On Sequins
Photo: Robert R. Rutledge
First published on December 19, 2024
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Finishing a Book
I believe in sequins
I believe in their determination.
I believe in their collaboration with our delusions, alternatively known as optimism, that despite it all, we deserve bright and shiny things; we deserve sparkle.
It took lockdown and the terror and grief of the Covid pandemic for me to appreciate the witchcraft of sequins–their alchemical ability to transmutate from a superficial and shiny, delicious silliness to a weather vane for pain, a mirror for what we can’t hide.
Before lockdown, I wore sequins to my speaking events because feminism is a celebration for me. “I will dance on patriarchy’s grave in this dress,” I would tell audiences, like the 1,000-strong crowd at Melbourne Town Hall in November 2019. They joined me in my customary “Fuck the patriarchy” chant, which I lead at the end of each of my events.
I spent three-quarters of 2019 at speaking events across the world, from promoting my books, to joining literary festivals, to marching in Sarajevo’s first Pride Parade, and getting a television episode banned in Australia. The sequin dresses I wore injected audacity into my exhaustion.
And then the pandemic and one after another of my extended family were dying. And a sequin dress that is my New Year’s Eve staple had to be what I wore to my first vaccine shot. A vaccine at a time of plague and death is a new year of sorts, no?
Getting my first Covid vaccine shot. Video: Robert E. Rutledge
After days and days and days inside, a keynote event that had been postponed was finally now possible and just contemplating wearing sequins had me in tears. If sequins in 2019 reflected the joy of my feminist defiance, post-lockdown, sequins refracted the grief of losing so many loved ones through a sadness too bright for my heart to bear.
That’s what happens when you see sparkle as only silly and superficial.
I don’t have five year plans, let alone plans of the ten year amount. And I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. But I am increasingly eager to turn 60. I want purple sequins. I want to be the 60-year-old woman who wants to be seen. I want sequins to reflect back to me every line and fold in the body that is aging with sparkle.
"Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boyfriend, the girlfriend, the Goddess or the Revolution," Gloria Anzaldúa wrote.
Sequins are my co-conspirators in impatience. They whisper “You are the goddess.” They insist “You are the revolution.”
I am increasingly eager to turn 60. I want purple sequins. I want to be the 60-year-old woman who wants to be seen. I want sequins to reflect back to me every line and fold in the body that is aging with sparkle.
Nikki Giovanni died last week. She insisted you are the sparkle, shine!
“…and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu
so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
and i’ll show you a hungry person.”
Wrap yourself in sparkle. Be Self-full. Consider each sequin you wear your wink to the world.
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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