for Sony Labou Tansi, Martial, Chaïdana, and all the unspeakables; for those who remember what was said and what was unsaid
What happens when words vanish from policy, from screens, from speech?
“Erasure” is a poetic meditation on censorship, identity, and memory—drawing inspiration from Sony Labou Tansi’s La Vie et demie, the Trump-era word bans, and the resistance found in storytelling. Through surreal imagery and postcolonial echoes, the poem explores the silencing of identities—and the defiant power of naming what was meant to be forgotten.
They said: Let’s keep things neutral. Let’s clean up the language. Let’s not say diversity— it makes some uncomfortable.
Let’s say merit. Let’s say unity. Let’s not say transgender. Let’s not say pregnant person. Let’s not say climate change so loudly. (It’s just weather, after all.)
And so, one by one, the words went missing— folded out of funding reports, redacted from federal websites, tucked behind quiet executive orders.
The list grew. Evidence-based. Science-based. Vulnerable. Equity. LGBTQ. Non-binary. Racial justice. Systemic racism. Female. Woman. Each word silenced carried with it a body, a memory, a need unmet.
Sony Labou Tansi once wrote: “They renamed everything. Even the dead.” In his world, absurdity was law, and survival meant remembering what you were told to forget.
Here, too, people remember— in classrooms, in poems, in quiet footnotes and fiery sermons, in stories passed between colleagues over coffee or courage.
We are not always loud. But we speak. Sometimes in metaphor. Sometimes in satire. Sometimes in comedy. Sometimes in laughter. Sometimes in carefully chosen words that slip through the cracks.
The words will come back. Soft at first. Then steady. Because language—like truth— always finds its way back to the mouth.
“To forbid words is to erase the world they describe.” —Sony Labou Tansi
In 1979, Congolese writer Sony Labou Tansi published La Vie et demie, a surreal and grotesque novel that imagines a dictatorship so absurd and violent it makes language itself a casualty. Decades later, in a very different setting, the Trump administration has implemented a chillingly real campaign of linguistic erasure—quietly banning words like diversity, transgender, systemic racism, pregnant person, and even woman from federal communication.
In my recently completed academic paper, I draw a provocative comparison between Labou Tansi’s fictional regime and the real-world linguistic censorship imposed by the Trump administration across two presidential terms. Though they exist on different ends of the spectrum—one a postcolonial African dictatorship, the other a contemporary Western democracy—the parallels are striking. In both contexts, language is not just controlled—it is redefined, weaponized, and erased.
Take Executive Order 13950, which labeled concepts like “white privilege” and “systemic racism” as “divisive,” or the 2025 ban on terms like LGBT, female, and assigned male at birth. These are not merely semantic shifts. They represent a form of bureaucratic violence that targets already marginalized groups by rendering their experiences unspeakable. As Michel Foucault and Judith Butler would argue, when language is removed, so too is the framework for identity, resistance, and legal protection.
In La Vie et demie, Tansi’s characters resist the regime’s control by speaking in poetry, irony, and contradiction. Martial, the indestructible rebel, and his daughter Chaïdana, who preserves his legacy through storytelling, remind us that to name the truth—even when language is broken—is an act of rebellion.
The United States is not immune to the dangers of linguistic control. We see it not only in executive orders and policy revisions, but in attempts to ban books, restrict inclusive curricula, and threaten academic freedom. Yet, resistance persists. Writers like Eve L. Ewing use poetry to reclaim erased histories, and journalists like Nikole Hannah-Jones reframe the American story through projects like The 1619 Project. Their work, like Chaïdana’s, insists on naming what power wants us to forget.
This is not just a literary or academic issue—it is a democratic one. The words we are allowed to speak shape the futures we are allowed to imagine. When “diversity” becomes unspeakable, diversity itself becomes unrecognizable. When “woman” is erased, so is the struggle and triumph of women’s lived experiences.
As Tansi shows us, language is never neutral. And in every age, we must fight for the right to speak our truth—especially when the silence is sanctioned.
