Debatable Canvas

My mother is an incredibly open minded person.  Incredibly open minded until it comes to modifying the body, and its the one thing we just can’t agree on.  Where as she is of the opinion that even shaving your legs is a form of self mutilation I see it simply as being self alteration.

From the age of about 5 years old I desperately wanted to get my ears pierced.  Unfortunately for me no amount of begging, temper tantrums, or gentle persuasion was going to make her decide that allowing some stranger to staple little holes into her daughter’s ears was a good idea,

“But your perfect just the way you are, why do you want to ruin that?”

I didn’t want to ruin my perfect self, i just wanted to be able to decorate it with beautiful jewellery!  So I spent years pretending i had my ears pierced.  I would steal those twisty ties with the wire in them from the kitchen, cut them to size and squeeze them onto my earlobes as hard as I could until they hung there on their own.  I would find sequins and glue them onto my earlobes, I made earring out of paper and cellotaped them on, and I saved up my pocket money to buy clip on earrings any chance I got.  Over the years I reluctantly accepted the fact that I would probably have boring naked earlobes for the rest of my life.  Then one afternoon (on December 21st I believe) after getting picked up from a friend’s house my mother took a detour and stopped in front of the local chemist.

“Right jump out, we’re going to get your ears pierced”.

I imagine I probably sat there with my mouth open speechless.  After all these years of wishing and dreaming I was actually going to get beautiful jewels in my ears and I was suddenly terrified.   I remember the bored shop assistant handing me a tray of earrings and telling me to take my time in choosing a pair.  Well considering I had already decided on the pair I wanted about 5 years earlier it didn’t take me long to find them.  I pointed to my ‘birthstone’, which happened to be a sparkling little blue set under September.  By the time I got led into a tiny back room piled high with cosmetic boxes my hands were literally shaking with fear and excitement.  The lady rubbed my lobes with disinfectant, marked the spot with an eyeliner pencil and asked if I thought they were even.  I glanced in the mirror quickly and mumbled yes, I was too nervous to actually have a proper look.

“Ok love, here we go then, try to relax”.

Relax? Not a chance.  I sat there with white knuckles, eyes tightly shut, and forgetting to breathe.  Suddenly I heard a click followed an incredible burning sensation.  It wasn’t as bad as I expected but I did N OT want to go through with the other side.

“Well we can’t just leave you like this can we love?  Come on it’ll be over in a second”.

So ‘click and I was done.  She handed me a bottle of disinfectant and a few care instructions which I barely listened too and led me back out to my mother.  I couldn’t wipe the grin off my face and looked at my reflection in every shop window as we made our way back to the car

“I suppose one little earring in each ear isn’t so bad”, my mother grudgingly agreed.

She probably knew that that was the beginning of the end.  Soon afterwards I insisted on shaving my legs, then my under arms, then I wanted a bra, then I started to dye my hair, and then god forbid I experimented with make up a little.  She never told me I wasn’t allowed too, every now then she would just mumble,

“Well its your body so I can’t stop you from doing it, I just want you to know that I really don’t approve of it”.

I’m a bit of a mummy’s girl so the idea of ever doing anything to upset her was usually enough to make me reconsider but there were a few occasions where the guilt factor lost its affect.  When I was 14 years old for instance I used to hang out at a friends place with a bunch of girls.  This was definitely our time for losing innocence.  We would sneak into the kitchen and steal the weed that was always kept in a large cookie jar on the top shelf in the pantry.  Unfortunately we hadn’t really figured out what to do with it yet.  We crept into her brother’s room when he was out and leafed through his stash off porn magazines.  And one day after a bottle of peach schnapps from her parents liquor cabinet we decided to pierce each other.  Armed with some old safety pins, some matches for sterilzing the needle, and a wine cork to push on, we set about giving each other some new holes.  Holding the needle in place and putting the cork on the backside of my friends earlobe I began to push.  It was a bizarre sensation, and by the time the needle was half way through I was ready to stop and throw up.

