Ras, nectar, and all that juice
Sluts were here
Create together
I recently performed with five lovely ladies onstage. We prioritised our time together in our calendars, crossed long distances by train, rode through the rain on our cycles, worked around school timings, book writing, family dinners, flamenco dancing, child-rearing, podcasting, exercising, workday fatigue, creative directing, date nights, alone time, and chucked our gracious partners out the house so we could sprawl and create unencumbered and unobserved. We fed one another. There was care, there was a generosity of spirit, there was romance.
Self-connection shared
I’m many things, but a well-read feminist is not one of them — yet. Definitely a feminist, but well-read in the non-fiction department is what I’m talking about. I’m rectifying that as we speak and as I make my way through the global canon on whose shoulders we stand, I want to direct you to a quote from Audre Lorde’s essay of Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power that has been running through my mind. Each sentence in this essay is a gem, but what I want to point to today is this part:
That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
Self-connection shared, ah what a sentiment. What a feeling! That you are in concert with yourself, thrumming and being, and then when you share that there is music made in concert with those whom you wish to share this with. I can live just in this paragraph, nestle in the comfort of knowing that such satisfaction is possible without any umbrella concepts keeping us from the largesse of satisfaction outside of them. Let’s demand all of it.
Why is this essay running through my mind? Aside from it being life-sweetening, I had read this as part of fellow slut’s Madhvi’s erotic writing course earlier this year, and it had planted a seed in me. It plants seeds in all of those who read it, and for me it took a while for this seed to germinate. I found lushness, slowly. Sensorial feeling nourishing the internal fullness of being; the inside glow burnishing my capacity for feeling joy — of demanding it. And that led to this:
Sluts in Saris
This is how we described ourselves:
Sluts in Saris are six South Asian women who enjoy sex and fuck well. Sluts in Saris are hungry women, sated women. Moaning, throbbing, craving, juices flowing and occasional screaming — this act brings on stage their sweet, defiant, carefree creation intersecting with the lush romance of their female communion.
Through claiming, reclaiming, and declaring their intersectional identities onstage across diaspora and origin they transmute their brain chemistry around their pleasure towards honest expression and liberation. Their spoken word covers the autobiographical, the erotic, the sensual, and the playful.
I didn’t know any of these women before this year began, but we were ready for each other when we met, our self-connections nurtured and strong. We were ready to share that with one another. It has been a privilege to work with them, a joy to create alone, together, and to transform a couple of weekends into a stage performance of such brightness and wit — I totally do say so myself.
Entering the void
With this buoyancy residing in me I now look at the rest of this year as even more of an unknown than what it was starting out. But that I say lovingly. The unknown, how reassuringly surprising. This unknown brought Audre Lorde, artist friendship, South Asian female friendship, the erotic, poetry, and performance into my life. And oh — a day job that I’d been working towards came through too. Sustenance of another important kind. And if you’re saying, what does the erotic have to do with having a day job, then I’ll direct you here, in the same essay:
The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavours, my work becomes a conscious decision — a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
Look — capitalism, yeah? Audre Lorde sure knows. But the work mentioned here, that’s the work of my life, my life. I need to exercise the capacity of joy in my day job, it lets me live with my art more freely, logistically speaking. That is fucking brilliant. It must give more than it takes and I am at a place where I can ensure that for myself, so I’m doing it. And therein does my self-connection grow stronger.
Sluts in Saris was and is self-connection shared. To move through with the erotic at the fore, my life force centred in every step, is generative and chaotic and — ease-y. It gives ease.
I have another performance coming up shortly, but that will be another newsletter.
Go, let that pellet of the erotic bleed colour into every aspect of you and see what comes your way.
My very best to you,
Shobhna
Absolutely love the vividness of what you write. This is so very intriguing.