🔗 Read the full academic study (coming soon). 🎙️ Coming up next: A podcast episode exploring banned words, storytelling, and survival.
They came with ships and sermons, crosses in one hand, guns in the other. They found altars we had made from stone and spirit, and called them blasphemy.
They did not bow. They did not ask. They took.
What they called idols were our elders in wood. Our prayers in bronze. Our wisdom braided into clay.
They shattered the shrines and stole the statues. Said, “You are savages,” as they wrapped our gods in linen and mailed them to Europe.
Then they built museums— temples of theft— where people now stand in quiet awe before the very things we were beaten for loving.
And they say:
“Look at the craftsmanship.” “Such primitive elegance.” “How valuable this is.”
But what they mean is:
“It only became sacred once we took it.”
They bow now— but only to the plaque, to the frame, to the price tag.
We see the altars behind glass. We are told to be grateful. That they were “preserved.”
But what they mean is:
“You were never meant to be trusted with your own holiness.”
So we light candles in our lungs. We whisper prayers in hidden tongues. We touch soil and remember its name. We bow—not to stone, but to spirit.
Because we know—
A god behind glass is still a god. And the stolen sacred still sings.
Last night, my son Ude and I found ourselves in a spirited conversation about immortality. His philosophy class had just discussed Socrates—calmly facing his death, curious rather than afraid. Would it be oblivion? Or a new life? We paused, weighing the gravity of those possibilities. But then our conversation took a turn: toward eternity. Toward heaven. Toward hell. Toward Sisyphus.
I told him I found beauty in Camus’ vision—that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because he has found meaning in the absurd task of rolling a boulder uphill forever, but because he chooses to embrace it anyway. That, I told my son, is my rebellion too.
Death as Curiosity
Socrates saw death not as a tragedy, but as the ultimate question mark. He imagined it as either the most peaceful sleep or a doorway to another kind of existence. His serenity came from detachment—but mine comes from immersion.
I am not afraid of death because I refuse to let fear dictate how I live. I want to live boldly, consciously, even when I am broke, tired, or uncertain.
The Joy in the Revolt – Camus and Sisyphus
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus gives us a man condemned by the gods to push a boulder up a hill forever. But Camus flips the script: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.” The absurd does not break us—it offers us the chance to revolt.
Sisyphus is not a symbol of despair but of joyful defiance. His refusal to succumb to hopelessness is a model for all of us navigating the daily weight of survival in an existence that often appears meaningless.
What is the meaning of life when it’s filled with suffering, repetition, and banality? Should we still be happy living it? But isn’t that what heaven—or hell—might feel like too?
What If Sisyphus Went to Heaven?
Here’s where my son and I diverged. He believes that in eternity, God will grant us divine knowledge. I asked—then what? If we all possess divine wisdom, are we truly equal, or does a hierarchy still linger? Will we know in full or only in part? Will questions remain? Will desires?
Would some still long for drama, for choice, for something more than the endless praise of the one who sits on the throne? Will we still have free will?
Sisyphus exercised his free will—and was punished for it. His revolt stopped people from dying, disrupting the cycle of life. In the cosmos of order, rebellion is often mistaken for chaos.
In Revelation, the heavenly realm is filled with creatures covered in eyes, day and night proclaiming, “Holy, holy, holy.” It is an eternity of glory—but also of eternal surveillance, eternal memory, and eternal praise.
And what happens when we remember pain? Earthly joys? Desires unmet? Might eternity itself begin to unravel under the weight of our memory?
Jared M. August asks a similar question in his theological reflection: “What shall we remember?” He proposes that Revelation depicts the believer’s memory as preserved in eternity, reinforcing the importance of memory in all its forms—not just joy, but also pain, longing, and identity (The Gospel Coalition).
Memory, Worship Fatigue, and Monotony. Is Heaven another Absurd Existence?
Revelation promises that “they will serve him day and night in his temple” (Rev. 7:15). But what if service becomes suffocating?
