You Have to Suffer
Alek Wek in stills from Janet Jackson's "Got ’Til It’s Gone” “Got ‘Til It’s Gone” opens with a pan over Black men and women in oversized collars and modest dresses. The beat drops as the camera enters a house party. A sign on the wall reads Europeans Only / Slegs Blankes, evoking apartheid South Africa. Then Janet Jackson snaps her fingers. She has gathered her hair in pigtails that defy gravity. This is her thick, curly, unapologetically red phase. As Jackson croons onstage, the dance floor comes alive with motion. It is an ode to Blackness in sepia, with the full spectrum of undertones represented, midnight blue to albino paleness. The rapper Q-Tip is Black, so is the waiter carrying drinks, so are the children holding each other in the dim light. They take each other’s portraits and bathe in the open. As if ignited by the notes, they jump and clap and stomp and slow-dance. Safe from the white gaze, the people move with abandon and tenderness. This room is made for them; it is free. As the video draws to an end, Alek Wek appears—her head bald and skin a ripe black. The yellow stereoscope she holds covers most of her face. Inside her lens, a man stands tall, chest puffed with pride. Wek lowers the stereoscope down, recasting herself from observer to observed. She smiles serenely. This was the first time I ever saw her. It was the summer of 1997 and I was nine years old.
The anomaly of Wek’s presence startled me. French culture of the nineties rarely showcased Black girls, the darkest ones most rarely of all. Despite the thousands of African immigrants who lived in my housing project, and the millions more outside of it, media titans had conferred and concluded that black faces were unrelatable to the only audience that mattered, and unrelatability didn’t sell. But we featured well as objects of pity. Yellow-eyed and joyless. Bellies distended by hunger. Flies hovering over little buzzed heads. A white man would peer into the camera with an impassioned plea: For ten francs a month, be a hero and bring clean water to this African child!
Visibility otherwise demanded a certain exceptionalism. You had to be American, like the cool kid who played Rudy Huxtable on The Cosby Show, or be an out-of-this-world athlete, like the figure skater Surya Bonaly. Girls my complexion didn’t model in clothing catalogues or grow up to present the evening news. Nor were we written into fairy tales. To play princesses, we suspended more reality than our white friends. Brooms morphed into horses and rugs into flying carpets. But our skins also became white, our noses narrow, our hair silky.
Wek was nowhere and suddenly everywhere. A modeling scout had noticed her walking around a street fair in London, five years after she emigrated from South Sudan at fourteen. By the end of 1997, Wek had walked runway shows for Chanel, Jean Paul Gaultier, Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Isaac Mizrahi, and Alexander McQueen. She’d also become the first African woman to grace the cover of Elle magazine. I admired the way color vibrated against her skin, the way it declined to blend and self-erase. Her ethereal hue was a worthy canvas.
I found her sudden omnipresence
