Beauty, Nihilism & Capitalism

Written by Elisha Kiala

(Image from Latoya Fraziers ‘Notion of Family'

To age or not to age? A choice we don't choose to make, though I feel if we could we wouldn't, but the reasons for this are much more complex than we think. With the growth in nihilism and a feeling of existentialism which comes from our growing capitalist world, growing older feels pointless as our leaders continue to show a lack of care for the people. More specifically black women. Despite this feeling, due to the capitalist nature of the beauty industry, women are still told to consume to preserve their youth, all whilst feeling like the world is falling apart. If anything, this just reminds me of how complex we are as human beings, that though we can understand the wrongs of beauty and respectability politics, we must still participate to survive our day-to-day lives, but also feel like our worlds aremeaningless and that our decisions to remain young or a ‘girl’ comes from our minds rather than those ideas being ruled by a body of people, who are in control of the media who feed us messaging that remaining young is the best thing a woman could be. So now the question, ‘to age or not to age?’ 

We live in a hyper-capitalist world, a consumer world we do this to survive. I think though with all this hopelessness existing this is almost what sustains our apatite to be alive. For years now black women have been told that they aren’t enough and that they must buy into something to become worthy, whether that be skin products, hair products or clothing items to become ‘presentable’. Either way, respectability is something that we have become attached to, because of years and years of conditioning. Now we have resisted, but at times it feels like we’re going backwards. With the resurgence of feminity talks online, I wonder why we feel so attracted to bodying ideals that were never made for us. Things that were created for us to be ostracised. I think of bell hooks idea on the cult of womanhood, and in truth what we buy into is this cult. With our desire to live fading away, we must attach ourselves to a cult to have some form of desire or connection to our world. And with us living in a patriarchal-imperialist world run on power dynamics, buying into the idea of womanhood makes this all worth it. Now this isn’t an entire representation of black women today as black women are becoming more and more progressive by decentering men and picking up a queer politic to love And relationships, in truth I just fear that with the amount or accessibility, we have to these discussions and how easy their lives are framed we can get sucked in and begin to believe our lives become of value once we buy into this ideals of womanhood. A womanhood that is restrictive and cannot be bought.  

It’s so easy to think that the pursuit of beauty is simply based on vanity when it’s not. When your survival is based on whether your beauty is actualized it is hard to have hope in this world, when being black and woman isn't deemed as embodying beauty. Art and beauty have always been indigenous to black culture, when you look at countries like Angola previously the ‘Kongo Kingdom’ including countries like DRC Congo and Congo Brazzaville, artistic expression has always been enphasised the main difference is, that ‘Kongo’ people made it for them and represented their people at the time. Colonialism changed all of this, with forms of systemic oppression like racism and colourism which affect black women, the idea of nihilism now comes at hand. Racism allows for the oppression of individual groups due to their skin colour and what that skin colour means. For black people, it means dirt, impurity and sin. When we include intersectionality and the identity of women, these are further emphasised, with ideas of black women being inherently sexual beings, people who deserve abuse and are angry. If this is internalised, the damage almost feels irreversible because black women come into a space where they could believe that their minds and bodies exist to be controlled by other people or their born to be full of anger and rage, emotions that are valid but in our specific bodies are wrong. What happens when emotions that are valid responses to the world you exist in are invalid in your body because ‘you're always like that’. And to all the women in your bloodline who had to suppress their emotions within the family, workplace and social settings to be accepted to not be deemed as too much. Why wouldn't your desire on earth be small, if you haven't been given the privilege to live life freely due to your looks? Even within our communities, this feeling can exist for dark-skinned black women. Growing up the way people speak to you or discuss you has a clear effect on how you view yourself, humanity and worth. People telling you to hide from the sun, that you are ugly, boys laughing and making jokes about the idea of you being in love with them, is not an easy path to live, from childhood, this is what you hear from your peers it's easy to hate yourself. I think of ‘The Bluest Eye’ by Toni Morrison, how that book perfectly encapsulates the experience of being darker skinned in a white colonialist world, the constant strive to be ‘beautiful’ and if you're not the worthlessness that comes with it. Because you see it's not about what beauty is or not rather what beauty does to you and what it does to black women. In the end, the child in the book becomes so disillusioned with the pursuit of beauty she dies wishing to have blue eyes. And what do those blue eyes represent for a child who has been othered because of their skin? When we engage in society whether we want to admit it or not, beauty and the beholding of it affects a person's quality of life and when life has no meaning beauty consumerism makes it present. The engagement of desirability politics is essential and a rite of passage, yes you have to be submissive, yes wear your hair straight, yes lighten your skin, yes do not say your opinions, yes if you are curvy show off your body but not too much, yes if your skinny get work done, yes if your fat loose weight and so forth. Because the point isn't to self-love, but rather buy into products that will ‘help’ you self-love, that beauty being a commodity helps black women find meaning within their lives. No, it just allows us to never fully embrace or decolonize what beauty means and looks for us. 