If we cannot imagine Sisyphus happy in his earthly absurdity, how can we prepare ourselves to embrace eternity? What if, like Sisyphus, a soul wakes up one eternal morning and says, “There must be more than this”?
What if rebellion in eternity is not born of pride—but of boredom? What would happen to diversity, to desire, to difference?
Maybe eternity, like the boulder, is heavy. Maybe the truest revolt is to find joy—even there.
My Own Rebellion
I told my son that I am Sisyphus already. I rise each day under the weight of bills, deadlines, longing, and fatigue. And still—I revolt.
I choose life. I choose joy. Not because my situation is easy, but because my refusal to give up is sacred.
I am not waiting for eternity to be handed to me. I am making eternity now, each moment I resist despair. I do not look forward to a heaven or hell as a place— But I live them as states of being. One cannot exist without the other.
Questions for Eternity
So I ask:
What if Sisyphus reached heaven and still found the boulder there? Would he kneel in eternal worship, or would he smile, pick it up, and roll again—just because he could?
Can we imagine an eternity that includes rebellion, Not as sin, But as spirit?
Darling, I was born in a wig and reborn in rhinestones. When the doctor slapped me, I said, “Not the face.”
I am Camp. Not a style, But a resurrection.
I paint my lips with irony, Contour my cheekbones with pastiche, My eyeliner so sharp it cuts through heteronormativity. I don’t cry— I glitter.
I’m the chandelier at a funeral. The swan dive in a cocktail dress. I’m Bette Davis lighting a cigarette with your expectations and exhaling a monologue that ends in thunderous applause from ghosts who wish they were this extra.
Camp is a wink in a war zone. A ball gown in a bunker. It’s knowing the script, tearing it up, and then delivering every line in a British accent with a martini in one hand and a drama in the other.
I am Cher in a headdress. Gaga in four looks. RuPaul crowning queens like the Vatican crowns Popes (but with better shoes). I am Divine divine.
My aesthetic? Apocalypse but make it fashion. My gender? Sequined disbelief. My spirit animal? Susan Sontag’s typewriter tapping out “Notes on ‘Camp’” in six-inch stilettos with a smirk.
I am not real. I am more than real. Too much? That’s just enough.
So let the naturalists mumble in beige. Let the tasteful bow in their taupe blazers. I’ll be over here—
In tulle. On fire. And perfectly, ridiculously, fabulously—undone.
When I was a child, Mom was a teacher and had a rich collection of literary work that I always got lost in as my escape. One of the memorable books I read was She—not just the first novel, but the entire trilogy: She, Ayesha: The Return of She, and Wisdom’s Daughter. I didn’t fully understand the cultural implications then, but I was captivated. Ayesha was beautiful, wise, terrifying, and unyielding. She ruled. She didn’t apologize. She lived for thousands of years, and her story stayed with me for decades.
Years later, while teaching Death Becomes Her in my Women in Film course, I began to see it differently and would often reference Haggard’s She in my classes. I’d shown the film many times as an example of visual satire, camp, and gender performance—but something clicked. The themes of fear, beauty, power, and punishment weren’t just superficial. They echoed the same cultural anxieties I had first encountered in She. And so, this paper—and this blog post—was born.
“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”: A Name I Know Too Well
Over the years, I’ve been called that—“She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed”—not as a compliment, but as an attempt to silence me. To mock my defiance, my curiosity, and my penchant for being a critical and logical thinker. To punish my refusal to bow to illogic or perform submissiveness so unquestioningly. But here’s the irony: they called me that not because I refused to obey—because I asked critical questions, thought outside the box, was creative, pushed boundaries, had a can-do attitude, refused to just conform, and stepped out of line – to improve on and do it even better.
Just like Ayesha. Just like Lisle.