“Keep going, I just want to get this over with now”, my friend urged.

So I did, I pushed the needle in further until suddenly we heard a ‘pop’, and had broken through the skin on the other side.  While she put an earring in and prepared to pierce the next friend I decided I would give my belly button a go.  I sat slightly hunched over so I could get a better grip on the skin (I was, and still am a rather skinny wee thing).  Again I positioned the cork on the under side (a lot more tricky on your stomach), took hold of the safety pin, and began to push and turn the needle.  To my surprise there was very little pain and before long I could feel the tip of the needle on the other side.  I only had this piercing in for a couple of days before my mother found out and forced me to remove it.  Now that I think about it Im probably lucky she did or it would have led to a nasty infection.  As far as I know the other friends had no problems with theirs and still have them to this day.

The last piercing I have had since then was during my last year of high school.  Everybody was either getting their tongues or their upper ears pierced and I wanted one too.  I don’t actually remember getting it done but I do know that I was again pierced by a friend.  This time it wasn’t quite done in a friend’s bedroom with a rusty needle, but in a chemist with a piercing gun which for any piercing that is going through cartilige is a definite no no.  In order for it to heal properly and avoid infection and scarring you need to go to a professional body piercer whole will do it with a needle, not a gun.  Anyway to cut a long story short I didn’t, so after a long time it still hadn’t healed and I eventually took it out.  Like any form of modification, piercing’s intrigue me to no end, having said that though I have never had the desire to get any since then.  I’m very happy to just stick to my 2 little lobe piercings that I worked so hard at getting!

So you’d think that my mother would be safe from having a further mutilated daughter, i’m afraid not.  When I was about 17 years old I became fascinated with tattoos.  I even looked into getting one a couple of years later when my grandmother died.  I inherited the golden pendant that she always wore and in it was a beautiful lotus flower.  I spent months agonising over it, I even drew some terrible tribal designs to go around it.  But after going to see several different tattooists they all told me it was too small and fine, and because I was a tattoo virgin they were worried I wouldn’t be able to sit still enough. I can say with great confidence that I’m glad they persuaded me otherwise!  So a couple of years pass and I’m still bleating on about wanting to get a tattoo until one day when I’m in Germany my friends there had heard enough.   On my birthday, in some god awful camp ground next to an airport (but that’s a different story altogether), I get handed a crumpled piece of paper.

“Happy Birthday”.

Ermmm great thanks.  But then I open it to find a homemade voucher for 50euros that can only be spent on a tattoo.

“We’re sick of hearing about it all the time, just go and finally do it will you!”

There was another catch, I was leaving Europe the next week and they made it very clear that I had to get tattooed before I left or the voucher was worthless.  Well what’s a girl to do?  Go and make an appointment with the tattooist ASAP of course!  The morning of my appointment I decided to get a simple black star on my inner wrist.  I was supposed to meet my best friend at the shop so she could hold my hand, but when I got there she was nowhere in sight.  I was really beginning to panic, I mean I was so nervous I could have been sick on the poor tattoo guy.  I showed him a picture of the scraggly star I had drawn,

“Like this only, you know, straight”.

He grunted something and said he’d be back in a minute.  I got the distinct feeling that he was pissed off at having to tattoo another stupid little picture on another stupid little girl.  When he came back he told me to take a seat and put my arm on the plastic wrapped arm rest.  He shaved my inner wrist, to this day I can’t figure out why because i have about as much hair there as I do on the palms of my hands (which is none in case you were wondering), and then after he did that the bastard sprayed disinfectant on it.  I can tell you straight up that that was the most painful part of getting the whole tattoo.  He then transferred the image onto my wrist until he had the perfect reflection of a star. 

“Ummm isn’t this star a little bit big?”  I asked nervously.

“No. It’s the same size as the one you showed me”.

