Growing Up With Miss Jamaica

[Peasie]

This is a good read.


Growing Up With Miss Jamaica from Elle Magazine.

http://www.elle.com/life-love/news/a34563/growing-up-with-miss-jamaica/

i may have to come back and edit this post to add pictures caw mi know how some a unno stay


CeaBee, it is more than a paragraph

[CeaBee]

me nuh click pon links so it nuh matter

[Peasie]

Growing Up With Miss Jamaica

It took me years to undo the sense that lighter skin was more beautiful.

By Nicole Dennis-Benn [Her book, Here Comes the Sun, is out in July 2016)

When my sister and I were left alone, we put on my mother's dresses, slipped on her high-heel shoes, powdered our faces, and added headscarves to pretend we had long hair. In the mirror we posed—our bony arms jutting out from the elbows above our narrow hips, lips puckered, lashes fluttering like the wings of the flying cockroaches in the cupboards. We walked like them. Talked like them. Tried on their smiles. We kissed the selves we imagined in the mirror. We wanted to be them. How beautiful they were, how graceful, how well-spoken, how fair. Their long hair. Their large, expressive eyes. Their cream-colored skin, which, apart from beauty spots and strategically placed moles, was free of blemishes.

Though they were strangers, our community seemed to love them more than they loved us. Pictures of Miss Jamaica World and Miss Jamaica Universe beauty queens hung everywhere. It was their faded photos that we saw printed on dated calendars at Mr. Harvey's shop when we asked for rice and cornmeal. It was their smiles that beamed at us above the racks of liquor in bars we passed on our way from school, where old drunks bickered about politics and women—"Dat coolie one 'dere in di wet see-through JAMAICA shirt g'wan be me wife! Mark my word!"

Their lives existed far away from ours in a world beyond Kingston 8—worlds beyond Constant Spring and Hope Road. Their worlds existed on hills that seemed to touch the clouds. At night, the lights on those hills blinked like stars, mocking us for living in the pressure-cooked alleys of Kingston, the ugly trenches. They seemed to have it easy, never once having to think about disguising their blackness or growing their hair. They woke up that way. Went to bed that way. Sometimes we spotted them in public. They stood out among the dark black faces like beautiful red hibiscus flowers among weeds.

The solution first appeared in hushed whispers throughout the school compound. Dark-skinned girls flocked to the restroom on the fifth-form block. "Yuh see how Lola face look clear an' pretty? Is bleaching cream do it!" The other girls listened reverentially, as though what they heard would somehow answer a lifelong prayer.
Denorah, one of the few other girls at my school from a working-class family, had discovered Nadinola. She stole a jar from her mother, who rubbed it on her knees and elbows, blackened from years of scrubbing other people's houses. She hid it inside her frayed backpack and when she came to school revealed it to us. That was the year that Buju Banton, a renowned Jamaican dancehall and reggae artist, came out with the smash hit "Brownin"—a song that expressed his love for lighter-skinned women. "Me love me car, me love me bike, me love me money an' ti'ng, but most of all me love me brownin!" What would happen if we used Nadinola for extended periods of time? Would we be invited to sit among the lighter girls at lunch? Would the boys who liked them like us too? Visions of Miss Jamaica flashed across our minds.
It began as innocent curiosity, but as we saw the attention the so-called brownins were getting, our motivation shifted. We had stepped inside an open wound, a painful history fraught with yearning—a yearning that our adolescent minds were only able to understand as vanity. We began to fear the sun. In their fine print, the creams advised avoiding it. But it was the bold warnings of our elders that stuck with us—"Stay outta di sun or else yuh g'wan get blacker!" They were trying to protect us from something we only vaguely understood. Many of us were too busy being children to acquiesce, too innocent to realize that our bodies were exposed wounds; our flesh, the perpetual shame.



For those who click on links the rest of the article is here http://www.elle.com/life-love/news/a...-miss-jamaica/