Two Immortal Women, A World of Fear
In She (1887), H. Rider Haggard introduces Ayesha: a veiled, ancient queen who rules over the lost African kingdom of Kôr. She’s more than beautiful—she’s unbearable to behold. Her gaze kills. Her voice commands armies. But she is also an Orientalist fantasy: white and wise, ruling over “uncivilized” African subjects, her power derived from a mystical fire hidden deep in the heart of Africa.
The novel is a product of British colonial anxiety—a time when the empire was both expanding and crumbling, and Victorian masculinity was obsessed with controlling the “wild” unknown. Ayesha, therefore, is the feminine Other: desired and feared, powerful and dangerous, and ultimately undone by the very mystery that defines her.
Fast forward to Death Becomes Her (1992). Lisle von Rhuman is just as commanding—an immortal beauty who seduces aging celebrities with a potion of eternal youth. Her appearance is coded as exotic but sanitized: a vaguely Mediterranean accent, long flowing gowns, Middle Eastern décor, and a surreal, ageless presence. She lives in a palatial Beverly Hills estate that could double as a temple. Her power, like Ayesha’s, is spiritualized, sexualized, and elusive. We never really know where she’s from. That’s the point. She is Othered, but safely packaged for the Western gaze.
The Psychology of Glamorous Entrapment
From a psychoanalytic view, Ayesha and Lisle embody the Freudian death drive—they don’t grow or evolve, they just loop: around obsession, vanity, loss, and denial. Their beauty is a trap. Their immortality? A gilded coffin.
In Lacanian terms, their reflection becomes their prison. They’re stuck performing an ideal version of themselves, and that performance… slowly falls apart.
From Freud to Lacan to Kristeva, the psychology in both stories is clear: these women are trapped in the mirror. Immortality is not a gift—it’s a loop. Ayesha can’t move on from her past. Lisle is frozen in her aesthetic present. And Madeline and Helen—Lisle’s customers—become grotesque dolls, eternally reapplying paint over decay.
Enter Julia Kristeva. In her theory of abjection, she describes the abject as what we try to cast off in order to be “clean,” “whole,” or “civilized.” It’s the stuff that blurs boundaries—between life and death, self and other, inside and outside. It’s vomit, blood, rot… or a woman whose neck is twisted backward but still walks in heels. In both She and Death Becomes Her, the immortal body becomes abject: a horrifying, leaking symbol of what must be expelled to maintain order—but that refuses to go quietly.
These women don’t live forever. They perform forever. And in doing so, they become both icons… and abjections.
Power + Punishment = The Price of Being “Too Much”
Ayesha and Lisle are punished not because they’re evil—but because they’re too powerful. Too commanding. Too unapologetic. Too unknowable. The narratives demand their collapse to restore patriarchal order.
Madeline and Helen, meanwhile, are punished for aging, then punished for refusing to age. Their co-dependent decay isn’t just grotesque—it’s a satire of how society turns women into rivals, then cannibalizes them.
The Exotic Immortal and the Colonial Gaze
Ayesha’s African empire is visually lush but racially caricatured. Her dark-skinned servants speak in broken English. The white male explorers see her as goddess and monster, mother and mistress. Her femininity is both the height of allure and the reason she must be destroyed.
Lisle may not be “colonial” in the traditional sense, but she’s no less coded. She’s timeless, foreign, and unknowable. Her immortality is portrayed as forbidden knowledge—like ancient wisdom stolen from temples—and her body is marked not by race, but by exotic performance. She’s the kind of Other that Hollywood adores: seductive, mysterious, and conveniently unattached to any real cultural identity.
Camp, Queer Time, and Living on the Edge of Decay
Of course, Death Becomes Her doesn’t just lean into satire—it leans into camp. Stilettos on corpses. Lipstick on broken necks. Sequins over splinters. It’s fabulous and horrifying, and queer scholars have long celebrated it for refusing naturalism. The women don’t die. They don’t grow. They just exist, unnaturally and unapologetically.
And that, too, is a kind of resistance.
Ayesha is camp, too—in her high drama, her divine pronouncements, her robes and rituals. She is queen, priestess, diva, and drag.