It clearly wasn’t but I was to intimidated to argue.  I had had something really tiny in mind, much like Gisele Bundchen’s little star, this one was at least twice the size if not bigger.  I have to admit that I am actually glad about the size now, something smaller would have looked tacky.  Anyway when I hear the gun start up, and my friend still hasn’t showed up to pity me through this I totally start to panic,

“Hey I’m a little bit nervous, can you tell me something that will, you know, make me feel better?”

“Don’t watch”.

So I shut my eyes tight and tried to think about something else.

“Okay I’m going to start now, you need to relax or it’s going to be uncomfortable”.

I got ready to flinch and was astounded to find that there was no need.  It was pain, yes, but somehow it was so soothing.  Before long I sat and watched intently as the needle marched in and out of my wrist leaving a black trail.  Suddenly my only regret was that I hadn’t chosen something bigger because the whole thing was over in about 10 minutes.    Just as I was finishing up my friend walked in the door.  I was shaky as hell from all that unnecessary adrenalin but could not shake the smirk from my face.  Things stopped being quite so funny a couple of days later when I had to fly home.  Let me tell you that sitting on a 24 hour flight with a throbbing new tattoo is far from great.  I don’t know if it had to do with the sensitive spot it was in or the change in air pressure but my wrist swelled up quite nicely.  It took my mother all of about 10 minutes to notice my tattoo when I got home,

“What’s that on your wrist?”

“Nothing”.

“It’s not nothing, come on show me”.

So I pulled my sleeve up a bit further.

“Hmm.  Is it real?”

“Yes”.

“Hmm.  Well I suppose its not too offensive”.

And for a week or so after that she actually took some interest in watching it scab up and heal, but it hasn’t ever been mentioned since.

Now I knew for certain that this would not be my first and last tattoo.  Although it took a couple more years before I got tattooed again I never stopped thinking about it, never stopped thinking about the sensation of getting tattooed.  I found this quite odd because I have a very un-addictive personality, and yet the idea of getting tattooed practically consumed me.  The next time I got tattooed I had begun to think about starting a sleeve.  However because I am an overly-sensible person (most of the time) I wanted to test out a bigger piece in a less visible area first.  After thinking it over for just a couple of months I booked in to see the tattooist.  We talked things over briefly, I told her approximately what I had in mind but told her she was the artist so I would leave it in her hands.  We decided that because it could take up to 4 hours I should book in for 2 separate sessions.  As fate would have it though I got a strange skin rash a few days before hand and had to cancel my first appointment, unfortunately the tattooist was moving overseas a few weeks later and was fully booked out, so the only option was to get the whole thing done in one go.  On the day I got there early enough to dash across the road and try to eat some breakfast, it just wouldn’t go down so I had a coffee and slinked into the studio.  She was already there waiting for and showed me a very basic sketch of what I had chosen, most of it was going to be free hand.  We went through all the formalities, she showed me the sterilized needles, did the paper work, disinfected the area, shaved it, transferred the image and we were off.  These tattoos were on my back, yes my lower back but let me tell you about them before you roll your eyes.  They are 2 symmetrical art nouveau swallows, each about the size of my hand.  So they really just brush past the old tramp stamp label.  Initially I thought I wanted them much smaller and on my stomach, I’m very glad to have been talked out of that!  I think the worst thing about being tattooed for 3 or 4 hours straight is that your legs start to go numb.  I don’t think I’ve straddled a chair like that for so long and by the end of it I was getting in a right foul mood.  As far as the pain goes it was there!  There were times when the pain was so great that I could feel my stomach quiver, but then after an hour or so your bodies chemicals kick in to deal with the pain and everyting starts to go sort of numb.  I have to be honest, it took me a while to really fall in love with those new tattoos.  In the future I will definitely be involved in the planning of them a little more, but now I couldn’t imagine my body without them.  It’s been nearly 2 years and I still look at them at every opportunity I get!

