Amira Hanafi

from Identity Theft

#7
As an ideal woman, I am a man. My shimmies are punctuated with a little pouch of fat just above my pubic hair. I have a high salary working with the subaltern; I close on a house but choose to stay in the motel. I buy a stack of black ties at WalMart and also purchase a dog. Of course the dog barks. I am thinking of jiggling breasts, the way a woman’s shoulders flick when she dances. I hire an Asian to teach me how to be fortunate. He asks me to repeat my sentence and I say, I want you, I want you, over and over again. Still thinking of the hips and toes, hips and toes. My head is stuck between the bed and the dresser and I am singing, There will be a brown baby, there will be a brown baby, bring the baby out in the sun. He hangs me out the window so everyone knows.

Amira Hanafi is an artist and writer using variable methods of research and collection to produce documentary objects. She recently returned from a four-month drift in Cairo, Egypt, where she collaboratively produced a collection of material that will be the basis for her first solo exhibition at Spoke Chicago in September of this year. She is the author of Minced English, Trinities, and Forgery (forthcoming from Green Lantern Press, 2011/12). Her work has recently been published in American Letters & Commentary, Requited, and Matrix New Feminisms. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.