Fiction, 2020
There is no route to escape white men. Luster is a glittery and dazzling exploration of what it means to engage in a sexual relationship with such men. It is written with devastating clarity and honesty that first feels like fresh air, until you realise it’s been minutes since you took a breath.
Meet Edie, she’s a black woman in her twenties, who doesn’t have a “real career path”, and is drifting through torturous relationships with forcefully underwhelming men. Things change when she meets Eric. He has a wife, lives in a suburban paradise, and is stable in a way that only generational privilege and patriarchy can be. He is her opposite manifested. They begin an affair, she moves into his house and begins to act as an older sister/nanny to his daughter, an adopted girl who is also black in a neighbourhood and life that is pastel pale. If this already sounds icky, you should know that Luster is just getting started.
What follows are questions about racial fetishisation, the baggage that our skin carries, and how it plays out in relationships with other people. More importantly, it asks the question of who has the power to control the narrative and whether the voice that acknowledges race is a brave or cowardly one. Luster manages to say what the internal double consciousness only thinks.
Song - Last Words of a Shooting Star - Mitski
Film - Get Out
P.S. - I’m sorry that this is a little late and shorter than usual, it was Diwali weekend!
the second line?????
the first line???????