Now iIm ready for another one, and this time I want it to be on my arms.  I don’t intend to get tattooed anywhere else so its either my arms or nothing.  Obviously this is a huge decision though, so I am being very careful to consider it properly.  And what about my poor mother you ask?  Hmmm yes my poor mother, she is a big part of why I haven’t started yet.  The topic of tattooing is a very sensitive one with us, she has made it clear how she feels about them.  Every time they slip into a conversation she becomes very quiet and sometimes I’m scared she will start crying.  Sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth seeing her get so upset, then I remind myself that it is my body not hers.  In the end these pieces have immense meaning for me, in a way they are a form of therapy and I could not imagine being without them.

Body art/ modification and tattooing have fascinated me for a long time.  To be honest I keep waiting for it to just be another faze I am going through, for me to grow out of it, but 10 years on I’m still as fascinated, if not more than I ever was.  Body modification from all over the world and through out history has me mesmerized.  I am interested in anatomy and what the body is capable of, and the fact that you can etch colourful pictures in your skin is just amazing.  I have a large amount of books on the topic, I live in a country where we have the most amount of tattooed people in the world, and where tattooing is an important part of the culture and history.  I also recently discovered that the women of my fathers country are also frequently tattooed and a look forward to finding out more about that.  I can understand that tattooing is not for everybody, and that many people find it distasteful and still relate it to the lower class,

‘Tattoo’s are worn by sailors, whores, and inmates”, my mother would say.

I also agree that there are some really terrible tattoos out there that a lot of people come to regret (I’m glad I got piercings when I younger and not tattoos because I’m sure I would have some regrets there too).  I have a theory though, and you might disagree, but I think that the people who often wish they hadn’t have gotten inked are the ones with tiny tattoos, the flash you pick off the wall.  I have never come across a heavily tattooed person with large pieces that has regrets.  I recently went to talk to somebody about getting my arm done, I told him I wasnt sure how much I wanted to get done and I just wanted to go one picture at a time.  He advised me to start thinking about the whole piece now, even if I got it done slowly because otherwise you’ll end up looking like a mismatched jigsaw puzzle.

My final opinion is that everybody should do with themselves what makes them feel comfortable, beautiful, and happy.  It’s easy to judge people without having any knowledge of their reasons.

Do as you will as long as you hurt nobody.

 

 

I am an imposter of my own ethnicity

 

I am an imposter of my own ethnicity.

 

The only thing that links me to my country is my DNA.  It’s the reason why my skin is a few shades darker, my hair a little curlier, and my doe eyes brown.  I have never visited my country, cannot speak a single word of the language, don’t know how to behave in the appropriate manner, nor do I have any idea about the customs or traditions. 