So now to age or not age. Maybe we are just tired, that life goes on and it still feels like a standstill. Our roles in our community and family are no easy stride: so when I think of my life and others around me and realise this paralysing state of anxiety that comes with getting older has nothing to do with me looking older but more so the heavy weight of responsibility that comes with it, one I’m accustomed to but one that is now expected further. Me and my friends often joke about what happens to black women when they turn 25, and how they conform to gender norms, they constantly talk about marriage and male desirability (in our echo chambers) and we think about why that happens and how annoying it is that it does. Not only this but, I feel a loss of idols, who do I look up to in how I build my world. A world where we oppose traditional views of black African girls, and we think about our careers first and friendships with women and then men after. I feel this a lot as I'm beginning my 20s, and I see myself changing, growing, evolving and expanding my mind and philosophies. How do I define myself, and move with the times at the same time? I always joke with myself that I want to be young forever not because I'm scared of ageing, but because I still want to feel this force for change that I did at 10-13, and still have the control and power that I do as an adult that I didn’t as a child. So I wonder with these women who turn 25 and shift their feminist ideals, to more internalised misogynistic ones what happens? Do the pressures of society cave in on you? Does ageing become something to fear rather than embrace? Or does living according to what you want become scarier and harder to do when everyone tells you, you'll end up lonely?  I think of the eldest black daughters, and how so much of life wasn't taught but they had to assume position, they discovered their rights on their own no one told them what they were. How does this too affect whether you attach meaning into your life? The work they engage in within the family is enough for them to not want to age because if they have to have a family themselves, the work never ends. Now if they rebel against these standards, what happens to them is brutal, and now the work they did in holding the family together is repaid by isolation because they didn't do what they were expected to do. Maybe that's what happens the weight of being a black daughter is too much to bear so conforming is easy and could provide meaning that has been lost over the years. The experience of self-actualisation humanising thy self is new to our culture, our bodies after suffering years of inhumane living have to figure out where we fit in society. How we define ourselves, without a colonialist perspective.  “A loop a girl born to each family prelude to suffering”- from ‘extreme girlhood’ by Warsan Shire, those words reign deep in the discussion of beauty politics, labour and nihilism, that someone could believe there is no God who is going to save you because life has no meaning. You suffer and that is all. The world that many black girls are brought into judges you and treats you based on your looks, and the amount of labour you put into other's lives. It is understandable to believe that your life has no meaning. But we can only move from this by dismantling oppressive systems, like patriarchy within the family, racism, colourism and so forth. Because our lack of desire comes from the world around us, humans have an innate desire to love and create but these systems oppress and restrict us so much that the desire to do this becomes lost, and the ways we are given to retribute that is through beauty consumerism, this shouldn't be our only option to live. We have to do the work of decolonising, dismantling and rebuilding, what life means to us, we’re gonna heal.