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the language of my body: words and memories from a Middle Eastern Dancer By Sara Nadira
listen my body is trying to tell you something (a little girl making arabesques around the living room her father watches, takes pleasure in her only half aware of an audience. instead she feels the dim evening light enclosing around her the Tchaikovsky serenade rushing through her the urgency of the sound and the intensity of her spinning)
listen my body it speaks across time (a video tape an old and faded picture of a sixth grader on a gymnasium stage willowy sapling in a black chiffon dress and a french braid of tawny hair soft on her feet she trips by like a skiff on the sea and her arms they never stop swaying)
now watch her pulling away from the dream (a performance of Sleeping Beauty sadness and distance did you feel the pain of that woman's broken body as she arched to the sky and fell on bound beribboned feet back to the floor now her satin toes moves so fast but do they need to do that to have beauty?)
listen my body has something to tell you that it's slowly breaking out of the shell you put around it whenever you told me it wasn't good enough but now you listen to new sounds for I have learned that language of my lungs can speak through myself in the way my muscles circle when I roll around inside myself touching to the core
listen to the echo of my breathing hardly audible beneath the flourishes of the clarinet it pulls you into me your eyes your parted lips your willingness to hear you trace a line through my rolling hips to the taunting of the violin and the heaving of the tabla then I pull away from you fall into my own world when I only know the dim evening light enclosing around me the urgency of the beledi rushing through me and the intensity of my spinning.
listen did you hear what my body said? |