I come from (or rather my father comes from) a small country in Africa called Eritrea.  It is comfortably nestled into the East African coastline on the Red Sea.  Behind it lurk the Sudan on one side, Ethiopia on the other, and off to the far right is a micro country called Djibouti.  Eritrea, from what I understand is still a relatively unheard of place for many people.  This is because in 1950 the UN General Assembly made the decision to merge Eritrea and Ethiopia together, eventually in the early 1960’s Eritrea was made a province of Ethiopia and the country ceased to exist.  Understandably the Eritrean people were as impressed with this move as the New Zealanders might be if they suddenly had to call themselves Australians.  So instead of sitting back and accepting the United Nations decision to simple annul their country and identity the Eritrean people put up a fight a civil war began that would last for 31 years.  This wasn’t your average kind of war either where the men are just competing to see who can pull out the biggest guns; this was a fierce fight for independence that was fought by men and women equally.  It’s hard to imagine that I have cousins and family members who were born into war, fought the war, and died in the war and had never known a different life.  After all, 31 years is a long time.  Anyway sometime during the late 1970’s or early 80’s my father, who had escaped to Kenya by that time, got the chance to re-settle in Germany.   It wasn’t long afterwards that that my parents met (my mother is German).  Almost exactly 11 months later I come into the picture kicking and screaming.  So there I am, too white to be recognized as being African, too dark to be German and all together a little confused as to why nobody else looks like me.  Judging by family photos I’ve seen I spent quite a lot of time with other Eritrean friends and family members when I was younger always perched on the lap of this person or that.  When I was 2 years old my mother decided that New Zealand might be a friendlier place to raise children and we moved.  A couple of years later my parents got divorced and that’s the last I can really remember of having anything to do with my Eritrean heritage.  Although we still saw my dad on a regular basis and he was always encouraging us to hold onto our German roots, it became as though the Eritrean ones never existed.  Now I’m 25 years old and for the first time that I can remember I was invited to celebrate the Eritrean Easter (the 2 main Eritrean religious groups are the Coptic Orthodox Christians, which is what my family are, and the Sunni Islam).  Don’t quote me on this, but I think the Orthodox Christians are from the old school, hence why their calendar is a little different to the one we go by these days.  So on Sunday 27^th April I tried to make myself look semi respectable despite the lingering hang over from the night before, and my sister and I made our way to the house of an Eritrean family living in Mt Roskill.  We found the place no problem and saw my father’s car parked outside but somehow couldn’t bring ourselves to get out of our own car.

“Shit I’m totally nervous”, my sister whispered.

I agreed with her, if my dad hadn’t have seen us sitting out there I probably would have turned around and left again.  Not a chance though, after being given a word for not showing up on time again he ushered us to the front door, and suddenly we were passed from one persons open arms to the next.  When a small, round, older woman came to hug me as though I was a long lost family member I heard my dad give me instructions from behind,

“She doesn’t speak English, you need to kiss her 3 times”.

So I did. And then I had to greet the next person, and the next, and the one after that until I had pressed cheeks and kissed the air with everybody in the house.  Most of the family had put on their traditional clothes for the occasion, actually they were similar to the ones I remember having when I was younger.  Because we had turned up so late everybody else had already eaten so everything was reheated and we got called to the kitchen for a second lunch.  The whole kitchen floor was covered with grass and red flowers; I’d never seen anything like that before.  One of the girls laughed,

“Don’t worry, our floor doesn’t always look like this, its just Easter tradition”.

“Yeah you know back home when there has been a drought and you can’t find any green grass the people just cover the floor with hay”, my dad joked.

I felt so incredibly naïve, it was actually humiliating that there my sister and I were, half Eritrean and being given step by step lessons on being Eritrean.  It was like being given the ‘Dummies guide to your own culture’.  And then again we were so grateful for finally being given a chance to be part of it.  The one place we felt in our element though was when it came to eating.  During our time in Germany my mum had learnt to cook the traditional Eritrean food, and I can honestly tell you that nothing in the world tastes as good.  Basically you have these sour yeasty pancakes called injera which get spread over a large plate (everybody eats together off this plate) and on top of that come some of the most delicious curry type sauces you could imagine.  Then you get another pancake to eat with.  You rip off smallish pieces and sort of drag it through the sauces, there ain’t no such thing as cutlery here my friend!  If your used to eating with your hands then they’re as clean as they were before you started eating, if your like me you’ll probably end up to your elbows in sauce, but that’s kind of part of the fun.  So my sister and I are practically drooling before we even make it to the dinning room table only to find a lamb sauce, a chicken sauce and 2 bowls of odd smelling grey meat that my dad refuses to reveal the body part of.  My sister and I happen to be vegetarians, although she’s by far more extreme than I am. 

“Hey that’s ok”, we kind of try to assure our host,” we’ll just eat the sauce around the meat”.

We’re so nervous about fucking up, and don’t want to seem rude so we dive in and help ourselves to the red sauce with the fat lamb bones swimming in it. 

