our mind, we violate our privacy.” Yet occasionally, I violate my privacy because I recognize the power of “me too” in the sense of mutuality of experience.
For many years, I got drunk on the divinity of Jesus, which is important, but his humanity keeps me going when life is hard, and the first few months of this year were. To know a Jesus whose earthly father’s presence is less known. A Jesus that was hungry and needed food, tired, and needed sleep, mocked by his brothers, one so engrossed with sorrow he said to his heavenly father, “If possible, pass this cup over me. I can’t take it again”, the Jesus who accuses God of abandonment (why have you forsaken me?) reminds me that I am not alone if I ever feel any of these emotions. Yet his humanity is downplayed because a savior who is vulnerable contradicts the superhero Jesus we want to show all the time.
Paul writes that we are living epistle read of men. Yet to read any letter, chat, or book, you must open or unclad it. Every place Jesus was opened showed us his humanity. His side was pierced, and blood gushed out. His humanity was on the cross, as his divinity was in the resurrection. The nudity of Jesus on the cross is something artists and preachers don’t like to discuss. In their paintings, artists put a cloth around his waist, yet some theologians suggest nothing was on it. His transparency scares us.
To be sure, nudity does not mean I give you my password, nor does transparency mean that I share my ATM PIN with the world because I want to be transparent. Brene Brown warns us that “oversharing is not vulnerability” (p.159). While I encourage you to get naked, I pair that with a note of caution from one author: “Choose your confidant carefully.” Choose your transparency and nudity with care because some may mock it, and others will use it against you, but share with those who have earned your trust to see you unclad. Share with your children when they reach the age you are human. There is something called work, and sometimes work is not pleasant, but you have to work to earn.
What, then, is nudity? Primarily, it means I show you our common human traits, experiences, and contradictions so that you don’t exalt my life above or beneath yours. Like a sermon my PoP preached once, “we are all in the same boat”. There are certain commonalities in human experience. I remember telling a grad student who seemed to be in awe of my articulation of some academic ideas that I have often had to read some academic text more than once to understand what they are about. She did not believe me until I showed notes where I write to make sense of what I am reading sometimes. My nudity lets the person know you are not alone. I know that I am beautiful and know book, but I have no clue about some things. So, if my intelligence is all you see and not the labor that got me there, you will be hateful. Is she the only one?
Not long ago, someone reached out to me to apologize about something. They said until I started sharing on Facebook, they did not realize how much I was going through when, half of the time, they gossiped about me that I was proud because I was related to someone. I told this person I did not share my story to evoke pity or sorrow. Far from it, I write because I have been a beneficiary of the nudity of others. I have followed a pastor for over 20 years who, through the years, while challenging us to rise above mediocrity, also shows us his humanity. Anytime PoP jokes saying, “Come take this mic from me because I have not taken my medicine,” that day, as many other days, he is laying it bare so we can learn that the pulpit is not greater than the pews that, like all men and women we people of like passion. These days, he has added old age as another reason to just be 100%
If my nudity shows you anything, it is our commonality; if my success shows anything, it is that possibility of what is already actualized in you or the potential. To my mind, I think there are no superheroes anywhere, only people or women who have mastered the art of dancing with broken bones.
Today, I celebrate two of the many women who taught me how to unclad. They taught me to own my story and never let anyone pick at my wounds or scars. One woman is my biological mother. Iya mi Ololade, orun re o. The second is a woman who was my entry point into African American studies before I would ever take classes on it. She is none other than Dr. Maya Angelou. The six collections of books that make up her autobiography were the most honest and vulnerable self-writing I have ever read.
I hope you are unclad for those who have earned the right to see you do so. If you occasionally do it for the world, as I sometimes do know that it could be possible that someone in the world is transformed by that nudity, just like I was by Maya Angelou
Happy International Women’s Day 2024.
Posted on Facebook on March 8, 2024
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