soliloquee's New Writeups

Prostitution (thing)

2002-05-03T03:47:29Z

This is all true....

It's a warm night. Several cars come around. Every time a pair of headlights, long reflected shimmers in the wet street, approaches, my heart speeds up. The girls stand in a little grove, smoking, joking, tugging at their skirts. They poke fun at me, the kid- but not nearly as much as they would if Mandy weren't standing beside me with her hand resting purposefully on my shoulder. I'm Mandy's girl. No one fucks with Mandy's girl.

The first three johns pick out Camille, Kisha, and Buffy, in that order. The fourth guy asks for me but Mandy won't let me go with him. She whispers in my ear, her breath softened, but not yet slurred, with cheap wine, "That guy's a fucking scumbag. Crazy motherfucker. I'm gonna let you have a gentle first time, sugar pea."

Mandy likes to mother me. I like to be mothered. Living on the streets, girls like us form strange families. We crave love and echo the dysfunctions of the…

Falling in love with strangers (thing)

2002-04-15T04:52:42Z

Number One comes in the morning:

The waiting room of the free health clinic is buzzing with angry noise: babies howling and phones ringing above the pinched voices of tired nurses in white with their weary eyes, late enough in their shift that annoyance has overwhelmed sympathy. She's sitting across from me on the plastic chairs, big and soft and dark as coffee. Breasts like melons resting on an enormous stomach, one of those huge black women who doesn't seem overweight, but simply made to be that size, to be large and full and thick like sweet biscuits fresh from the oven, swollen with warmth and sugar. She looks young, in her twenties maybe, her thick nappy hair pulled back so tightly that it seems visibly tense, like a caged animal ready to spring free or a taut clothesline on a summer day.

Her skin is very dark but her eyes are startlingly light, a soft, watery brown like drops of Yoo-hoo on the white kitchen counter. They are staring at…

Rape committed by women (idea)

2002-04-12T04:28:17Z

This node strikes a very personal chord with me, and I've got a lot to say here, so bear with me. Or don't, either way. But don't say I didn't warn you.

I believe that in some sense people always do pay for their actions. When they rape someone they pay with the price of their soul, and that's arguably the worst punishment there can ever be. It's comforting in some small way to think that the woman who raped me lost some part of herself that night, just the way I did, that she didn't emerge from that experience completely unscathed. Her punishment is that she is a rapist, that she has caused acute and awful pain in this world, and she will never be able to undo that.

That being said, it still makes me angry, makes me dark and bitter. That she got away with what she did. That I was ridiculed and held responsible for her actions. That I was denied the validity of my pain by people who insisted that I wasn't 'really' raped, that rape by…

Fashoda Incident (place)

2002-02-10T04:47:43Z

It was 1898, and Fashoda was nowhere and nothing. It lay, a small, unimposing fishing village, along the White Nile, somewhere in the transition land between the Nubian Desert and the vast Savanna of southern Sudan. Sudan, at that time, was a whole lot of nowhere itself, the wild and sparsely inhabited Mahdia, slowly falling to British rule. And Fashoda, little Fashoda, was the carefully measured center of nowhere, the nowhere town that almost sparked a premature World War I.

The problem was this: The colonial powers that be were in the process of devouring Africa, partitioning off the beautiful continent piece by piece, squabbling over who would rape what land and who would repress which peoples. The colonial powers that be were a proud and ambitious lot, and two of the major players, England and France, would stubbornly butt heads at Fashoda.

England was clearly expanding in a north-south direction, building a contiguous empire…

Algeria (place)

2002-02-09T20:58:44Z

The Democratic and Popular Republic of ALGERIA:

Algeria is the world's tenth largest, and Africa's second largest country, with an area of 919,590 square miles. In US terms, that's roughly three and a half times the size of Texas. It's located on the north edge of Africa, between Morocco and Tunisia and Libya, above Mauritania, Mali, and Niger.

In this behemoth country, 90% of the people live in the green strip of Mediterranean Sea coast called the Tell, where they can enjoy the mild Mediterranean clime: a regular rainfall blesses this land, the rainy season stretching from December to March. The Tell is separated from the rest of Algeria by the Atlas Mountains and the Hauts Plateaux (highlands). The summer, even in the Tell, is hot and dry, and a hot, sandy wind called sirocco is common. The rest of Algeria is part of the vast and verdureless Sahara, where only an occasional oasis can support life.

HISTORY:…

Africa (place)

2002-02-09T04:18:31Z

A surprising dearth of material on the subject here, when there is so much to say!

Africa.

At 11,688,000 square miles (30,271,000 sq km), it is the world's second largest continent, easily three times the size of the United States. It stretches 5,000 miles from the Mediterranean Sea in the north to the Cape of Good Hope in the south, and at its widest point is 4,600 miles across. It is bordered in the north by the Mediterranean, coming its closest to Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar, where a little finger of Morocco reaches upward towards Spain and the Iberian Peninsula. On its west is the Atlantic Ocean, curving into the Gulf of Guinea, and on its east is the Indian Ocean, which passes between mainland Africa and the island nation of Madagascar through the 950 mile Mozambique Channel. Above Africa's jutting horn, Asia Minor hangs down, separated from Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Sudan by the Red Sea. Egypt, in the far northeast,…