What Do We See in the Mirror?
When I look at Ayesha and Lisle, I don’t just see fictional women—I see reflections of cultural obsessions. I see what we do to powerful women who don’t conform. I see the fear of aging, the punishment of visibility, and the danger of desire unbound.
But I also see possibility. Performance. Resistance. A touch of the divine.
💬 Let’s Talk
This blog post reflects just a portion of my full academic paper: 📖 *“The Immortal, the Vain, and the Undone: A Comparative Analysis of H. Rider Haggard’s She and Death Becomes Her” 🗣️ What does immortality mean to you? 👁️🗨️ What are you refusing to let die? 💅🏾 And what version of you lives forever in the mirror?
I’ve watched Death Becomes Her more times than I can count. I’ve taught it in my Women in Film classes for years, always amazed at how this glammed-up, campy 1992 film sparks such serious conversations about aging, beauty, power, and the lengths women are asked to go to remain visible.
But the older I get—and the deeper I dive into stories of monstrous women, divine mothers, and witches with impossible grace—the more one character in this film stands out to me:
Not Madeline Ashton.
Not Helen Sharp.
But Lisle von Rhoman.
Swathed in silk, nearly nude, adorned with gold and mystery, Lisle floats into the story like a postmodern goddess. She’s played by Isabella Rossellini with the grace of an immortal and the gaze of someone who knows you will obey her—or suffer. And she offers something no woman in the real world is supposed to have: eternal youth.
Of course, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch.
“Take care of yourself,” she tells Madeline. “You and your body are going to be together a long time. Be good to it.”
“You may continue your career for ten years… but at the end of that time, before people become suspicious, you have to disappear from public view forever.”
That line always makes me pause.
We’re taught that beauty is visibility. That the reward for being young, slim, flawless, is to be seen. But what Death Becomes Her shows us—what Lisle teaches—is that in this system, beauty also requires erasure. You can stay beautiful… but only if no one sees you fall apart. And when that time comes, you’re expected to vanish.
It’s a terrifying deal. And yet, doesn’t it feel familiar?
The Goddess in the Algorithm
Lisle’s candlelit temple, her magical elixir, her immortality rituals—they might seem far from the world of filters, ring lights, and celebrity skin routines. But they’re not. Her logic lives on in today’s beauty apps, in TikTok transformations, in the $60 billion cosmetic industry that turns aging into failure and transformation into endless labor.
Makeup has become modern magic. People sculpt entire new faces daily. Drag queens remind us that gender, like youth, is something you can paint. Women in their 60s are going viral for reversing time with contour. The same power Lisle holds—the power of illusion—is now available in every Sephora and on every phone screen.
But the pressure remains.
Maintain yourself.
Be careful.
Don’t crack.
Global Goddesses, Real Monsters
Lisle isn’t alone in media history. Across African, Asian, and Latin American cultures, we’ve always had powerful feminine spirits. Mami Wata, La Llorona, witches who resist marriage or bear scars of survival. In films like I Am Not a Witch, Mami Wata (2023), or Onibaba, the female body becomes sacred, dangerous, ungovernable.
These women don’t always maintain themselves. Sometimes, they rot. Sometimes, they fight. Sometimes, they scream. But they never disappear quietly.
That’s what makes them monstrous—and that’s what makes them divine.
When the Mask Doesn’t Come Off
What Death Becomes Her leaves us with isn’t horror or comedy—it’s a question: What happens when the body is no longer yours, but a performance?
As I revisit this film with students, with friends, with myself, I see Lisle not as a villain, but as a warning. She who must be obeyed is also she who must be feared. She offers power. But it’s not freedom. It’s maintenance. And behind every mirror in her temple is a woman who will one day fall apart.
So maybe the question isn’t how to stay young forever.
Maybe it’s this:
What does it mean to be seen—truly seen—even as we change?
And how do we write ourselves into a story where we don’t disappear?
