Temptation of One Dark Body troubles masculinity and sexuality in black men through the lens of introspection and meditation. This is an open conversation between Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava’s The Sweet Flypaper of Life, Robert Mapplethorpe’s Black Book and Glenn Ligon’s Notes on the Margin of the Black Book. This work hopes to provide an alternative social context for the viewer to imagine Black maleness and think about this body, too, as a cartography toward freedom
Scanned 35mm Black and White Film
Dear black boy
You are the sweetest love song
I have ever heard
Know how to turn sandpaper silk
In your soft strong hands
You are a saint yet to be called
Not because you weren’t ready
Redemption songs and prayers
And gunshots are starting to sound
Remarkably the same; these days
Every breath should be given thanks for
You have been misread like many
Old tattered books
Worn by rough hands
Trying to bend and break meaning into you
Your sparkling darkness is something to be feared
Like calling creator in the face of death
Lying naked on floor
Beaten brown and broken
You are the purest form of prayer
The mean-mug you wear as armor
Is meditation ceremony
Harmonizing to the sound of the city
The faces you pass place offerings
In the beggar’s bowl you call a clenched jaw
The way their heads cock back
And turn away
The muscles dancing under your skin
Are ceremony, are ritual
Are offerings, are prayer
Are ascended
Ancestors guiding us to something real
Your skin captures light
Never let go – its holy
For all the things you are called
For all those who think
God hasn’t been here in a long time
They have been looking
In the wrong holy relics –
You are a blessing
Your stillness is anointing
They wish they had your grace
Andrew Wilson