“We’ve just finished 52 days of fasting you understand”, on of the guys explains, “that means for 52 days we haven’t been allowed to eat any form of meat or dairy product.  So on Easter day you won’t see a single vegetable on the table.  God I just love meat so much, we eat a lot of meat back home you know”, he says as his attention focuses back to sucking the last bit of meat of the bone.

I’ve got to admit that despite the pieces of gristle that kept getting stuck between my teeth, that sauce was out of this world, and it was probably thanks to that lamb fat dissolved in it.  Every time I’d just finished my plate, the elderly lady beside me would gesture for me to take more, I didn’t want to seem rude so I just kept eating.  It wasn’t until it was clear that I had defiantly reached maximum capacity that my dad finally told me that this was just the custom and that she would just keep offering me more until I said I had had enough.  So with my fingers still stained red from the sauce, we were ushered back into the living room for coffee.

“Have you ever had traditional Eritrean coffee?”

Yes, for once I didn’t have that blank expression on my face.  I had had Eritrean coffee several times before and no café made, espresso machine coffee could ever come within in a mile of comparing to it.  An Eritrean coffee ceremony is totally unlike anything I’ve experienced anywhere else.  Basically green coffee beans are hand roasted over hot coals by a woman crouched on a small chair.  Everybody else sits around talking and eating popcorn (did I mention the popcorn??  Whenever there is coffee there always seems to be popcorn).  Then when the coffee is roasted, and you’ll know because it smells like caffeine heaven, it is poured into type of mortar and pestle where it is crushed into coffee grind.  After that it is put into a jug with a long narrow neck, stuffed with horse hair and put on the coals to boil.  And then finally you’re allowed to drink it!  It gets poured into these tiny little egg sized cups, loaded up with sugar and passed out to everyone in the room.  Traditionally you’re supposed to drink 3 cups of this coffee, but they let us off the 3^rd.  The whole while the woman by the coals is sprinkling them with incense and somehow this in combination with your body trying to digest the excessive amounts of injera you’ve eaten, and the pleasant caffeine overdose you’ve just received you feel yourself drifting off in your own little trance.  

Eventually my sister and I had to excuse ourselves, time to get back to the real world.  Before we left we went around the room shaking every bodies hand, we thanked them, and they thanked us,

“Your part of the family, your welcome here anytime do you understand?”

We mumbled that we did, although to be honest we were still struggling to come to terms with the fact that every Eritrean you meet is somehow your family.  I guess family has a slightly broader meaning over there.  On the trip home in the car neither of us uttered a word until we pulled into the driveway.

“You know its weird but I’ve never felt as at home as I did with these people today, I kind of want to do it again”.

I knew exactly what she meant; I had this brief feeling of belonging somewhere.  Despite being completely new to everything I felt oddly relaxed around these complete strangers.                                         

 

 

 

 

Let me introduce Miss Roulette…

Hello I’m (Miss) Ruby Roulette.  I always have something I need to get off my chest so it only seems fair to share it with the rest of the world.  To be really honest with you I find this whole blog thing a little creepy.  The idea that anybody, anywhere in the world can tap into the weird and wonderful world that exists inside my head feels a little perverted… and then again it’s sort of part of the turn on.  Seeing as how I am completely new to this I have no idea what direction it will take, I’m really just using it as bait so i’ll keep writing on a regular basis.  I can only assume that my interests, issues and heartaches will weedle their way in there somehow.  So without giving too much away I suppose I may as well tell you that I live in a small country in the middle of the ocean, I partially live in the wrong decade, adore everything vintage/ rockabilly/ pin up, love to travel, I love good food (despite being a vegetarian), I like my coffee black, and drink my whiskey neat, I am fascinated with other cultures and people in general,  am intrigued with body art/ modification/ anatomy, prefer to read non-fiction over fiction, and i love to write and research.  Your thoughts, views, idea’s are most welcome.  Please be honest… but gentle, i can be a little sensitive!

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