Kinky Gazpacho

Just finished reading a memoir of an African-American woman who studies abroad in Spain and falls in love.

There were so many things I identified with, I just devoured it. Her identity issues because of the environment in which she grew up, her penchant for foreign language and culture, in some measure, as a way to escape the binary, the "Are You Black Enough? Police" as well as the "White People in Charge."

And then Spain. The places she explored were the same places I explored. Madrid, Salamanca, Sevilla, Cádiz. The liberation of being considered American before being considered black, but at the same time, the issues that arise from being black in a country where there are very few blacks and ideas about black people are heavily based on stereotypical representations and skewed towards exoticism.

And then her search for black culture and African presence within Spanish history. I sort of saw it as a parallel to my interest in Afro-Latin American studies.

It was a quick, engaging read. I don't know why, but it's funny when I'm presented with the fact that I'm more like other people than I think. I've always kind of clung to the idea that I'm a unicorn, a unique being who exists in a category of my own because there is no one else who has grown up the way I have AND has had the experiences that I've had AND believes the way I do AND is doing what I'm doing with my life . . . but not only is that kind of thinking a little absurd, it has allowed me to create and claim a place of tortured individuality. A self-imposed melancholy solitude due to the burden of "not being like everyone else." I am an individual, but I'm beginning to see that maybe I'm more like everybody else than perhaps I'm willing to admit.